Think of listening to a live musical performance in a concert hall. While it’s somewhat inconvenient to go out and hear music, it’s definitely worth it. You hear everything. You feel the performance. Music comes at you from an infinite number of directions and in an infinite range of frequencies. The musical experience is so vast that most ears cannot detect the full performance. On the other hand, all ears can hear the spurious conversation and coughs from the audience.
Concerts remind me of listening to analog recordings on vinyl records. Yes, they are less convenient than digital forms of music. You can’t just select a track with a remote or pre-program a playlist. And yes, they are noisy when compared to digital music. The media and playback system can produce any number of pops and hums.
However, when it comes to sound, vinyl is king. That’s because LP records contain the same continuous sine wave as the original recording. Digital music, on the other hand, loses that quality when the sine wave is reduced to a set of 1s and 0s required to digitize it.CDs are a close-sounding second, however. And to achieve their high musical quality, the industry adopted a high sampling rate. Believe it or not, a compact disc (or any other digital) recording samples the analog source 44,100 times per second! Even at that rate, if you have a quality sound system, your speakers are capable of delivering frequencies that your CD player will not produce. Thus, a loss in music occurs.
To take full advantage of the range of LP records with the fewest disadvantages, I buy 180 gram vinyl. 180g is significantly heavier than standard vinyl, so the record sits flatter on the turntable. The flatter the record, the better the tonearm tracks. The thicker 180g records also have deeper grooves, which translates into a truer listening experience.
As you can probably imagine, 180g vinyl is more expensive than standard vinyl. At more than $30 per record, I don’t buy much of it. For most of my music, I opt for the price, convenience and relatively good quality of digital music.
For those special recordings that I purchase on vinyl, a multi-sensory experience awaits. The album art on a 12” cover is more appealing than what you find on your iPod screen or in a CD jewel case.And the larger format lends itself to some unique gimmicks. Remember the zipper on the front of The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers? How about the pop-up spaceship inside Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue? And Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, with the tenement house window cut outs on the album’s cover and the residents shown in various poses on the sleeve, is one of the best. You just can’t get that stuff anywhere else but on vinyl.
Records have a different texture than CDs. As you meticulously handle the LP by its edges and gently drop the tonearm, you get the sense that the music is fragile and valuable. I toss my CDs around like they are mini Frisbees.I’ve never licked my LPs and CDs, but I’d be willing to bet that vinyl even tastes better than the aluminum CD.
All-in-all, if I never left my home and had an infinite amount of time to root through my music, I’d only buy vinyl. I could sit around and smell, hold, gaze at — but not lick — my music.
However, since I have a life outside my listening room, I’ll always own a generous amount of digital.
