Life…at 33-1/3 RPM
Somewhere in time
I’m going to take a guess that most people reading this blog post have never bought a vinyl album. I’m not going to say it’s a shame because I can understand how the CD dominated after it became popular around 1984. However, this isn’t going to be a post about how one format is better than another, it’s about the roots of music, why people still listen to vinyl, and whether or not it’s still worth investing in what people consider to be a format that’s been “dying” since 1988.
I grew up with vinyl. The first two albums I had were a Sesame Street album, and the Beatles’ “White Album”. I used to listen to “The White Album” religiously, knowing every sound on it, including where each scratch on pop on the vinyl was. It came with a double-sided poster; one side with pictures of the band, and side two with the complete lyrics, and a complete set of 8×10″ pictures of the band. When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, we found that very album I used to play as a kid in the old stereo she had. I had just assumed it got thrown away long ago, so it was like finding a favorite toy you had as a kid. Everything was inside except the picture of George was missing. The album was so scratched up that I don’t dare to even attempt to play it on a good stereo system. Even though I had a different copy of it on vinyl, finding that copy which I played on my crappy record player at the age of two meant more to me than having it on CD. Albums were something you held onto, not just some 5″ disc you tossed around in the back of your car.
My copy of The White Album from when I was a kid
That’s one of the reasons why vinyl was so special. Sure, it was stamped out of a machine like CDs are, but there were times when packaging an album meant that you had something valuable. Most of the time you’d get a simple cardboard jacket with a white sleeve, but other times you were treated to fold-out posters, lyrics printed on the sleeve, plastic sleeves to help protect the vinyl, different artwork on different sides, and very rarely you’d get laser etching like on Styx’s “Paradise Theater”. A treat would be a single album that had a gatefold with a nice piece of artwork inside it or the complete lyrics like on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run”. Unless your CD comes in a large box set, the very nature of the size of the CD prevents any kind of special packaging to come with it. Of recent memory, the only interesting thing I’ve seen on a CD is NIN’s “Year Zero” which changed color with the temperature of the CD. Tool does some interesting things with their CDs, too.
It may be that when I was a kid our setup at home was different than most people’s. My dad had a Yamaha CR-2020 receiver and a Yamaha YP-701 turntable with Ohm speakers. For 1978, they were badass and I truly believe that listening to albums on a setup like that made me appreciate the music more than if I had some junky record player and cheap speakers. Friends from school would come over just to listen to albums on that system. Getting music was different back then, too. Where I lived, I had to go five miles to the local mall in order to get the latest album. There weren’t many record stores other than Sam Goody or Record Town where I lived. That means that unless you physically had the album, you weren’t listening to it. Today, everyone with a bit torerent client can grab the album days before it’s officially released if the album leaks onto the internet. That destroys the communal need to gravitate towards someone’s house to listen to the latest big album, and sharing an album with friends the day it’s released is all but gone.
The soundtrack section of Sam Goody's at the Woodbridge Center Mall, NJ in 1984
Buying albums was a ritual. Almost every Friday night I’d hit the record stores in the mall, checking which one had what I wanted for $1 or so less than the other place. I’d generally get two a week, and by the time I went to college I amassed about 200+ albums which ranged from mostly rock like Journey, Rush, and Maiden, to oddball 12″ EPs and a few soundtracks sprinkled in. I’d get 45s now and then if I didn’t have faith in the album. Even back then there were one-hit wonders and buying 45s for $1.29 was much safer when you wanted one song than buying an entire album for $9 or $10 which would be a large fraction of what your minimum wage got you that week.
Ghosts in the machine
There are a good number of 33’s and 45’s that I still own which were never released on CD. I tried a few times to convert them to digital just to have a copy of them on my iPod, but I always found the procedure to be tedious. I’d have to run the audio into my old receiver, and then into an analog-to-digital converter and then into my Mac. After a while I gave up and lost interest. Also, the Yamana YP-701 turntable I have, handed down to me from my dad, was starting to slow down due to a loose belt which I had no interest in replacing.
Two years ago I heard of a company called ION that started producing turntables with a USB jack in them. This allowed you to plug the turntable directly into your computer with no messy wires or amps, you just plug and play. I grabbed one at the Brookstone in the Menlo Park Mall and the thing ran as advertised. I plugged the turntable into my Macbook Pro, put an album on, GarageBand saw the turntable without drivers, and recorded it just fine.
Although this little experiment didn’t seed my interest in listening to vinyl again, it did inadvertantly allow me to have a turntable that worked well for the time two years later when I would decided to pick vinyl up again.
Pictures at an exhibition
I always had this idea of framing albums. There are some album covers which were works of art on their own like Patty Smith’s “Horses” or The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band”. I only have one framed album which is a rare copy of Journey’s “Dream, After Dream” from Japan and it looks great where it is. I thought I’d just put a few more here and there in the house in frames that you can easily swap the albums out of. The artwork on some albums is completely lost on CDs, used only as a visual guide to what the album is rather than something to appreciate. On the way back from watching football at Champps I decided to stop into Vintage Vinyl on Route 1 in Fords which I used to go to a lot years ago to find indie and industrial CDs that most mainstream stores wouldn’t carry. The store has two main vinyl sections: new releases which are categorized and alphabetized, and the used vinyl which is all thrown together with no order at all. I didn’t even look at the new releases thinking there’d be nothing I’d be interested in and headed straight for the used vinyl. At $2-$4 a pop, buying a few albums to put up on your wall didn’t seem like a bad deal. Since they’re unorganized, you have to flip through all of them in order to find what you want. Even after twenty years, I found that I could still flip through the vinyl like a pro. I found a ton of good covers: Rush’s “2112″, Rolling Stones’ “Tattoo You”, Jean Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene”, Derek and the Dominoes’ “Layla and Other Love Songs”, Journey’s “Escape”, Meat Loaf’s “Bat out of Hell”, Emerson Lake and Palmer’s self-titled album, Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” (still with the Korvettes sticker on it!), and Blondie’s “Parallel Lines”. I bought some cheap frames at $5 each, went home, and thought “well, before I pop these into the frames, how do these sound?”. I hooked up the ION turntable to my home theater receiver which has a phono input and played “2112″. I expected it to sound flat and scratchy compared to CD. The fact is, it sounded amazing. The vinyl I bought happened to be in very good shape and had very little noise on it. Whoever owned it took very good care of it.
So that got me thinking about trying other albums. I put on “Escape” and although it had some minor noise on it, it also sounded very good. Jonathan Cain’s piano on “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Neil Schon’s riffs on “Escape” came through just as well as Peart/Lee/Lifeson’s sound did on “2112″. I hesitate to use the “w” word that people tend to overuse when describing how vinyl sounds compared to CD, but I will say that it did sound more natural. It’s not to say that there’s something very wrong with how CDs sound, but there’s something about vinyl that seems to bring out a more full sound. Two major advantages that CDs have are the ability to skip tracks instantaneously, and pause when you want. Unless you have a turntable with a level to lift the arm up, you’re either muting the stereo or lifting the needle when you want to pause.
Some of the amazing covers that have graced albums over the years
I’m well aware that some people consider CDs to be “low resolution”, but CDs were just more practical to own for a variety of reasons. However, I tend to think that there’s an advantage to how CDs are mastered which brings out different details. I listened to Meat Loaf’s “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” for years on vinyl and I remember listening to the CD for the first time around 1986, hearing these little details I never heard before. Specifically, right after Ellen Foley sings “Though it’s cold and lonely in the deep dark night” there’s this little high pitched tune played, and you hear it again when Meat Loaf sings “I can see paradise by the dashboard light”. I never noticed it on the vinyl version, but you hear it when you play the CD. That brings up the question about whether or not it’s someone making the CD master sound better, or if CDs themselves bring out details. The thing is, without knowing specifically how specific CDs are mastered, there’s no way to know for sure.
I did find one amazing thing happen when I was playing the vinyl I bought. I really can’t say if it was out of habit or not, but I found myself sitting there listening to the album. With CDs, I can’t remember the last time I sat and listened to one because the norm now is to listen to them in the car after you buy them, or rip them to your iPod and listen at the gym, or listen to them on your computer with less-than-good quality speakers. Not so with vinyl. Buying a new album meant taking the time to sit yourself down next to the stereo and listen to what you bought there because you couldn’t bring it with you. That first time you dropped the needle you sat there, read the liner notes, looked at the artwork, and read the lyrics. You studied it. I’m curious if anyone does that today with CDs. You can’t even do that with music you buy online because most of the time the lyrics aren’t embedded in the tracks like they should be. If you pirate music, you’re missing a lot of the experience of buying the music, but I suppose nobody really cares about that anymore. Does anyone even know who sang background on Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing”?
Over the last few months I’ve been going to Vintage Vinyl on and off and even made a trek to Princeton Record Exchange. At PRE I found two rare NIN albums, a copy of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, B52’s self-titled album from 1979, and an oddly shaped Police promo album. I’ve also found out that many bands are re-releasing their albums on vinyl. Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, Rush’s “Permanent Waves”, Led Zeppelin IV, NIN’s “The Downward Spiral” (which had some controversy surrounding it), and Queen has re-released their first few albums. I picked up “A Night At The Opera” which sounds amazing. U2 re-released some of their catalog but I haven’t found “The Joshua Tree” yet. Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” comes with a download code to download the album in a digital format when you buy the vinyl and does Guns And Roses’ “Chinese Democracy”. Just today I was listening to the radio and heard that the new AC/DC album is available on CD “and vinyl”. I can’t even remember the last time I heard vinyl advertized on the radio.
So this idea of buying albums for their covers has turned into wanting to buy them not only for the possibility of getting a different sound out of my favorite albums, but for a bit of nostalgia as well. I noticed that Best Buy is starting to carry vinyl now. I find that to be a strange turn of events when retail space is closely scrutinized, especially in today’s economy. When music has become a digital commodity I find it strange that Best Buy would even bother carrying vinyl, but there it is: Metallica, The Who, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin.
NIN's "The Downward Spiral", never released to the public on vinyl, only as a promo. Now you can get it for $30.
Look into the future
Is vinyl coming back? I’ve heard that on and off for years but it wasn’t until I saw vinyl in Best Buy that I thought there may be a small resurgence. In fact, this year it was announced that vinyl was the only medium in music that had growth in 2008. Who’s buying vinyl? At first I didn’t think it was the younger crowd until I read this article from the New York Times which stated that vinyl’s coming back as a fashion statement. The HDMI receiver I bought recently doesn’t have a phono jack on it so I’m guessing that receiver manufacturers don’t believe it’s worth putting them in anymore. Perhaps vinyl will be seen as a niche, “high end” market. It’s tough to tell at this point, but it will be interesting to see how things are a year from now.
When I first drafted this blog a few weeks ago, I was convinced that this was a passing hobby. Since then, I bought a new belt for my dad’s Yamaha turntable and I have to say that listening to vinyl on a high quality turntable like that really makes vinyl worth listening to and going out of your way for. I find myself appreciating the quality of the audio you get from vinyl. There are caveats though. I bought two copies of NIN’s “Ghosts I-IV” from two different places and both copies’ discs three and four were warped in exactly the same way. I have a feeling that there were some bad pressings of that title. Discs one and two are perfect. Over time I’ve found that some albums have pressing problems, but it’s rare. I remember that my friend and I both bought Dire Straits’ “Brothers In Arms” from two completely different stores and had skips in the exact same spot.
What I like about this resurgence of vinyl is that I find myself really getting absorbed by the music. It’s no longer a filename on my hard drive or my iPod, it’s a piece of work that someone took time to create.
And no, I will not be making a blog post about 8-tracks.
See more pictures of my vinyl collection on flickr.
My friend Nancy checks out Journey's "Frontiers" in 1984, back when vinyl was king. This picture was taken for the high school yearbook.
Gatefold from the new pressing of Led Zeppelin IV. You can't get this on CD.
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