For many teenage music fans of today, it’s difficult to imagine that only twenty years ago, all music was on vinyl. Nowadays we take CDs for granted, they store everything: music, computer games, films, data. It’s difficult for me to imagine my world without the CD. Yet, in this age of the compact disc, you have music fans who swear by vinyl, and will rarely buy or listen to a CD when there is a record available. Some of these people have loved music since before the birth of the CD, and are hanging on to this in the same way a child may suck its thumb until it is ten years old. They are clinging to the past, and good for them. However, you also get the new-wave-hip-trendy-rock&roll teenage vinyl buyers (mostly NME readers) who buy records over CDs for what can seem like no real reason at all. The point of this article to discuss the vinyl versus CD debate, and to convey my (probably already evident) opinions on the matter.
So firstly, what is a record? Music used to be stored physically in the grooves of a plastic (vinyl) disc (later more adventurous shapes came about). The grooves were read by a needle which converted the physical signal in the grooves to an electronic singal. This signal was transferred via wires and such to an amplifier. The amplifier then did its stuff. Records originally ran at 78 RPM, but almost all the vinyl bought or sold today runs at 33 RPM (LPs) or 45 RPM (singles). Records came in a variety of sizes, but the most common were 7” singles, with one song on either side, or 12” albums with around 5 songs on each side.
Vinyl records may as well be a fossilized trilobite on display in the Natural History Museum, they are about as consequential to the majority of life today as an accumulation of minerals where a living thing used to be, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag and sat on a shelf in a drawer somewhere, with a little white label explaining it to anyone who cares to acknowledge it. Records are a relic from a historic civilization. Perhaps this is where the fascination with vinyl comes from. People collect ancient Greek and Roman artifacts; maybe a different group of people collect late-twentieth-century musical artifacts. This is true of some people, namely record collectors, who own the vinyl purely to own the vinyl. However, anyone who owns a collection of Roman pottery, doesn’t pour their water from an ancient jugs or serve their spaghetti bolognaise in ancient dishes. A lot of people actually listen to vinyl rather than listen to its modern equivalent.
This brings me to the latest breed of vinyl buying teenagers who believe music on vinyl somehow makes them more ‘scene’, ‘hip’, ‘cool’ or whatever word NME is currently using. For some unknown reason, these people believe that buying vinyl actually makes them a bigger music fan than the people who buy CDs. Perhaps, since we have already discussed that records are a relic from the past, these people also believe that listening to vinyl gets them closer to the ‘spirit of rock and roll’ or some bullshit like that. My only counter to this view on vinyl is that it is probably the most pretentious reason to listen to music I’ve ever heard. Personally, I listen to music to stimulate myself (no, not like that) and learn; not to create some kind of image about myself, which is essentially what this attitude is about.
Vinyl fans will argue that vinyl sounds better. If vinyl sounded better than CDs, why were CDs invented? Why, even if they were invented, did they become such a big thing so quickly? CDs store and transfer music digitally, records are an analogue representation of sound. Digital systems are able to transfer more data with less interference or loss of clarity than an analogue signal.
When you present your average vinyl fan with this tasty little fact, they’ll often go one of two ways. The first is to say that sound is not a digital signal, it is an analogue signal and therefore sounds better when represented by an analogue signal. Sound is indeed an analogue signal, and the sounds produced by your speakers or headphones are no different. For a moment, think: analogue sound to digital sound back to analogue sound (ie. recording a sound to a CD then playing it back) is, when thought about logically, obviously less prone to any interference or decay than analogue, to analogue to analogue (ie, recording a sound to vinyl then playing it back). The second way they’ll go is to remember that they are entitled to opinions and say ‘Well I prefer the sound of vinyl..’ Whenever I hear this, I grin. A record is a physical representation of the sound amplified by your stereo, and thus any inconsistencies; scratches, dust and so forth; on the record will be ‘heard’ through the speakers as background noise, jumps, clicks whatever. This doesn’t give the music ‘character’, it makes the music less and less distinct. Any vinyl fan using this argument can pretty much forget using the argument presented in the eighth paragraph (if you can’t wait that long, the idea of it is that no artist intended for you to listen to his work through a veil of white noise, it’d be like looking at a Rembrandt through misted up goggles and saying its how it was supposed to look). CDs can become scratched, but their sound quality doesn’t diminish until they are almost destroyed, and any music fan worthy of the reference should know how to look after his CDs. Vinyl is much more easily corrupted. And when it comes down to it, I bet all the vinyl buying teenagers are listening to digital music on their mp3 players and minidisk players.
As a huge music fan myself, I have amassed a collection of both CDs and records. Sometimes I like my music loud. Have you ever tried playing a record loud. Properly loud? The hiss can become a roar and the music can become unlistenable at high volumes. In my opinion, the argument ‘vinyl sounds better than CD’ or ‘I prefer the vinyl sound to CD’ is laughable.
Another justification of vinyl fandom I have heard is that bands recording prior to 1990 all recorded on vinyl, and thus the vinyl sound is the way their music was meant to be. Who’s to say that if Jim Morrison were recording today he wouldn’t want his music on CD? Vinyl was just the best medium available until this point, then CDs took over and are now the mainstream musical medium. The argument ‘This is the way they wanted me to hear it!’ is invalid in this way. You could, I suppose say that since the sound was designed for vinyl and analogue transmission, it wouldn’t sound as good on the digital medium of CD. This is why they remaster older music when it’s put onto CD. Ever see those little stickers saying ‘Remastered’ on the front of Led Zeppelin CDs?
Now, after bitching about records for a thousand words, you may think I am being hypocritical. I have mentioned that I have a collection of vinyl as well as a collection of CDs. Sure, I have a lot of vinyl, but I buy it for it’s collectability. I quite like vinyl in the lovingly-wrapped-labelled-and-catalogued sort of way - in the museum sense - as I mentioned earlier. You can get them out every so often to amuse yourself, but you don’t pretend they are the best, if they were the best how come they’re extinct? It is possible to own records without thinking that records are better than CDs. I buy 7” singles because I just have to collect everything; sometimes you even get a different b-side to the CD single. If I go out to buy some music, the first place I’ll check are the CD racks, then I will go and find the vinyl section.
So my main points from this discussion are that vinyl does not make you cool (or whatever word your magazines tell you to use). Vinyl does not sound better than CD. Vinyl is not ‘being true to the music, man’. Vinyl is, however, something to collect and look after, and perhaps one day try to explain to your grandchildren. The motives behind this article were my frustration at a generation of 15 year-olds listening to The Darkness and confidently saying that they are true music fans because they buy vinyl.