Since it’s official that vinyl sales are booming, shall we take a look at what all the fuss is about?
Physical formats in every industry are under intense fire at the moment; photographic film, books, vinyl. The migration of content from physical to digital is heavily underway and has been for some time, and the reasons are apparent; digital has an immediacy, a convenience and portability that many physical formats simply cannot contend with. Yeah, there were portable CD players (portable cassette players too), but that required having to carry around the CD’s/cassettes if you wanted more than one album; why bother these days when you can have thousands of albums in your pocket stored digitally? And so on and so forth. But it leaves the question; why then are people trading the cheap and easy approach of sticking their laptops or iPods into speakers for vinyl?
Vinyl isn’t cheap. Relatively speaking. The actual record itself will probably cost you more than a digital or CD release brand new, not to mention the exorbitant prices of some rarer copies, and none of it is useful without owning the necessary gear to play them. A cheap, semi-decent hi-fi setup with speakers, amp and turn-table isn’t particularly cheap; with some corner cutting and bargain hunting mine’s cost about £180 or so (so far, hehe).
Let’s look at the records themselves. They’re nothing more than PVC discs, pressed with an audio waveform onto their surface. Each play has the potential for degrading the quality and damaging the record, and over time if stored improperly (or indeed if stored correctly) they can warp and be rendered distorted or even unplayable. It’s quite a fragile medium, and somewhat intolerant of abuse. Indeed, records themselves are perhaps only barely better than lossless digital files in terms of quality; very high bit-rate digital files with very high sampling rates are practically indistinguishable from the raw waveform of a record, most people would struggle to tell the difference. Indeed, digital does somewhat have an advantage in possessing a “cleaner” sound, absent of clicks or pops. I have an old copy of Eno’s Apollo, for example, and the ambiance is somewhat ruined by the less-than-ideal surface quality.
But it’s not really about the perceived quality or the physicality of the medium that I think makes it so attractive, at least to me. Owning a record isn’t like owning a CD; CD’s require no effort whatsoever. Stick it into the player and you’re good to go. Not so with vinyl. With vinyl, every play is an experience, you make the time and take the effort to sit down and listen to something. You get up, skim through your collection, pick a record and pause to look over the 144 square inches of album art first of all. Glorious. Now that is certainly not a luxury you get with CD’s; it’s nice to have some decently sized, high quality album art to look at every once in a while. You turn on the stereo and briefly hear a hum as it powers on, then slip the record onto the table, drop the needle, sit back and relax. There’s something so much more interactive about that entire process than just opening your laptop lid and playing any old shit off iTunes. I know I can do that anytime (and I do), but settling back to listen to some tunes on the record player is a specific and deliberate thing when I want to kick back and do nothing but just listen to some music (especially when I’m feeling mellow and a little less than sober).
I imagine the reasoning is a little different for everyone; some people are purely interested in the collectibility, particularly in regard to special, limited edition releases. Others strongly believe there is a noticeable quality difference between vinyl and digital files and buy them to sate their audiophilic requirements. Whatever the reason, I’m glad people are still buying music this way and I hope more people join in and continue to use the format.
