Love at 33 1/3 RPM: A 25 year old’s love letter to an archaic medium

At the risk of confirming everyone’s suspicions that millennial are all waxing nostalgic for a time we didn’t know—we’re getting used to baby boomers projecting all of their self-loathing on us—I’d like to explain why we millennials pretty much only pay for music when it comes on vinyl—a format that arguably was surpassed before we were born.

For those who don’t know, the LP is still marching along, the musical format that refuses to die. In 2010, vinyl sales were up 26 percent. Contrast that to CDs, which fell 21 percent, and the music industry saving-digital download sales that crept up just 2.1 percent. Records are becoming so mainstream that the counter-culture has revived cassettes.
Some of this can probably be attributed to retro-pastiche. Vintage turntables and dusty LPs, like books on a shelf, have looked natural and attractive in the American home since the ‘40s.

But surely there’s more to it than that. People are fanatics about their records. There’s an entire “Record Store Day,” that—in Chicago anyway—saw droves of young dudes (of every age and gender) flipping through crates. Stores with names like “The Dusty Groove” were packed. People were squeezing through aisles, even as outside the freezing rain made a compelling case for downloading. Why?

There’s an obvious and less-obvious appeal. Let’s start with the obvious: Records just sound better than mp3s.

For all the popping and crackling, records can be cleaned. The mp3’s damage is inherent in the design. I’ll admit there’s a really complex way of explaining how an mp3 is made, and then there’s this one. It’s reductive and without nuance, but as you’ll see, this is how mp3s are made. It’s appropriate to the format.

The mp3 caught on because unlike older digital music formats (.wav’s for example), the mp3 takes up very little hard drive space. The nature of creating an mp3, or AAC or any other “lossy” format causes certain sound frequencies to be eliminated. The AAC, Apple’s default format, is especially sharp at eliminating frequencies that are outside of the hearable spectrum, or being covered by another instrument like a heavy bass, anyway. In theory, everything you would hear should be there. It’s not as wide of a spectrum of sound, but if you’re listening to music via earbuds on the subway, the difference is probably negligible.

Additionally, as the audio is encoded, a decision has to be made as to how detailed the digital representation of the audio wave will be; this is where “kbps” is introduced. Think of it visually if it helps: How many pictures of this horse running do you want to take per second, to recreate the visual experience of seeing it run? Think of the choppiness of not having enough frames per second. If you’re a really visual person, draw a sound wave rising and falling (go ahead, I’ll wait). Now draw a staircase going up (and down) the wave. This is the digital version of the sound wave.  Note the corners. Note how right angles are just so much less.... organic. To be fair, good mp3s should have around 320 bits per second (contrasted with the typical Hollywood which has only 24 frames per second). It’s a clever way to get a lot of music on a small hard drive. So what are we missing?

To test just what differences these compressions and eliminations might make, I devoted an entire afternoon to comparing the sound quality of an album.  I opted for Blood Sweat & Tears’s 1968 debut album Child Is Father to the Man because I thought its diverse musical styling—orchestral overtures, ‘60s pop, folk, R&B, jazz—would provide a broader scope for comparing formats. Also I had found a cheap copy at the record store, and hadn’t really had a chance to sit down and listen to it.

The experiment, which took place on a cold drizzling Sunday, was so indulgent and enjoyable that I’d recommend everyone buy a turntable just for conducting it. I sat down and listened to each track twice through the same stereo—once off my laptop at 256 kbps, and once off my turntable—alternating which format played first.
From a sound standpoint the difference is definitely noticeable. The organ especially, here played by Al Kooper of “Like a Rolling Stone” fame, has a full, thick, angelic quality on vinyl. On the computer the same organ parts are present but sound much smaller and airier. Via LP, the bass parts are much more textured, almost purring on the record. The cymbal splashes from the drum kit sound light, never shrill. Overall everything sounded much more realistic. Instruments were easier to distinguish on vinyl: I could hear the long decay of hits on the vibraphone, which on the digital recording I thought was a Rhodes piano; for the first time in my life I thought “What a fine lute part this song has!” Your ear may not hear the frequencies that are present, but they still make a difference in how everything sounds.
In a direct comparison, the mp3 sounds fine but not as good. Audiophiles will argue that I stacked the deck by using a “lossy” format. Yeah, I could’ve found some FLAC files, which preserve CD quality, but are thus immense. And perhaps in technology’s forward march, they will figure out how to preserve the highest quality recording but find a manageable way for you to listen to it portably and conveniently. It seems for the time being, “cloud streaming” is two steps back, but if consumers decide they want higher quality, I’m sure someone will figure out how to sell it to them.
Apart from my slight audiophile tendencies (okay, full-blown epidemic audiophilia) there’s something else about vinyl records. The less-than-obvious advantage.  

Child Is Father to the Man has some of the most amazing production I’ve ever heard—really exciting horn parts, big apocalyptic choirs, lead vocals oscillating through a spinning Leslie speaker, just a whole album of interesting and cool choices. I don’t usually evaluate albums based off of these merits, and this brings me to perhaps vinyl’s most enduring strength.

I sat listening with my notebook in hand and the record jacket next to me. In between notes (usually on the second consecutive listen of a song) I read the back of the jacket. The cover of Child Is Father to the Man is silly and kind of disturbing (each band member is next to a child with said band member’s head imposed on the little shoulders. Each one is creepy in a unique way). At one point in the fourth track, “My Days Are Numbered,” a big Revolver-style backwards guitar solo just rips in. It’s a great moment, which the jacket credits it to Ztak Evets. Immediately I wanted to figure out what else this Dutch guitar master had done, but my computer was of course in use, so I contented myself with noting to look it up later.
In the past that moment—that whoa—would’ve been the jumping off point, and I wouldn’t have finished the album. I would’ve been off on a wild Google, YouTube, iTunes hunt, trying to consume another musician or style I didn’t know, rather than actually listening to music at all. In this case I probably would’ve gone back to Blood Sweat & Tears after realizing that Ztak Evets doesn’t exist, it’s just the BS&T guitarist Steve Katz, spelled and played backwards. Nevertheless, an mp3 is easily turned on, and easily turned off.
The limitations of vinyl—its lack of portability, its dependence on the user to flip it every 25 minutes or so, the fact that record players can’t go online—all serve to create a space for music.

The mp3 player and the computerized music library allow you to have music going all the time; this is their strength. You can come home with your earbuds in, slam the iPod onto the iPod dock and hear only the slightest interruption. Everything we do can be soundtracked, and that’s cool! Rather than walking up the street to the sound of cars and traffic, I can walk up the street listening to The Cars and Traffic. With the slightest movement of my fingertips I can get more, put more on, play it in any order I want, even repeat one song infinitely (That “Play One Song Forever” button has been on every version of iTunes since the beginning, and I can’t for the life of me imagine why).

But vinyl won’t go for a walk. It sits in my living room, in a specific place, sort of set apart. When shopping for records, I can curate to a specific room. There’s a whole ritual of taking the jacket out of the dust cover, the sleeve out of the jacket, and the LP—carefully!—from the sleeve, lining up the hole, and moving the needle in place. Calling these actions holy or liturgical in some way is overstating it, but it is an act of reverence. It takes away the everydayness (or every-momentness?) of now-ubiquitous recorded music and reminds you that it’s a privilege, a treat. Creating a space for music, giving it attention. It is (a lesser form of) the difference between a poster of a Van Goghon your wall—novel at first, and eventually peripheral—and going to see “The Old Guitarist” in a museum.  You prepare yourself to let the art in. It sounds over the top, and yeah, it kind of is.

Think of it like the slow-food movement: vinyl lovers are enjoying music’s ritual, and quality—all served up on a platter. All of this is possible with digital music, sure. Of course, airplanes could just be driven around on the highway. Just as the merits of paintings, aside from being just “a permanent record,” became clear with the birth of photography, the merits of vinyl in an mp3 world are only now coming in clear. Warm, punchy, and clear.  

Perfecting Sound Forever

   So I just finished reading a fantastic little piece of nonfiction called Perfecting Sound Forever and I highly recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in recorded sound.  Greg Milner follows the history of recorded sound and the contentious debates that continue to surround it.  On the way he touches on critical theory, psychoacoustics, war profiteering, music criticism, media theory, a little bit of Adorno, and some old fashioned fanboy gushing (Pavement get's mentioned a couple times).  I think this book is actually every one of my geeky interests rolled up into one single serving.  Milner is not so secretly an analog enthusiast but he's quick to point out the wild eyed doomsdaying and magical thinking endemic to certain analog purists.  

    One of the most important things I've taken away from the book is the idea that the trajectory of musical technology was not preordained.  There has always been a push towards high fidelity, having the purest representation of a sonic event, as well as a push for innovation, for creating new sounds with new technology.  It's a classic example of a tool built for observation having irrevocable effects on what it observes.  It's also always been a contentious subject, every new technology having it's utopian boosters and dystopian naysayers.  This ongoing battle hit a fever pitch with the advent of CDs.  What's most depressing about the CD chapter of the book isn't that so many people thought digital audio sounded terrible (a lot of people still feel this way) but that it was spurred by an industry desire for a format change.  Neither artists/producers nor consumers were clamoring for a better format, and many of them thought it was a useless ploy.  I always assumed that analog purism was something that came later, an old guy nostalgia but also a punk rock fuck you to a once very expensive medium.  I didn't realize that digital audio was a contentious subject from day one.  Also, the technical standards of CDs (bit depth, sampling rate) were sort of rushed into use.  That is, CDs could have been more hi-def given a couple more months in development.  And of course the greatest irony of all, that digitizing music would eventually be the industry's undoing.

    This got me thinking about the current Tape/Vinyl revivalism.  I'll admit that the most annoying trait about format fetishism is the built in nostalgia.  You kinda wanna shake these people and scream "Get with it, things change, stop trying to escape into the past.  The future is..."  you get the point.  But, there's actually a foward looking element in all this nostalgia.  Becuase you don't have to listen to records and you don't have to put them out, doing either is a conscious act, a rebellion against the norm.  It can seem like a pointless rebellion but it's not just empty posturing.  It's also not an anti-social behavior.  It creates spaces of cultural exchange where there are alternatives to the convenient and disposable (or just fickle) nature of pop culture.  Although it smacks of a fad, I think it really stems from a desire for community, the very same same desire that fuels webforums and blogs.  

    The debate for me isn't just about sound quality.  Yes, I think records sound more musical and therefore better.  But it's also about having the artifact, the fetish object.  Yes, it's conspicuous consumption, no it's not very "green," it's more expensive/not free (This debate could go in circles though.  How much energy does it take to make an Ipod?  How much did that Ipod cost?  Who get's that money?).  But I buy a record, the band makes some money, the label that put out their album makes some money, the record store makes some money, I get something permanent and usually desirable in exchange.  It seems so quaint doesn't it?  Consumerism that doesn't feel like consumerism.

    Far be it from me to say this is the only way to listen or to be actively engaged with music.  But it is effective and actually quite rewarding.  And it's thriving, which is something the industry as a whole is certainly not doing.  Polemics aside, it's a continually interesting phenomenon, especially as it consistently confounds so many people who try to shrug it off.