
Irregular Writings
October 2013
The Age of Vinyl
Every other month there’s a story in a paper somewhere about the return of vinyl and how it’s all cool and cute and the music business is saved. I went into a record store in the city and the BEATLES had just had some of their catalogue released on high quality heavy vinyl. (I don’t know why, but modern vinyl is sold in weighted terms.) The proprietor said it was hard to keep up with the demand, and it was mainly younger people in their 20s doing all the purchasing. The vinyl albums were going for $50 and upwards. I get the impression; most people buy the vinyl and download the music to listen to. The album is an object.
I must say, I have a LOT of vinyl. But it’s all stuff from the Age of Vinyl. I like to listen to stuff made for that technology within that technology. The late and much missed Lux Interior had a room of the house he shared with Poison Ivy devoted to their 78 record collection. It was for listening to 78s – on their 78 player. That’s what the music was meant to be heard on.
I bought some vinyl new in a shop in the UK in the mid 90s. It was a time of great creativity in hip hop and drum and bass music and a lot of it was issued on vinyl. Of course, in the UK and Europe, they had never wholesale deserted the whole idea of vinyl as they seemed to do in Australia sometime in the late 1980s. Here, seemingly overnight, all the record shops remodelled for CDs only and got rid of their record bins altogether.
Australians embrace new technology very quickly. Of course, all the vinyl record pressing plants slowly disappeared as well as the skills for mastering and cutting the original plates from which all the vinyl copies would be stamped. It was another level of sound artistry that couldn’t really be recovered. Very mechanical as opposed to making perfect digital copies – very human and delicate. The arm which held the record playing stylus, for instance, is pulled down with more force at the edge of a 12” vinyl album that at the centre. So the music had to be a little less in volume at the outer edge. Records cut in the age of vinyl were recorded with frequencies boosted to sit strongly within the hollow ambience of the barely detectable sound of the needle carving its way through the groove. In the early days of the CD, a lot of old time rock ‘n’ roll records sounded flat and unexciting or all wrong when laid bare within the new digital space. They had to master them again to get that old groove back around the songs. And they did just that.
See, it’s all subjective in the end with music. With this vinyl fetish, you could actually see it as a positive thing. For me, being a musician in 2013, it’s really more of a sad final joke upon us all. I mean, us the players. Might as well make tea cosies or branded condoms as manufacture vinyl albums. They’re expensive to make. They’re bulky. And hardly anybody in Australia knows how to make them anymore. Like most things, they’re manufactured elsewhere and brought back here.
I knew a world when there was only vinyl. I went to a plant in Adelaide in 1979 to watch the first record I appeared on get stamped. It was like being in a bakery. The record was a 7” single and we asked for pink vinyl. The man was taking dobs of molten vinyl, shoving it on a plate and it was getting stamped, with the paper circle in the middle, which had been baked to get rid of all moisture.
I went to the same sort of place in London in the 80s. The cutting engineers scratched their names or little private messages into the vinyl at the centre of the record. You got a test pressing and you’d play it on your old machine or go to a friend’s place to compare. Nothing ever sounded as good as it did in the studio the last time you heard it through those big, deluxe speakers.
With CDs, it was all perfect. No test pressings really needed. It was done. You could go into the mastering suite and walk out with a CD to do with what you liked. No further process of mechanical manufacture to contend with. No other variables.
Now, if you’re a musician, you can record track, master it and upload it immediately to a site where people can access it straight away. No record company, no management, and no filters at all involved. Why the hell would you want to go back to the age of vinyl?
To be continued…