WILL VINYL EVER DIE?

Weinheim, GERMANY—While out running errands the other day, I spotted a T-shirt reading: “Vinyl will never die.” A few telling characteristics (gelled hair, Day-Glo trousers, tiny backpack) suggested to me that its wearer was primarily concerned with the longevity of this antiquated medium as it relates to the house or techno music scene, but the declaration has an air of defiant truth regardless of one’s preferred musical genre.

Even if we were to plug our ears to the bluster of its romantic champions or the sober head-shaking of its practical detractors, vinyl can still be said to have a sort of enduring magic to it, and it’s hard to imagine records disappearing in the cold and passive way that the cassette was superseded by the compact disc, or the way that the CD is now slowly being supplanted by the Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio (DVD-A).

This magic of vinyl is something that goes missing in today’s sterile world of ones and zeroes, and perhaps this niggling lack explains—at least in part—why, for example, LPs are such sought-after items on eBay, and why the audiophile Mosaic label always releases its remastered jazz sets on high-quality vinyl in addition to CD, not to mention the fact that the vinyl pressing invariably sells out before the other. If the compact disc were truly superior in every way, it would be commercial suicide for a small company like Mosaic to put out a painstakingly remastered limited edition set on a delicate, restricted, outmoded medium. And only certifiable lunatics and incorrigible nostalgia buffs would waste time bidding for them online.

Over the past two weeks, during which time I made the coincidental sighting of the T-shirt, I’ve been engaged in the rather peculiar and time-consuming task of cleaning my records. This process involves the removing the dust from the record with a carbon fiber brush, spraying the disc with Windex, wiping it down with a soft cloth, and then letting the stylus dig the remaining trapped oil and grime from the grooves.

(With CDs I normally use a soft cloth and Pledge, if I do it at all.)

This means I have to play the records from start to finish for a thorough cleaning, which means I can’t stray too far from my record player (sans automatic tone arm), which—not to put too fine a point on it—means I consider myself more or less bound to the seventy square meters of my apartment for the thirty minutes it takes for a side to finish.
Which naturally begs the question: Why?

For starters, the cleaning process gives me a great excuse for listening to my entire collection of records one by one, especially those which have been gathering literal and figurative dust. Much of the time this results in discoveries and rediscoveries, like the nascent symphonic ideas that appear in Schubert’s Moments Musicaux (Alfred Brendel playing), or the twisted nonsensically poetic lyrics (“freeze your blood and then stab it into me”) on Modest Mouse’s Night on the Sun EP, or just how stunning Antonio Carlos Jobim’s overlooked Stone Flower can be, or how expertly Miles renders the “Saeta” on Sketches of Spain. Or that somebody somewhere surreptitiously switched my disc of the Philadelphia Orchestra/ Ormandy performing Tchaikovsky with a disc of Haydn symphonies. Their loss.

Still, I suspect that the reason for my cleaning ritual is also one of the main reasons behind vinyl’s decline in popularity. The format asks a lot more of its listener than CDs or even 8-tracks; wax cylinders notwithstanding, records are the physical manifestation of inconvenience. A mere slip of a fingernail while taking a record out of its slipcover can ruin it. So can a prematurely worn stylus or an out-of-balance tone arm. The playback apparatus even favors a handedness: southpaws like me have to learn to work with their right. Storage is a big issue too.
A rise or drop of a few degrees in temperature can warp them irrevocably, and stacking LPs on top of one another is the same as slowly squeezing the music out of them.

The payoff, however, is that the responsibility of ownership makes the reward of listening all the greater. The medium enhances the music. The greater care and attention a record requires means that the work it contains takes on a special quality. In turn, every vinyl album I own, whether it’s indie rock, classical or jazz, takes on the same fragile beauty as an Old Master painting or a Ming vase: for all their sonic and emotive dynamism, those horns and guitars and drums can’t withstand the force of a stray fingernail. A violin concerto can be destroyed by heat.
Likewise, it suddenly becomes apparent how necessary each part of the music is to the pristine whole. Not a millisecond can be sacrificed to dirt or dust without losing something essential, just as a fleck of paint falling from a Vermeer will lose the fluid effect of pouring milk or the light shining off an earring. One of the things that makes art—all forms of art—so precious is its physical transience. The sheer durability and convenience of CDs causes us to forget that sometimes.

None of this philosophical approach to record collecting has prevented the medium from being regarded as passé. Not that I mind entirely. At a flea market recently, I came across some gum-chewing teenagers eager to clear out several milk crates of records. Lord knows how they got a hold of them, but it was a stack of pants-wetting finds—Ella singing in Berlin (the set where she forgets the words to “Mack the Knife”), von Karajan conducting Beethoven’s Fifth, Placido Domingo in Verdi’s Rigoletto (Guilini conducting)—in impeccable condition. They wondered if ten euros ($12) was too much to ask. The speed with which I reached for my wallet assured them it wasn’t.

Despite what the hardline pragmatists and technophiles might argue, I don’t browse flea markets and eBay in search of records for reasons of nostalgia. Precisely the opposite. I buy them because the hand I have in a record’s preservation brings me closer to the music; because they subtly prompt me to consider what goes into a work of art and what should be treated as such; and because ultimately this keeps the recordings fresh as well as timeless.

Contrary to the appealing slogan on that T-shirt, I know vinyl will die eventually. So will I. Everything around us will someday crumble and decay and vanish. But right now, when it matters most, vinyl is still here. It’s survived the introduction and proliferation of more advanced recording formats, and I have a feeling it will continue to do so for the reasons I have just named (and many I’ve no doubt overlooked), all of which add up to some untranslatable allure. And the way to discover that allure is through a little extra care.

By E.J. Iannelli RAW STORY COLUMNIST
Originally published by The Raw Story, http://www.rawstory.com

CD SOUND: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE TRUTH

"The people who designed today's CD standard twenty years ago knew that vinyl LP's offered superior sound, and had no qualms about saying so"

It didn't have to be like this. But as it stands now, many of the popular CD's you buy aren't made to sound like what the artist created in the studio.People in the music business know that roughly 70% of the time, CD's are played on boom boxes, portable CD players, and car stereos. So it should really come as no surprise that most CD's are made with this market in mind. It makes perfect business sense. But does it make musical sense, especially for those who listen to music on high quality home stereos? To answer that, we first need to get a basic idea of some things that happen to the final mix that comes out of the studio. As you'll see, the various ways that the music gets doctored often amount to radical surgery being performed on the artists' studio sound.

The core of the problem is that producers and labels want their artists' CD's to sound as loud as possible on a typical boom box (even when the volume control isn't set very high) so the CD grabs your attention when you put it in and push "play". So when the mix is finished and the recording goes to the mastering house for final preparation, the pressure is usually on the mastering engineers to make this happen. Of course, if they were to record the music at a very high level and nothing else were done, then much of the sound would distort badly whenever the louder parts of the music came through. To help avoid that, engineers use compressors and limiters on the music, "squeezing" it into a narrow volume range. (Compression is also used in studio on individual tracks like bass guitar, vocal, drums, etc., as well as some on the overall mix. But here we're referring to additional compression that's added after the final studio mix is done.)

Now, since the needles on the control panel barely move while the song plays, engineers are free to crank up the recording levels without worrying about overload. From the early 90's onward, this kind of treatment has been applied like a sledgehammer to many popular music CD's. And when compression is overused like this, the sound that was recorded and mixed in the studio is completely squashed. You aren't hearing the band's studio sound, you're hearing a pale imitation.

But wait--there's more. When compression is used, one other result is that some of the treble gets chopped out of the music. So as a patch, engineers will compensate by adding certain parts of the treble back in with an equalizer. But while the treble that was lost was only lost during musical peaks or transients, the added-back treble is there all the time. Moreover, since the ear is very sensitive to certain high frequency ranges, engineers know that by adding even more treble boost in those ranges they can further boost the apparent loudness of the music, so of course, they do. Also, low bass (not just subsonic junk) often gets cut, since bass eats so much power and the low stuff is impossible for boom boxes and portable players to deal with anyway.

So back to our question: What do all these things have to do with serving the music? Nothing. What does it have to do with marketing CD's to boom box owners? Everything. All of this gets done at the behest of producers (and usually the artists), because making CD's that sound as loud as possible and also as bright and catchy as possible on 70% of the equipment that plays them is good business. So from a dollars and sense standpoint, you can't blame them. But making CD's that sound more like the studio mix--for those people who have the high quality home stereos that can do justice to that mix--is not a priority. Talk about tyranny of the majority; that 30% "minority" still translates into millions of music buyers, all of whom are forced to live with a product that often times sounds bad on their systems.

PERFECT SOUND FOREVER, OR GLASS IN THE DISPOSAL...?

Here's one way you can demonstrate all this to yourself very clearly:

It's Friday, the end of a long week. You glance across the room at your stereo and say to yourself, "Let's have some fun..!" At times like this, do you ever feel like popping in a CD and really turning it up? Well, if you do and you have a quality home stereo system, your ears will likely start to rebel as the kind of surgery engineers have been performing on the music now feels like surgery on your ear drums. This is because at higher volumes, your ears are even more sensitive to all of this over-engineering, and the sound becomes REALLY harsh. What kind of sound are we talking about? Turn on your garbage disposal. Now, pour in a bucket of broken glass. (Of course, you don't need to listen at high volumes to hear this effect; we just wanted to use the most 'glaring' example.)

As already stated, this pronounced over-engineering is mostly a 90's phenomenon. (Today it's worse than ever; ask any engineer from a big mastering house and they'll tell you.) So what about CD's made in the 80's? Well, these earlier CD's suffer from a different set of problems. For one, the quality of digital equipment was much lower in the 80's. Early digital gear just couldn't capture the music as accurately as today's equipment can. A dry, overly bright sound was common even on good production jobs, and low-level detail didn't come through well at all. In addition, the digitized signal wasn't always handled carefully as it made its way step by step through the recording and production process, partly because it was thought that with digitized signals you didn't have to worry. (In practice, you do.) As a result, the signal would become further degraded. Lastly, the source tapes used were usually not the best available, particularly when record labels were in a rush just to "get the stuff out" on CD. Unfortunately, this can still happen today. Even with CD's (new or old) that are engineered well, some of the bright, hard digital sound usually remains. Vinyl simply delivers a fuller, more natural and more complete sound.

So if you hadn't realized it by now, the hype behind "Perfect Sound Forever" has never matched reality. But don't blame the techies who came up with the CD standard. These designers knew back then that the CD wasn't really all that, sound-wise, when compared to good vinyl LP's. "Wait a minute," you're probably saying. "The people who created the CD said what??" You read correctly: The people who designed today's CD standard twenty years ago knew that vinyl LP's offered superior sound, and had no qualms about saying so. This is because at the time, CD's were primarily targeted at the market share then owned by pre-recorded cassettes, whose convenience and portability led to strong sales despite sound quality that was markedly inferior to vinyl LP's. So who came up with "Perfect Sound Forever"? You guessed it--the marketers. Have you spotted a trend yet?

While we're on the subject of digital versus analog, you might also have thought that your favorite artists were all recording in digital by now, since CD's themselves are digital. After all, it's Y2K, right? Everything is digital these days....

Is that your final answer? Just checking. Because more often than not, the music that you see coming out of the big studios is recorded and mixed onto analog tape, even to this day. Analog has a richer, more lifelike sound, and when analog tape is pushed to its limits, artists generally feel the sound is more appealing that that made by digital equipment. Just listen to what Courtney Love said recently:

"I don't care what anybody says about digital recordings. At this point they're good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do."

1 1 excerpted from her speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York; May 16, 2000

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