This being a blog about home recording and publishing, one might be surprised to find out that its author is a huge fan of vinyl records. I'm such a fan, in fact, that if given the choice between a new CD at $10 or a copy of the same album on vinyl for $15 or even $20, I'll almost always choose the vinyl.
But why? Why pay a higher premium for an older medium?
Let's start there. The vinyl medium itself, specifically the LP or Long Playing Phonograph Record, was officially unveiled on June 21, 1948. That means that as of June of this year, the 33 1/3 RPM record is 62 years old. And that's quite a long time.
No one can beat it for longevity, then. Think about it. The 8-track? Dead. The cassette tape? Dead, unless that's all one's car can play. After so many years, the vinyl record remains a readily-accessible medium for music releases.
We owe that, mostly, to the DJ community, who spin vinyl for its analog properties. Vinyl may be slowed down or sped up without any loss of continuity. When slowing down a digital file, one is limited by the sample rate of the track; slowing down too much results in empty spots in the track where sound was not sampled, producing a poor result. Vinyl has no such limitation and is thus preferred by many DJs.
Such preference allowed the format to limp along during the CD's heyday. And here, I should probably mention the CD's (admittedly) many good points.
The CD is compact. It's portable. Music is stored digitally on a CD, and converted to sound during playback. The CD, in comparison with vinyl, is nearly impervious to scratches or dust. It's also nearly unbreakable; try and snap one in half, and you'll see what I mean.
It should be an easy fight, then. But after 30 (!) years of the CD, we've still got vinyl. More importantly, we've got people like me who swear by it.
Why?
It sounds better.
Before you all decide to get into a fanboy war at the bottom of this post, let me say this: it's down to preference. Some people hate vinyl. Yes, dust is audible on the surface of even new vinyl, and if you can't get past that, you're never going to like it. Similarly, digital-lovers often shriek at the sound of sibilance on a record; on a CD, sibilant sounds are nothing, but on a record they can be far more noticeable, especially if a phono cartridge is slightly misaligned.
Conversely, I cannot listen to CDs. They sound thin. They sound tinny. They sound compressed (of the mixing variety, wherein producers have been sacrificing tonal range for volume).
Let's talk numbers.
CDs are encoded in 16-bit at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz per channel. If you're a fan of home recording, you know the importance of a DAC that supports 24-bit recording; it produces better results. The CD, however, only supports mixes at 16-bit. That right there is a massive detriment for the audiophile.
This limitation in the CD's format is not only fodder for vinyl lovers to point at; the release of the Super Audio CD (SACD) and Digital Versatile Disc - Audio (DVD-Audio or DVDA) formats were both attempts at improving the sound quality of digital media. Both formats offer much higher bitrates than CD, but - in a testament to the vitality of analog - vinyl still outsells both formats combined, nearly 3-to-1.
On the other end of the spectrum, of course, are the digital media file formats for compressed music. MP3 will come to most people's minds when discussing music downloads, be them legal or otherwise. The MP3 format supports a maximum bitrate of 320kbps, amounting to roughly CD quality. Other formats, like FLAC, offer quality technically higher than CD quality, all the way up to SACD or DVDA. It doesn't matter, of course. As I wrote, vinyl is still beating those to a pulp.
Does anyone here listen to albums? I do, but this is one area in which I'm honestly not sure which way the trend is headed.
Right now, I can mosey on over to iTunes and pay $1.29 (!) for a favorite track. That gets me a DRM-free copy of that track encoded at 256kbps in Apple's proprietary - but convertible - AAC format. I could buy ten of these tracks, in fact, and I'd have enough music to sit down and listen to for a while.
But, believe it or not, artists often take many of their songs and put them into collections called albums. These albums used to be designed to be listened to in a sitting; that is, a particular song was meant to be heard in a particular context, be it after another song, or in the beginning of it all, or at the end, etc. (In fact, some albums relied on the vinyl medium for their contexts; play an LP of Abbey Road by the Beatles. Side A finishes up with the quick cut at the end of "She's So Heavy" - and the listener flipping the record after such a sudden stop adds to the context of "Because," the first track on Side B.)
But does anyone sit down and listen to tracks in context? Does anyone listen to an album in a sitting? Digital media does not lend itself well to such conventions; even if I buy an entire CD, I'm greeted by song titles that I can listen to individually, or out of order, or sometimes not at all. If I don't like tracks 2-6, I'll just program the CD player to skip them.
And there's something wrong there.
The LP lends itself to album listening. Sure, you can move the arm and the needle to the track you want by eyeballing it, but it's much easier to lay the needle on the outside surface and let it play. With the exception of flipping the record (which only happens once unless it's a double album), there is nothing in between you and the album experience, or between you and the context of each song.
With an LP, music is an experience. With digital media, it's a convenience.
So, what's a home recorder to do about vinyl?
It's not exactly practical to have a record lathe in your home studio. It's infinitely more so to have a fully-digital setup, complete with recording software and ADCs, and to burn your mixes to CD. It just makes sense for the independent artist.
So what's the difference between an artist on CD and an artist on vinyl?
Any old schmuck can go and grab a copy of ProTools LE or even GarageBand, some cheap hardware, and spend an afternoon recording to end up with a CD. I can do it right now.................. done.
But if you're on vinyl, you've accomplished something. Not only did you make music, but someone, somewhere, liked it enough to etch it into a solid disc and press it into molten material. A vinyl record carries a permanence nonexistent in any digital form, and that permanence carries over to the artist. You can hold it. You can feel it. It's a physicality, an extension of the artist himself. It's not just 1s and 0s.
And that, in a nutshell, is why vinyl will always be the superior music format. It remains readily-available to the listener, but elusive to the artist. It forces a goal; it provides incentive for better material. And that's a wonderful thing.
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