In the beginning it was the console radio and turntable with the 3 dozen or more albums my parents had collected since marrying in the 1960s: choral, church, Broadway musicals, classical ensembles, and probably a few Christmas song compilations. Then as a teenager in the 1970s somehow I got my own stereo equipment and headphones for listening times when others were sleeping or did want to be disturbed by my pop music and Monty Python recordings on vinyl. By high school graduation and during college in the 1980s, the vast collections held at libraries and my own thrill at copying tracks from vinyl to cassette tape was a great source of pleasure, often playing the same songs over and over to form the soundtrack of my younger years. Sometime in the early 1980s the high-fidelity magazines and enthusiasts were discovering the magic of compact disks and digital recording for convenient size, high technical fidelity, and novelty.
At first the listeners accustomed to vinyl and the analog capture of all ambient space and time with the instruments and mic'd voiced found fault with the surgical precision and "dry" clarity of the all-digital process DDD or ADD (Analog recording, Digital mastering, Digital playback). But as record stores slowly converted from bins of vinyl to drawers of jewel cases with CD sets, more and more turntables fell into disuse or were given away or put in storage. So the listener corner at the city library downtown in Grand Rapids in the spring of 2022 was a nice surprise; like seeing an old friend. The available disks to hear on site, or to take home (together with portable record player) number maybe 100, mostly pop music. But putting Side 1 or Side 2 onto the platter triggers muscle memories of countless times before when dropping the needle onto the surface, or gently raising it to move to a new groove on the album.
How did it sound to hear
Elton John's well-known and his not often heard songs from
Honky Chateau, or the
ABC album from the
Jackson 5 after perhaps 30 years bereft of trusty home turntable? Leaving aside the limitations of studios and tape-based mastering tracks in bygone years, the aural sensation of vinyl was like black velvet with jewels lit by gallery spotlighting: pure beauty in a sea of space. Whether it is modern mic technique, present-day gear and software intervention, or the essential nature of 1's and 0's to represent continuous waves of sound, it is hard to say, but so often the CD or streamed digital recordings put the clarity and stereophonic complexity into an up-front, total sound wall for the listener. Each mic and sound source is present, but overall the combined effect is that everything is pressed against a wall, like butterflies pinned to collecting cases. By contrast the vinyl experience (or is this just wishful imagining, trying too hard to feel for precious old-time differences) also faithfully captures each mic and source, but these occupy a bigger room-space or volume of air; not flattened into crystal clarity.
As well of vinyl, the physicality is part of the music interaction: of handling the album, admiring the art or liner notes, removing the disk and its anti-static sleeve, perhaps lovingly brushing any dust off the surface, then playing the album from start to finish (or jumping around the tracks by manually lifting and again lowering the needle). Around 2013 or 2014 people in their 20's took an interest in some of the older gear of their parents: film cameras, analog wrist watches, VHS recordings, and also collections of vinyl. Some indie musicians responded by setting themselves apart and issuing limited editions of vinyl versions of their online tracks and the CDs they sold at concerts. As a consequence, the few surviving pressing plants soon were overwhelmed by orders; new businesses arose to take some of the work. Searching out the old machinery and pensioners who still remembered how to run and repair and coax the very best results from the equipment was part of the complication. But now in 2022 there is a small but steady market for vinyl buyers of music. It is hard to know if this period from the 1920s to the 2020s for vinyl recording will persist so that future listeners can know the experience. For the moment, though, spinning a disk is a pleasant trip down memory lane.
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