In a departure from my usual insane written wanderings, usually involving killer ducks and custard or some other oddness, I present a heartfelt plea. A genuine story of loss and recovery, a metaphor for how growing up and growing older makes everything flatter, less sacred and mundane.
(TLDR) Vinyl records are great.
I write this with the sincere intention of restoring the love and soul in music for anyone who has lost it, or fears they might.
For those who have never experienced analogue formats, you should hear the difference.
I urge anyone who reads this to go back to analogue recordings, not necessarily for your primary listening habits, but for those recordings you love.
Those that speak to something within you.
Those that stir some internal mystical fluid inside you.
Listen to those recordings in an analogue format, preferably vinyl, and you will both hear and feel a whole new dimension to those recordings.
Keep a record player for those listening sessions that mean something. The ones you use to reset your soul when it has been tarnished by modern life.
The ones you use to disappear within and zero out consciousness for a brief, calm moment or two.
Listen to your digital platforms, your streaming services, by all means. But opt for a dual pronged attack. Use your digital formats like you would use a pair of comfortable shoes.
Everyday use.
Comfort and convenience over quality.
But keep an analogue system for Sunday best. For those deep times when you don’t want to just listen to music, you want to commune with the musical gods.
Keep an analogue format for the metaphorical equivalent of Auntie Sheila’s wedding or your best friend’s birthday party.
Special, sacred, beatified, hallowed.
The Journey. (A.K.A. A Really Long Story)
As a kid I loved to listen to my parent’s old records. This was how I first found my love of music and that was how I learned to listen to music.
I didn’t really care what the music was at that point. I had no taste, I had no loyalties. No idea of what was good or bad. No reference points.
I listened to all sorts of stuff. From my Dad’s Beatles, Kate Bush and Ennio Morricone records, to my Mum’s Elvis, ELO and Moody Blues.
I also loved the compilation albums the family owned such as ‘The Hits Album’ and ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ Volumes 1 and 2!
Good god, I’m old!
When I was a kid I loved Shakin’ Stevens and I refuse to apologise for that. I was a kid, what do you want? It was all music to me and it stirred something in me, deep down in my soul.
By contrast I am very proud to this day that the first album I bought through my own choice and with my own money was the Debut album by Iron Maiden: from Morrison’s supermarket in Stavely, Derbyshire.
I remember the day well.
I remember that evening sitting with my mouth open, reading the liner notes, turning that cassette over and over and playing it again and again even better.
It was like opening the front door and finding a whole new world had replaced my normal neighbourhood!
There’s a whole story about an advertisement for Lucozade starring Daley Thompson that is connected to that event, but I won’t bore with that. Instead, I will continue to bore you with this:
Cassette tapes came along and I spent my early teens acquiring a personal taste in music.
I spent many hours copying tapes borrowed from friends and libraries (as I am sure those of us that are old enough all did).
Using the library’s own photocopier to copy the cassette tapes inlay was probably pushing it a bit, but nobody seemed to care.
And now, those adverts about how home taping would kill music all seem a little pointless.
I created ‘mix tapes’, rearranged back catalogues in ‘favourites only’ mixes and ‘rarities’ collections of B-sides, bootlegs and live performances.
I decorated the cassettes themselves with pen and Tippex.
I made my own inlays to reflect the original compilations.
I became an expert at repairing damaged cassettes with nail scissors, sticky tape and patience.
I developed an almost mythical and legendary sense of knowing where specific songs were by looking at the little window in the cassette body.
And those rare occasions when I could afford to buy a six pack of chunky D-sized batteries and take my battered, old, Sanyo boom box out with me and listen to music with friends….ahh, the bliss of those memories.
Those days taught me the discipline and physical fortitude needed to rewind an entire C90 by spinning it around on a pencil. Skills that would later come in useful in no way whatsoever.
I still loved the music when cassettes took over, more than anything else at that point.
Music was God to me and however my God chose to communicate was more than acceptable.
But, there seemed to be something missing.
A small something it has to be said, but something.
I loved to visit my Dad and play his records on his old, clapped out Amstrad hi-fi system, mounted in an attractive wooden case with LP storage space underneath and a magnetic closured glass door.
Those records just seemed to have something extra. I didn’t care that I was listening to MARRS, Bucks Fizz and Rick Astley, I just loved the sound.
My young mind came to the conclusion that it was simply nostalgia. A yearning for a happy childhood I once had that was forever gone.
A few years later I came into possession of a record player of my own. I don’t even remember where it came from. It was possibly a hand-me-down from someone in my family but I don’t remember who.
It was a self-contained unit with crappy little speakers and was covered in that horrible plastic that covered everything in the late seventies. Pastel blue on the base and white on the top and it was rubbish. Nevertheless I used it almost every day!
I had a little double cassette player which I had hooked up to a bunch of speakers pulled from every piece of old, busted equipment I could get my hands on; old TVs, cars, old hi-fi’s; any piece of defunct equipment that had speakers in it and I was breaking it open and nicking the speakers.
I knew nothing of wattage and ohms at the time and just figured more is better, so I cracked open the rear of my ghetto blaster, stripped the internal wires and just grafted all these other speakers in, and you know, it worked great.
I had the world’s first 22 speaker, surround sound music system!
But every day, I would sit and think “Hmm…what shall I listen to?”
I would shun my, by this time, massive collection of cassette tapes filled with all my favourite music and put my one and only vinyl record on my knackered old record player. ‘Boy’s Don’t Cry’ by The Cure.
It has been played millions of times and I used to just keep flipping it over and playing it back to back. I didn’t really understand why, it just felt and sounded better.
It was by no means my favourite album, or my favourite band for that matter, it just sounded so good, even with that scratch 23 seconds into ‘Killing an Arab’
I had the same album on cassette, minus the scratch, but still chose the record.
To this day if I hear ‘Killing an Arab’ and I don’t hear the scratch, the song sounds like it is broken to me!
I gradually increased my record collection, spending hours on my knees at Hudson’s Music in the nearby town of Chesterfield. Hunting for cheap twelve inch singles and bargain albums from battered cardboard boxes under the stands.
I never really had many though, and, as I was limited by my meagre income, I didn’t have much to choose from. It was a case of whatever was cheap that I didn’t really dislike too much.
I used my little record player more and more.
Next came compact discs and I didn’t take to those nearly as fast as I had to cassette tapes, mainly because you couldn’t buy a bunch of blanks from the shop and copy stuff from your mates.
You had to buy the damn things and as a twelve year old with just a paper round, I couldn’t afford a single CD, never mind a CD player.
My older sister had received a new hi-fi for Christmas that year and I was blown away by the sound. I used to sneak into her bedroom when she was out just to listen to her hi-fi.
When she was in I would pester her all the time to come in and listen. Bless her, she used to let me too, on the basis that I sat in the corner and didn’t move or make any noise and I didn’t complain too much when her and her friends decided to slap me, throw things at my head or make me the butt of their jokes.
I didn’t care. I got to listen to that sound!
I loved that you could just skip from track to track at the push of a button without all that rewind and fast forward rubbish.
I thought the CD player sounded so much better than my tape deck and it became my number one desire to obtain the cash to buy a CD player and some CDs.
I didn’t really realise at the time that the reason my Sister’s hi-fi sounded so much better than my tape deck was because it was a decent hi-fi and not a cheap ‘Grundig’ double-cassette deck from Argos.
That and the fact that I had created some kind of evil, Frankenstein-esque mutation of a tape deck with my unknowledgeable tinkerings.
I stuck with the cassette tapes for many, many years and my friends and I convinced ourselves that CDs were no good.
We said that they were really expensive, they scratched really easily and they didn’t sound much better than tapes anyway.
I don’t recall, however, ever having a conversation like that while trying to pull stretched tape from a tangle in the wheels and cogs inside a cassette player while trying not to crinkle and snap the tape, nor while patiently sticking the two ends of a broken tape back together!
When I moved from England to Scotland, I left a lot of stuff behind. I had to travel light as I performed the move on a National Express coach with only what I could carry!
One of the things that I dumped was my trusty old record player. I took my ‘Boy’s Don’t Cry’ album but gave all my other vinyl records away. No idea who I gave them to now, or what happened to them all.
From that point I just listened to cassettes. The record player and the feelings it imparted straight to my soul, bypassing all mental function on the way, was forgotten.
My first proper job gave me the cash to finally buy a CD player and I became a CD listener. By this time the CD had been widely accepted and the prices of both discs and players had tumbled. Over the next few years I gradually replaced my entire cassette tape collection with CDs.
Eventually I ended up with a huge collection of CD’s and only a handful of cassette tapes. The remaining tapes lasted for quite a while and I only recently chucked them out, but not before snapping a couple of pictures of them for nostalgia’s sake.
They had been with me for many years and I couldn’t just throw them away without a keepsake! Call me sentimental if you like, I really don’t care!
I was a very early adopter of digital music files. I first started ripping my CD collection to my PC hard drive in around 1998, before anyone had even heard of an iPod.
Using the original Media Player included with Windows 98 to rip the CDs and using Winamp (it really whips the llama’s ass!) to play the ripped music files on my first PC, hooked up via a 5.1 surround sound card to a reasonably powerful Creative surround sound speaker system.
This set up quickly became my primary method of listening to music. It made music so easy. All your music at the click of a mouse, all painstakingly named and rated, shuffle modes and playlist creation, all the things that everybody today is so used to with iPods etc.
No getting up to change CDs.
No danger to life and limb when your three disc, multi-changer, stereo system decides to go absolutely mental, explode, and spit red hot, sharp and spiky fragments of three of your favourite CDs straight at you when you are just sitting there minding your own business!
That’s another story which I really don’t want to think about any more than necessary!
Apart from upgrades to the computer and hooking it up to a Technics amp and some simple, but large, wooden cabinet stereo speakers instead of surround speakers, that is how I enjoyed music for the next decade or so.
A few years ago I gave my entire CD collection of six hundred plus CDs to an animal charity. I figured that I had them all copied to my hard drive, they are just taking up space and gathering dust. Why not let someone get some use out of them.
Unbelievably, I started to lose interest in music!
It became less and less important to me. I didn’t feel the same emotions and vibrations from it as I used to.
I recall, many times in the past, simply listening to music.
Doing nothing else but listening.
Cranking the volume way up to eleven, closing my eyes and just drifting.
Carried away by the tapestry woven in, around and through the music.
That was all gone and it just did not have the same impact on me anymore.
I thought I had just gotten old.
That music and the insane and almost obsessive love of it was for the young and when you hit thirty, other things become far more important.
I looked back at the lengths I used to go to for music and thought I was a fool.
Like travelling from Bolsover to Nottingham, a fair distance, at the age of thirteen on the off chance I could find a copy of the one Red Hot Chili Pepper’s album I needed to complete my collection of their works – the buses and trains to get there and back cost five times what the album cost and that was the only reason for going.
Regularly completing an eight mile round trip on foot just to browse the music shop in the nearest big town to me.
I could have gone on the bus but if I walked I had more money to spend on CDs!
I didn’t even want anything specific; I just went for a look and hoped I would find something good.
As the number of times I have orbited that fiery ball of stuff we affectionately and laughably call THE Sun increases, a lot of things have happened which I would not have predicted in my youth.
I used to love football and now I don’t give a rat’s ass which team won the league or which player went where.
I have since come to the understanding that I was never that big a fan of football in the first place. I was, however, a big fan of drinking heavily with my mates and a footy match gave us the excuse to do it.
I used to hate tomatoes, peas and strawberries with a passion and now I can’t get enough of them.
I used to like playing video games and now I have a playstation primarily to watch DVDs and stream video from the interwebs.
If all that, and more, is true then it makes sense that the same can happen to my love of music?
I used to love music and now I don’t. Sad but true.
Don’t get me wrong, I always listened to music, even when it became less important to me. It just became one of those things that are simply and literally background noise.
It became just something to drown out the deafening silence of the universe; something to keep me company.
It became just something that happened, not really vital to whatever I was doing at the time.
Just another noise amongst many in social situations.
I would put my favourite music on at home but not really listen to it. I started to have no real preference as to what music to listen to.
I would boot my PC up, start-up Winamp and hit ‘shuffle’.
And that was it.
Then, purely by chance, I was rooting around in a box of old stuff in the attic and there it was.
A dusty, worn, battered square looking back at me from under a Bart Simpson alarm clock and a flat basketball:
‘Boys Don’t Cry’ by The Cure, on vinyl.
Of course I had heard, many times, the old argument that has been going on since the dawn of CDs and MP3 as the dominant formats of music.
Thousands, nay millions, of audiophiles on internet forums and message boards debating the sound quality of vinyl records versus digital files.
I had read the scientific reasoning on both sides about bit rates, sound dynamics, the loudness wars, sound warmth et al.
For a while I had wanted to try out it out for myself in some kind of blind test.
Mainly due to nagging, strangely resilient memories of playing records on my old blue and white record player or my Dad’s knackered old Amstrad and there being…something…there.
Something imperceptible and defying explanation; was it nostalgia of times long gone or simply rose tinted glasses?
I decided now was the time to find out.
I hot-footed it to my nearest Cash Convertors (or pawn shop for non-Brits – those purveyors of other people’s misery and bad luck).
I found a little, self-contained, ‘Steepletone’ record player with a huge price tag of £10! I bought it and headed home.
Once home, the ‘Steepletone’ was unpacked and set up on my living room coffee table and ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ was dusted off and laid on the platter.
Stylus touched plastic and I was somewhere else instantaneously.
This was what music used to sound like!
This was what was missing!
I didn’t fall out of love with music at all!
Here it was the whole time, hiding in the grooves of an old piece of vinyl!
Even with the absolutely useless ‘Steepletone’ record player, with its tiny and tinny 4w speakers, there was something there, something different.
‘Boys Don’t Cry’ had remained a mainstay in my music collection through both CDs and digital files and I had listened to it in those formats many times.
But this was not the same music; this was…alive.
I heard frequencies and subtle tones in the songs that I had not heard for years.
I remembered them as soon as I heard the vinyl again but I had not heard them since the last time I span the black circle, currently revolving at thirty three and a third revolutions a minute before me, all those years ago.
It is not an overstatement to say I was aghast and shocked. I immediately hooked my iPod up to the auxiliary inputs on my surround sound system and played the same song I had just listened to on the vinyl copy.
I thought that there couldn’t be that much difference and it was in my imagination.
But there was the proof: cold and lifeless.
The same song but not the same song at all.
Like a copy of a copy of a copy.
Like a fax of a photocopied document.
Washed out, soul-less and simply missing something.
Over the next few weeks I tried a lot of different experiments.
I borrowed or bought records from other people’s dusty, attic-bound boxes and played them against their digital counterparts and time after time I got the same result.
The digital files were somehow less than the vinyl recordings of the same music.
I tried higher bit-rate digital files.
I tried different computers with different specifications and different sound cards.
I tried different media players and software.
I tried hooking the computer and the record player to the same amp and speakers.
I tried cassette tapes, CDs and MiniDiscs and still the same result.
Something lost and something lacking.
I will admit that I found variations in the difference between different digital formats and vinyl but that difference, be it large or small, is always there.
CDs and MiniDiscs (depending on the original source) are the best of the digital reproductions but they still lack something indefinable compared to vinyl.
FLAC and lossless digital files are next. Really high bit rate files follow those and low bit rate MP3 and WMA, like the ones on your iPods and most streaming services, are the worst of the bunch.
I can’t tell you what it is that makes listening to vinyl so much more intense, pleasurable and moving.
Shakespeare himself could wax lyrical for days on end and still fail to select the right words.
We could debate all day and night about the technical arguments.
All I can say is that listening to vinyl again re-ignited my love for music.
I felt like a teenager once more, discovering all those great artists and tracks. I felt like I was hearing music for the first time.
I upgraded my kit a little and from that point on listening to music was simply sublime.
I know audiophiles will say that you need to spend lots of money on equipment, and while that would be nice, you know, if we were all millionaires with nothing else to spend money on, I believe you do not need to spend much to get a decent system that sounds fantastic.
The total cost of my basic setup, not counting a thirty year old amp and speakers, was about £80.
I know buying an amp and speakers would increase that cost but, with the right cable, you could hook up a record player to your iPod dock, your existing hi-fi, your DVD/BD player or even your TV.
Buy a record player with a built in pre-amp and you can just plug a pair of earphones into the output and listen to it that way.
I know records are not readily available.
I know new vinyl records are really expensive (but just the fact that vinyl is becoming easier to get hold of backs up my point somewhat).
I know these things but I believe it is worth the effort and expense.
Second hand shops usually have a bunch of old vinyl records for £1 a pop. Relatives and friends may have some stashed in their attics that you can buy for pennies.
And that ubiquitous online auction site, eBay, has hundreds and hundreds for sale at reasonable prices.
An added and somewhat surprising benefit to this for me is I found lots of new music that I have never heard before and now I really like; artists and bands that I would not have looked at twice on the Spotify app.
I heard albums that I count amongst my favourites that I have only heard because I bought a mystery box of records from eBay that was simply listed as ‘box of 30 LPs, mainly rock, some other’.
Sometimes with vinyl you can only buy what there is available and, without buying expensive used records from online stores, the choice is not great. But go in with an open mind and you can really expand your musical horizons.
I never thought I would see the day when I would be listening to blues records from the ‘50s, but as Howlin’ Wolf himself sang “The blues had a baby and they called it rock n’ roll”.
It makes sense to me that, given my personal preference of rock and metal, I would like the blues too.
To totally misquote the Bible: blues begat rock n’ roll, rock n’ roll begat rock and rock begat metal.
My current appreciation of Tracy Chapman, early Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, a multitude of 70’s progressive rock bands, Mike Oldfield and CCR, to name but a few, stems from serendipitous finds in dusty, unwanted boxes of vinyl LPs purchased from eBay for a tenner!
I realise that I really didn’t need to write my life story here.
That all I really had to say was ‘try listening to vinyl, it’s great’ but I felt some background to my circuitous journey from vinyl back to vinyl would lend credence to my opinion.
If you have read all this, I thank you and I apologise for my verbosity and vociferousness.
I would also ask you why you read all this? Have you got nothing better to do?
In any case, you are here now and I will end with this plea: Please try it.
If you have any love of music at all, please, please give it a go. You will thank me for it.
I know there are downfalls with vinyl.
They hiss and pop sometimes.
There are sometimes scratches.
They attract dust.
They are hard to store.
But a lot of these negatives are not as bad as they sound and nowhere near as bad as the record companies and electronics giants would have you believe. Think about it. If you were trying to sell a new musical format, do you think their first step would not be to try to discredit the old and emphasise the benefits of the new?
Vinyl is definitely not as convenient, and absolutely not as mobile, as iPods and CDs, but I am not talking about replacing the modern formats with vinyl records.
Keep your iPods and CDs; they are great at what they do up to a point. If you want infinite playlists and portable music or the ability to access a list of all your favourite songs, then use your existing setup.
Hell, stick some 92kbps files on an SD card and whack that in your car stereo if you want.
If, however, you want to sit and listen to music and really feel it in your soul, really absorb it and be lost in the currents flowing from it, put a record on.
I listen to music now through Spotify and a sound bar hooked up to my TV, it’s not ideal, but it’s also not through choice.
My fairly recent relocation to Australia with literally only what I could physically carry forced me to leave a lot of stuff behind. My equipment and my record collection was one of the first things on the list. I couldn’t possibly have brought all that with me.
I have all my digital files on an external hard drive and my secondary phone whose only job is a portable music player.
But before this relocation forced me to start from scratch, I had re-purchased a bunch of my favourite CDs and built a hefty collection of MiniDiscs.
(As a digital format, Sony’s ATRAC system is easily superior to MP3, FLAC or any other system – it’s such a shame it died)
I am not saying that digital music is the enemy. It’s not the villain. It just has it’s place.
Soon, I will buy more equipment and rebuild my vinyl collection. I have to.
And the thing that really illustrates my point, is the fact that, given the choice, I would always put a record on.
It made that much difference to me.
Even if I did not have access to my favourite songs on vinyl, I would make the choice to listen to something I like on vinyl rather than something I absolutely love in a digital format!
If you wanted to see a band or an artist live you would go to a concert.
You would stand in the crowd in front of huge speakers that make your hair stand on end and your fillings rattle.
You wouldn’t put a glass to the wall outside the stadium and listen to it from there would you?
Digital lets you hear music. Vinyl lets you feel it.
Some Musings on Vinyl Reverence.
- Putting a record on is an act of reverence. You are paying homage to the music. You are respecting the music. You are saying ‘I like this music so much that I will take extra steps to listen to it, I will devote more time to it and because of that I will take more time to listen to it’. It is like a Chinese Tea Ceremony compared to dumping a tea bag in a chipped, enamel mug.
- Records just look good, spinning around like that. All glossy and shiny.
- As the running time of a record is just thirty minutes or so and then it will need more of your attention, to either put it away or turn to side two. Given this, you are more likely to sit and just listen to it. You are less likely to wander off and wash the car and never listen to the music. Doing this sort of thing makes the music sad.
- Records are great because it is impossible to figure out how they work! How does that music come off that bit of plastic! It’s witchcraft surely. Turn all the electricity off, place the stylus on the record and spin it with you finger and you can still hear the music, albeit very quietly! How is that possible?
- Records take up a lot of space. By having a record collection you are making a statement to the world. ‘I love music so much that I am prepared to devote a large portion of my personal space to it’.
- You can spin a record backwards and hear secret messages from some other plane of reality.
- Records come complete with twelve inch pieces of art that you can engross yourself in while listening to the musical goodness contained within that shiny, black sheet.
- Records often have lyric sheets included so you can sing along with the right words and not just what they sound like. (Such as with Hendrix’s Purple Haze: ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy!).
- When the little bit of metal scrapes the music off the record, how is the music still on there!!?
- Not specific to vinyl records but to albums. You should listen to an album in the order the artist intended it to be heard in. The artist spent a lot of time organising the tracks into the order they are presented in on the album, the least you can do is listen to them in the right order. Albums are also a snapshot of an artist at a specific time. The songs on an album complement, contrast and reinforce each other. An album played in its entirety is a story. Digital shuffle mode is the Devil’s work!
- In a tight spot you can use a record to decapitate a zombie (I would suggest anything by The Mavericks or Toploader if possible, as they don’t deserve to exist). You can’t do that with an app!
