What's old is new again.
That is a frequent observation of anyone who's lived long enough to see the patterns of history develop. In the 1970s we were obsessed with the idyllic, nuclear-family, rebel without a cause culture of the 1950s. In the 1980s, the baby-boomers retold legends of the tumultuous 60s, breathing new life into Woodstock-era rock and Motown-inspired soul, while staking claim to being the greatest generation in history.
So now we've arrived in the 2010s, for want of a better term, and so it is the 90s grunge-era, punk revival, vacuous pop-dance music that is bubbling back up to the surface.
In the midst of all this nostalgia, the vinyl record has seen an incredible resurgence. It has reached a point where radio stations have now reinstalled turntables in their studios, trumpeting the on-air return of vinyl like it's the resurrection of Elvis.
The sound is richer and purer we've been told. Nothing sounds as good as vinyl. The record companies destroyed the music industry when they switched to Compact Disc technology.
Well, allow me, somebody who grew up with vinyl records, to say back the truck up.
Over the course of the 1980s I compiled a rather large collection of records, not a much as an audiophile, but more than your average music fan. The reason for the collection was that I was plying my trade as a disc jockey for live events. Though I made little money, I thought at the time it had an element of glamour to it, and let's face it, I got to talk to a lot of pretty girls at parties.
The little money I had went to buying more records to meet with the seemingly insatiable demands of party-goers. For a kid with little or no income, it was a huge investment.
Sure, there were many a night spent with earphones glued to my head, listening to hours of my favourite artists, enjoying every second vocal nuance and guitar riff. But what many of today's vinyl obsessed junkies don't know is that over the period of the 1980s the quality of mass-produced vinyl records was falling off. It was economics of course. Record companies were driven produce cheaper products, faster and we were just as willing to line up to buy them. It should be noted that the price of a record album in the 80s was roughly the same as it is on iTunes today, which, adjusting for inflation, is almost 3 times more expensive.
The other thing that those who did not grow up in that era cannot appreciate, was that there was no comparable alternative to vinyl. There were cassette tapes, but they're quality was dubious from the start, and would degrade rather quickly over time. Vinyl was the best choice for sound quality and durability, but vinyl was also easily susceptible to damage due to repeated playing and mishandling. Records would get dusty and scratched, and once that happened, they we damaged forever. As much as I loved listening to music for hours on end, it galled me that I had to tolerate all the static noise that came from their eventual and virtually unstoppable degradation.
Record companies were fully aware of the limitations of vinyl and were quite content to let it go on for the foreseeable future, but the digital revolution was coming, whether they were prepared for it or not.
Let me be absolutely clear about my next point. The advent of the Compact Disc was the greatest thing to happen to music lovers since the invention of the phonograph. Read any review from any expert audiophile, producer or sound engineer from that era and you will come to understand that the quality of Compact Disc audio far surpassed anything ever produced on vinyl. Period.
You may wish to wax nostalgic about the amazing artwork on the sleeves of 12" records, and you will certainly get no argument from me. In many ways it was a pure form of pop culture art that will never be duplicated. But on the sound quality argument, you cannot convince me for one second that vinyl is superior. Every device capable of measuring audio range will support that contention, this is not just an opinion.
Now, MP3s are a different discussion, but that is a discussion for another time.
If you grew up loving music and hating all of the hiss and rumble and pops of dusty, scratched LPs, the advent of Compact Discs was miraculous. In fact, some of the early CDs used to come with a proviso from the record label noting that the background hissing sounds were he result of the original analogue studio recordings that none of us had previously detected on vinyl. On some CDs we could hear the musicians breathing, a page of music turning and other sounds that were previously undetectable on other media. It was like having the original master tapes from our favourite artists in one remarkably small package. Record companies had finally answered our prayers, and for many of us, the era of vinyl was mercifully over.
Two things have contributed to vinyl's resurgence. The first is driven mostly by nostalgia. Records were cool. From the artwork on the sleeve, to their smell and feel. We've even fallen in love with the crackles and pops, the warping that causes the stylus to dance, all of those little quirks that take us back to what we perceive to be a simpler time.
The other thing that's driving vinyl's resurgence is society's compelling and ironic distrust for anything corporate. The very companies who sold us billions of dollars in sub-standard vinyl are now being blamed for destroying the industry by providing the superior product we all demanded. Now those same companies are profiting again by reselling the same product at a significantly higher profit.
I'm neither defending nor condoning how corporations make their money. Corporations exist to make money, and they'll go wherever the marketplace allows them to do it.
You can love vinyl, I don't have an issue with that, and indeed there are many things to love. But please don't try to convince me that they are sonically superior than the best of today's digital technology, because on every possible scale of measurement it simply is not true. I can also do without the notion that the music industry set about to destroy vinyl as some bizarre plot to undermine music lovers and decimate independent record stores. Consumers were just as culpable when peer-to-peer file sharing sites sucked the life out of the music industry, devaluing the product and ultimately hurting both established and struggling musicians to this day.
At least the good news about consumers newfound love for vinyl is that maybe some of the investment I made all those years ago might be recouped if the right buyer comes along.
When it comes to choosing vinyl or digital I'm going to side with Montreal's most iconic radio personality, Too Tall, who is just as glad we don't have to rely on vinyl for our music as I am.
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