WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL WITH VINYL?

For many years, many years ago, vinyl was the only format available to the masses. We all had turntables, often as part of rack systems. Some of us got more serious and ventured into separates. We also had cassette decks, but for most of us this was merely used to copy our LPs to tape, to use in our cars. The industry was also clever. Manufacturers of cassette tapes knew that most vinyl records at the time about 45 minutes of music per record. This fitted the C90 cassette format perfectly. You paused the tape only once, at the end of side one of the LP, and then stopped the recording at the end of side two. Job done. Repeat for the next LP on side two of the tape.

Then the CD format hit us and suddenly many of us accepted, and not always based on merit, that CD meant the end of vinyl. So, towards the late 80s many of us ditched our turntables and vinyl collections, often at a great loss, and replaced them with the digital format. I know. I did the same. I heard CD for the first time when a dealer kindly offered me a Philips CD100 player to try out. The first titles I listened to were Pink Floyd’s Meddle and Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside. They weren’t spectacular, and this may have had to do with the fact that amplifiers at the time weren’t quite ready for the new input type. But hey, it was really convenient to just pop in a CD and use forward and rewind. Goodbye vinyl.

Fast forward many years, through the lean ’90s where “vinyl” was almost a curse word and into the early 2000s, and many of us got the itch to try the old format out again. From here, vinyl gained new momentum and today vinyl sales are rising year on year. One of the talking points, and it has become very divisive, is the analogue (vinyl) vs. digital (CD) debate. There are supporters on either side, and both formats have their merits. The problem is the equipment used to compare the formats, and more importantly, the cost. Let’s be fair here: most comparative tests are unfairly performed using an analogue frontend that is often way more expensive than the digital one. By the time you have rigged a turntable, arm, cartridge, and phono stage, you have spent a lot more money than what a CD player costs. It is the same with the source. Even a standard LP is a lot more expensive than a high quality “audiophile” CD/SACD/XRCD.

Leaving behind the technology and the countless arguments, there is one thing that those who left the vinyl format long for, and that newcomers are discovering – the sense of tactility and ownership. If you stream content, you don’t really own it as you cannot touch it. If you use CD and its derivatives, SACD and XRCD, you have more of a sense of ownership, but not really any involvement with the medium. You stick a disk into the tray, close it, and play it. I bet many owners have never bothered to read the liner notes inside the jewel cases of their CDs. Why? For most it’s simply too small to read.

Vinyl records offer that sense of ownership, and with it, tacticity, that we need. I notice how youngsters ooh and ahh about the accessories that come with an album such as ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. The posters, the post cards, and everything inside the gatefold cover, just beg to be opened, viewed, touched, even put on our walls, as we all did as kids. My parents totally freaked out when they saw the poster of the pyramids on my bedroom wall. Occasionally some youngsters will come around our home and I show them my records. You can immediately see how their fingers stroke the album cover – the much-needed tactile sensation they miss with streaming. Those of them who already own vinyl go even further than most of us oldies. Where we simply put our records sorted alphabetically in racks seeing only the spines, the newer generation proudly display many of their LPs on their walls. This is just so “cool” (the word coming from someone in his early 60s) and I love it.

Many owners, especially the newer generation, couldn’t care less about fancy technology such as half-speed mastering, original master recordings, UHQR, high quality 45 rpm, and the like. What they are looking for is actually owning something they can see, touch, and show off. That many of them don’t even own a turntable is quite ironic. They are after the visual element first.

I own many titles on both CD/SACD/XRCD and vinyl formats. Yet my trusted CD player has not been switched on for months.* Each time I have a spare minute, I’ll put on a vinyl record, take the sleeve, follow the lyrics, and just relax. I never lift the tonearm until the last sound has played. Next time you play ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, listen to the comment made just as Eclipse finishes. It does not even appear on many CD versions of the album. It’s the same for Don’t Bring Me Down at the end of ELO’s ‘Discovery’ album where the slamming door you can hear on the vinyl version is absent on the CD. It’s small things like these that will keep vinyl alive as a format, even as I am convinced that what someone said is true: “I like vinyl because of the cost and the inconvenience”. It’s expensive and man, it is often a tedious affair to operate. But I love it exactly for these two reasons. Well, maybe not quite the first…

Andries Oberholzer

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* While writing this article, I wanted to check whether my CD/SACD copy of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ also lacks the words “There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact, it’s all dark”. Maybe it is because I had not played CDs “for months” as mentioned above, but suddenly my trusted Rotel RCD855 would not play the disk, gave a READ ERROR message, with some weird noises coming from the tray. I tried another CD and got the same message. Two or three more tries later, there was an electric pop and my Rotel just died, after 36 years. It’s the end of the digital road for me.