THE LURE OF VINYL
Compact discs are a lot like the Republican Party: they may have all the power but if you move in certain circles, you can’t find anybody who actually voted for them. There’s a lot to love about the silver discs: they’re modern, they’re portable and, to put this in technical jargon, they kick a lot of butt—nobody ever woke up their neighborhood by driving down the street blasting a vinyl record.
Yet serious record collectors are, for the most part, record collectors. The issue of whether records or CDs sound better can be debated endlessly—it has been, and it will be. While a case could be made for either sound, there’s something about vinyl that endears it to collectors. It’s a more sensual medium: you can have more fun holding it, and watch it while
it’s playing. If you’re old enough, it’s always going to trigger memories of prying your favorite LP out of the sleeve for the first time, discovering the surprises on the label and the inner sleeve. And maybe it’s just that a record has more style—the “Hugh Hefner thing,” as Jeff put it. Yes, John Travolta clicked on a CD player before his romantic interlude with Uma Thurman during Pulp Fiction—and was rewarded with Urge Overkill’s sleek, modern cover of a Neil Diamond song—but just look at how well that encounter turned out.
“The romance of vinyl is that it’s more textural, tangible,” says engineer Bill Inglot, who’s best known as a remastering expert for CDs. “All CDs have that plastic cover, and they basically all look the same. CDs are like sex with a condom.”
Another industry veteran, Bob Irwin, runs the Sundazed label, which reissues lost ’60s classics on both CD and vinyl. And he says that vinyl has made a comeback since the turn of the millennium, at least among the collectors who love his label. “In the past two years our vinyl shares have spiked over 35 percent; the romance of holding a 45 or an album is coming back. You can’t watch two hours of primetime TV without seeing something like a car commercial, where the needle drops into a groove.”
Most of all, LPs appeal to people like Clark Johnson, a self-proclaimed vinyl snob who amasses records and stereo equipment in his Boston area apartment and who treats every play like an experience to be savored. “I really like CDs,” he notes soon after I step in the door. “They make good coasters.” Sure enough, he hands me a beer and invites me to plop
it down on the lonely CD sitting without a sleeve on his kitchen table.
When people draw generalizations about record collectors—that they’re anal, middle-aged guys with too much time on their hands—Johnson is the kind of guy they’re talking about, and darn proud of it. And he’s the kind of person who can make you wonder whether you’ve been taking a simple experience like playing records for granted. Balding and professorial, wearing a well-used flannel shirt, he speaks in a booming voice that would sound equally at home in a lecture hall or on AM radio. Looking around his kitchen I see evidence of a lifetime of collecting, and I haven’t even gotten to the records yet. Just the beer bottles that line every available bit of wall space: all exotic, all imports or microbrews and, shamefully enough, all still full. Though I spent a few hours at his house, we never reached the point where he actually played any records—that isn’t something you do with a stranger, the first time around. “That’s what radio is for, if you want to listen to something in the background,” he says. “But if I want to listen to a Mahler symphony, I want to listen to it. If you go to a concert, what else would you be doing?”
As a kid, he built turntables out of tinker toys, before he graduated to taking apart and re-assembling real ones. He still keeps the first record he ever owned, a disc of his own voice made in one of those old amusement-park booths. Growing up in the ’50s he once got to see Buddy Holly perform, and even holds a ticket for the concert that Holly would have played in Iowa if his plane hadn’t crashed the night before.
Most of Johnson’s life since then has been spent in pursuit of that perfect sonic wave. He once owned a low-profit business he dubbed the Listening Studio, designed to let his fellow sound aficionados test-drive their vinyl on high-end equipment. The suburban Boston house where he now lives easily has a half-million dollars of music in it. Once you get past the kitchen—a room kept music-free for those moments when one needs to rest and refuel—the vinyl covers nearly every room of the three-story house. Climbing the stairs, I nearly mistepped and trashed a rare Japanese pressing of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The top floor houses the most valuable of his albums. I can’t confirm his estimate that there’s $20,000 worth in this room alone, but it is an impressive batch of first-edition classical LPs from the ’50s and ’60s. The hallowed “Scythian Suite” is one of the first things I spot, along with an Offenbach recording by Arthur Fiedler & the Boston Pops—notable, he says, as the first classical LP that RCA ever produced. “This is where I keep the records that sound good,” he says, and points to a darker corner. “And over there is where I keep the records that are good.” This would be an ongoing collection, twenty-five-plus years in the accumulating, of his personal “greatest records ever made” (in his view, all classical and jazz. One of my own choices, the Monkees’s Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd, is notably absent). The middle floor houses the ones he actually plays on a more or less regular basis—again a collection high in snob appeal, though his taste in pop testifies that nobody’s perfect. The sight of Beethoven and Sonny Rollins filed right next to Loggins &
Messina bears out the wonders of personal choice—though as he assures me, the Loggins & Messina album is really well recorded.
His selection is, in fact, far better than what you’d probably find at your local Tower Records. Maybe they’ll have one copy of Miles Davis’s fusion classic Bitches Brew, but he’s got three—different pressings from different countries in different decades—all sitting side by side. The Japanese pressing from the ’80s sounds fine, he tells me, but what you really want is the freshest pressing from the album’s country of origin. That’s just what I find next to the Japanese one: the original Columbia pressing of Bitches Brew, with the bolder type that the company used on record labels at that time, still bearing the original cover sticker (“Specially Priced 2-Record Set!”) and its original price tag of $5.69. He has replaced the original paper inner sleeves with plastic-lined ones, so the record slides right out. I can’t find a scratch or a sign of wear anywhere on it. No matter how many times it’s been played in the past 30 years, this is a record that’s never been taken lightly.
Why he’s driven to acquire this stuff is a mystery, even to himself. “You know how collectors are,” is his first response when pressed for an explanation. But, he does admit that it goes back to a girl, Marjorie, the cute librarian in Sioux City, Iowa, who first turned him on to classical music. Though he lost touch with her long ago, the fixation has remained. “Every man needs something to amuse him. It’s an indulgence. I’m well off, and there are a lot of well-heeled people in the collecting biz. Besides, access to this stuff will all be over someday—it will all be collected. So we record collectors
are driven in a way that other collectors cannot be.” Having worked for a record label myself, I can see his point. I’ve seen piles of albums that were no longer selling get sliced down the middle and sent off to be used as landfill. My sympathies went out to the collectors who might have unknowingly driven right over the object of their search.
But the subject that gets him going is that of the vast, silver-circle conspiracy of the industry to replace his beloved vinyl with those cold, soulless CDs. In fact, the era that gave us compact discs, namely the past twenty years, can be written off in his book as well. “Modern recording studios are like intensive care units,” he says, the epigrams rolling off his tongue as if he’d been saving them for such an occasion. “Music is all about the groove, and you don’t find grooves on a CD. Give me the sound of old 78s over your tinkly LPs and edgy CDs—and I hope you’ll quote me on that,” he declares. To prove his point somewhat, he recalls a day at the studio he used to run, when his usual group of cohorts was spinning their vintage jazz vinyl. “Then this twenty-year-old kid came in, carrying a bag of CDs,” he recalls, a conspiratorial grin lighting up his eyes. “And he says to me, ‘Who told you records are better? I should know what’s best—I’m a junior at MIT! I am studying this stuff!’” Johnson rolls his eyes and rests his case: CDs must be bad if someone so unhip would swear by them.
A number of industry insiders would agree with Johnson, if not for the same reasons. Bob Irwin, for one, shares his target
audience’s love for vinyl. “For me it goes back to when I was five years old and started returning any soda bottle I could get my hands on, to get enough change to buy a 45 or an LP. Later on, when I had a job, I remember hitting every record store in a thirty-mile radius, getting those three-for-a-buck LPs. Anything that I heard about when I was a kid, I’d try to get my hands on. Getting a record was a wonderful thing, and it wasn’t just the music—it was the smell of it, the look of the inner sleeve. My CDs now live comfortably with my LPs. If we’re having a dinner party I can crank up the one hundred-CD changer. But when friends are over, I like nothing better than running back and forth from the shelves to the turntable.”
One of the most recent releases on Sundazed—a mono restoration of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home—is one that lives up to its title. The music itself can’t bring any revelations by now. Sure, it’s a classic, but it’s nearly forty years old, and most of us are probably as sick of the songs, at this point, as Dylan is. But, if you’re jaded enough to feel that way, you’re also old enough to get a cheap thrill when you pull the reissue out of the cover and see that old, salmon-red Columbia label again. The vinyl even clings to the inner sleeve as you draw it out for the first time—something that never happens again once you play the disc and its virginity is lost.
The folks at Sundazed have done their homework, finding the vaults the original masters were locked in, locating the negatives of the cover photo, and pressing it all on virgin vinyl (as opposed to the cheaper, recycled stuff). At the end of the day, it’s almost—but not quite—as good as the plain
old mono album that you could have bought at your neighborhood department store for three dollars the first time around. “If you’re lucky enough to have a 1-A pressing of the album, it was a truly wonderful record,” admits Sundazed owner Irwin. “They had the ears of everybody from Bob on down, listening and approving them, it was the way they wanted the record to sound. If you have the literal first pressing, it would sound awesome. But as we move away from the original lacquer, the experience gets lost.”
Bill Inglot makes his living preserving that experience. Working for Motown, Rhino, Atlantic, and many other labels, he’s been entrusted with creating the CD masters for some of the highest-regarded music of the vinyl era. His aesthetic is hard to pin down, but he’s got a definite sense of what sounds good. For certain records, including some ’60s soul classics, he’s certain that the mono versions sound better than the stereo ones, so he’s done his bit to keep those in circulation. Not everyone is convinced that the Supremes’s “Baby Love” sounds heavier in mono, but indeed it does. The clarity and presence he’s drawn out of the Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Everly Brothers catalogs—and for that matter, Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods’s Greatest Hits, which sounds far better than it even should—speaks for itself.
Simple as it seems, what he’s confirmed is something that every collector knows: those irrational, indefinable somethings that define your listening experience are precisely what it’s all about. If you think vinyl is warmer and more seductive, then you’re right. If you like CDs because they’re sharper (or at least, louder), then you’re right, too. So much
for the definitive arguments that got presented when CDs started wiping vinyl off the map, that their sound was inherently superior, that those digital bits could hold more and better information.
That’s not a claim to dismiss out of hand: listening to the new mastering that Inglot and Andrew Sandoval did of Elvis Costello’s This Years Model, I’m hearing a tambourine on the intro of “You Belong to Me” that was never there before—and I can finally hear the whole song with the ear-crushing volume I longed for when I was blasting the vinyl on my mid-’70s Magnavox stereo. However, a vinyl partisan would answer that the tambourine should have been mixed higher in the first place, that the vinyl album had more presence at any volume, and that I should have owned a better amplifier in the ’70s. Before we put the sex metaphor out of its misery, let’s just say that it’s a simple matter of whatever turns you on.
“There are bad CDs out there,” says Inglot. “And there are some I’ve been involved with that sound better than the original LP. That doesn’t mean we’re God, and it doesn’t mean the originals were crap. It does mean that technology can serve as well as brutalize music. There are certain things that vinyl can do better because of its limitations, which makes it more of an emotional listening experience. The physical limitations of dragging a rock along a dirt road [ie, running a chip of diamond over a plastic field at 33 rpm] can forgive a multitude of issues about how the music is recorded. It kind of mushes things just right.” And, he says, you can’t evaluate either without considering the subjective factors, like
the sentimental attachment to vinyl and the functionality of CDs. “When CDs came along, they freed us from our turntables. That doesn’t mean turntables don’t have their place, but so does all the information in the Word Book Encyclopedia. And if you’re going to the beach, which do you want to bring—that or a trashy Harold Robbins novel?”
So take note: here’s someone whose career has risen with the CD, who knows how many knobs and dials, how much smoke and mirrors it takes to turn out a compact disc, and he’s willing not only to admit that he listens to vinyl at home, but to compare the hot medium to trashy novels and safe sex. As for the question of whether CDs sound better than vinyl, the answer is: sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. There are just too many variables—how well the master tape has held up, whether the remastering engineer can get inside the original engineer’s head—to give either medium the objective upper hand.
Exactly what Inglot and his collaborators do in the studio has changed over the years. When CDs were young, he was into recreating exactly what was done in the studio twenty or thirty years earlier, which meant he went back to the original, unmixed, multitrack tapes that were spun in the studio and mixed them from scratch, trying to recreate exactly what the original producer had done, only allowing for the additional frequency response you’d get on a CD. One of my favorite results was “Walk Away Renee” by the Left Banke. It was also one of Inglot’s more heroic moments. While reconstructing the track, he and Sandoval figured out that the lead vocal had, in fact, been performed twice, and that the
original producer had cut and pasted from the two vocals, line by line. Such ventures gave him the power, to not quite change history, but to tweak it a little bit. He could decide that the strings in “Walk Away Renee” needed to be sharper, or to undo a particularly lame stereo mix (the original one for the Monkees’s “Pleasant Valley Sunday” was limp as it gets).
“Some people think I’m the devil,” he admits. “Just try going to a search engine and typing in ‘Bill Inglot sucks.’” I did, and could, in fact, find only three people who thought he sucked—all steamed over his decision to put mono mixes on a ’60s soul box. But he admits he’s less inclined to leave his own fingerprints on a record. “When I was younger and more immature, I probably wanted to remix the world, and that’s not a place that I really want to go anymore. A lot of times you get something that might be better, but it’s not quite the same. Even if it’s 1965 and you’re going in to mix ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ the day after it was recorded, something’s still changed since then.” For example, he recently restored some tracks by one of the trippiest ’60s bands, the Electric Prunes. When it came to that band’s greatest hit, whatever happened in the studio circa 1967—wild inspiration, really good acid, or dumb luck—proved impossible to figure out, much less duplicate. “You put up the multitracks of ‘I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night’—now that’s a four-track recording, it shouldn’t be brain surgery. But we could get no concept of how they got from point A to point B. You could spend years on it, and it’s still not gonna be right. Like most things people do, they didn’t put a lot of thought
into it. It could be serendipity, or it could be dust in the console.” He let the original mix stand.
His own feelings about vinyl are a bit conflicted, disdaining a preoccupation that he admits to sharing. “Vinyl is something we grew up with. You started with singles, and those were like training wheels, then you moved up to albums. If you skip down a generation or two, that feeling will probably vanish. As it is, I think nothing of forking out a couple hundred bucks for a rare LP, but I have a hard time paying more than retail for a rare CD. The real emotional experience is the music, but the vinyl is an emotional experience as well, there are very realistic, and somewhat subjective, rationales for it being a better medium. But when you get down to it, who cares? The patient has washed up on the beach here, and it’s not coming back. You can walk around thinking vinyl is better, but it’s like wanting your girlfriend from high school who is now married with three kids. You can only have a piece of your past for so long.”
Most vinyl lovers would agree that the format harks back to the past, but not everyone thinks there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, says Roger Manning. “I don’t necessarily advocate living in the past, but there’s a reason we do that—we’re not getting enough stimulus from what’s going on currently. People tend to forget what it was like to put on your headphones and go on a journey.” Manning has lately worked with a handful of very modern artists—playing keyboards for Beck and doing remixes for the French electronic band Air—and his love for vinyl has come into play there. “You go back to the recording equipment that was in vogue
during the ’70s, and the low-fi element of the scratched vinyl, and there’s good reason why that sound holds up in a club. It’s funny that because a lot of old jazz is being sampled now, you are finding a lot of young kids, a lot of scenesters and clubgoers, who are getting praise, laurels and dates with women because they listen to people like Herbie Hancock. In my day, listening to Herbie Hancock would have gotten you beaten up.”
Surprisingly enough, the most outspoken CD proponent I found was the hip-hop DJ Lucas MacFadden, a/k/a Cut Chemist, whose life and work are closely tied to vinyl. As a member of the underground hip-hop crew Jurassic 5, he’s found new angles for the use of scratches and samples as a field for rapping. Performing solo and in collaboration with DJ Shadow, he’s pioneered the turntable as an improvisational instrument in its own right. And he allows that love for vintage vinyl was one thing that initially drew him into the DJ world.
Like many in the hip-hop community, Chemist traces his own roots back to J.B.—but in his case that means James Bond, not James Brown. It was the style of those Bond soundtrack covers, with the pretty girls and the sleek ’60s lettering, that drew him in as a kid. “I didn’t give two shits about the music, but I started with From Russia With Love and wound up collecting them all. Those real seductive covers—everything had its own theme; I just kept going after them. That was my first real impulse, ‘I want to collect this, I want to have all of them.’ Even if I didn’t like the music,
they were still better than baseball cards because they at least had the music on them. They were something functional. I was never a big reader, never into sports, so my function of choice was getting those records. I think I stopped with Moonraker, because I was finally getting older and it was like, ‘Hold on, what am I doing?’”
By then the other J.B. had also come into play, thanks to a compilation album that bent a lot of ears in the ’80s. “The album, In the Jungle Groove—I heard that beat and I went out to find it. It was that one, ‘Little Miss Lover’ by Jimi Hendrix, and ‘Take Me to the Mardi Gras’ by Bob James, those were all on my first break tape. Doing the first tape was important, because I’d wanted to be Mr. DJ ever since I was eight years old and buying all those K-Tel compilation records.”
Today Chemist characterizes his collection as “Not many—just somewhere between ten and twenty thousand [a figure that few non-collectors would call”not many“]—but at least they’re all good.” And his approach to record-buying isn’t that different from what it was in the Bond days. “I don’t buy them to listen to, so much as I do because I like to look at ’em. I buy things for my collection when they have historical significance for me. I like buying funk 45s, old soul albums. I buy them to file, really. What I like to buy are things that I’ve never seen before, and there’s still tons of rap releases I haven’t seen. Those are hip, so it’s important to have those collected.”
His instincts as a DJ are considerably different, treating a record as a guitarist might think of a new set of strings. “You just look for textures, and that could be anything, it could be
a guitar stab. Drums are always the first thing you look for, and you go on from there. Vinyl sounds different, whether it’s a one hundred and fifty-gram record or one of those thin, old flexible ones. There’s different degrees of natural compression in there. I try to play different kinds of music next to each other, to show how they all relate, whether it’s a rock record or a drum-and-bass record. The manipulation of those sounds is important and that’s what hip-hop is about: taking something that exists and reinventing it. Scratching is like talking and the more music you have at your disposal, the more you can say. You want to talk, you want to be as articulate as you can be.”
That language inevitably comes down to his vinyl. “DJs are finding new ways to cope with digital technology, there are ways you can use MIDI and computer files to simulate a vinyl scratch. But when I see a DJ I want to see him pick up the needle and put it down on the vinyl—that’s half of what it is to be a DJ giving a performance. The way he manipulates the vinyl is a big part of the appeal.”
All of which would naturally lead to a speech about the superiority of vinyl, but for Chemist it’s quite the opposite. “We’re a digital generation, my friend, let’s face up to it. It’s true, there are certain tonalities of vinyl that digital technology can’t produce, but we’re getting away from it. Sure, I love records because I experienced the record in its heyday, there’s the smell of the paper and the pictures are bigger, with liner notes that you can read. But I think that if you take a ten-year-old kid that’s never seen a record before, that kid will like the CD more. It’s smaller and the kid will think
it looks cooler. Every generation has its medium for listening to music. For our parents’ generation it was vinyl. For us it’s CDs, and for the next it will probably be MP3s. In order for our society to evolve to where it has to go, we need to let go of the past, and vinyl is part of the past.”