Vinyl put the magic in the music

At some point last week (probably on Tuesday, which is typically our longest day here at the Review), as has happened many times before, I heard Ron say, “How about some music?”

See, I am kind of the house DJ here in the office. I have an iPad and a ridiculous library of music and a just stupid setup for playing it all. The iPad is plugged into a USB-C hub which has pass-through charging for the iPad and a bunch of other outputs. The important one, for our purposes here, is the headphone jack. Yes, we have gotten to the point where, if you want to play any kind of audio via any connection other than Bluetooth (which I hate with a fiery passion), you need some kind of adapter. One could be jaded and skeptical and assume that the big companies who make the devices we all use as music players also make Bluetooth headphones as the reason for this sorry state of affairs, which is not an unreasonable assumption.

Anyway, that headphone output feeds a cheapie pre-amp with a couple of actual vacuum tubes, just to warm things up and, finally, that hits a pair of small studio monitors. and, when things get a little quiet, I often get a request to alleviate that silence.

So, it was as that music was playing (I can’t tell you what it was, but I have promised Ron no Zappa when he is around…) I kept seeing some motion out of the corner of my eye. It was pretty annoying. I finally turned my head to the left where the iPad resides and was horrified to see that, in their eternal wisdom, the Gods of Cupertino (i.e., Apple) has decided that the classic album covers that appear in the music interface are somehow too boring to just display and they are now animated. And not animated in any kind of clever way. Generally it is just some kind of zooming in and out of the image. Like I said, super annoying.

It made me think about a press release I got maybe a week ago touting the fact that United Record Pressing, a factory in Nashville that has pressed everything from the very first U.S. copies of the single “7” of the Beatles’ “Please Please Me” to the latest “vinyl is a thing again” versions of your favorite current artist’s latest record.

Hard to believe, but in a world where everything is streaming and every piece of TV or movie or music content you can think of is available on a device you carry in your pocket, but vinyl sales in 2023 hit $1.4 billion. It is still a small drop in the streaming ocean, but it is actually more than what the industry brought in from CD sales. By a lot.

Sidenote: If you are buying vinyl for new music (said the guy who is listening to the new Chappell Roan as he types this…), you are wasting your money. The magic of vinyl, at least in terms of sound, is not just about the physical format you are playing at home. It is about the whole chain of creation.

In the Stone Age, instruments were recorded using really good microphones plugged into analog recording consoles that were modified using things like actual rooms called reverb chambers and then sent to analog tape and those tapes were used to cut physical discs that were used to press hot vinyl into the records we all played at home.

Today, everything (including my record, I am no better than anyone else…) is recorded “in the box.” That is a term engineers use to denote recordings made totally using a computer. It originally referred to a Mac. Someone may be playing something that looks like a piano, but it is sending an electronic signal to the computer that represents how individual notes turn on and off. That becomes something called a MIDI track (Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a technology from the late 1970s that allowed devices made by different companies to talk to each other) and the decision of if that track is gonna sound like an acoustic piano or an electric piano or a violin section or a flock of geese is usually made later because that track can trigger any sound you want to assign to it. Truth is that most anything you are listening to recorded after the mid-1990s probably only used a microphone to record the vocals.

But it all made me remember how big a deal records were when I was a younger man.

Ron asked me on the same day that he last asked for music if I remembered the first album I ever bought with my own money. We agreed that Columbia House deals did not count. (I am not gonna explain that, IYKYK.) And the first one I remember buying was probably Springsteen’s “Born To Run” in the summer of 1975, before I was old enough to drive.

It was the beginning of a serious addiction. Yeah, like most of us, I stream pretty much everything now just because it is so much more convenient. But I still own about 1,000 records (as in actual pieces of vinyl recorded when that magic was still a thing) on top of close to that many CDs. And my on-disc library clocks in at about 1.8 terabytes of data.

But none of it makes me feel like that magic piece of vinyl. Opening the package up. Putting it on the turntable for the first time and putting the needle into the groove. Then sitting back and devouring the lyrics and album notes. Memorizing every musician who played one every track and noting who actually wrote the songs.

So, yeah, excuse me if I think that animating those covers is stupid and lame.

Now, you kids, get off my lawn.