Reasons I listen to vinyl and why you may want to also

 Reasons I listen to Vinyl

and why you may want to also

By:Joshua Voshell

Edited By: Devin Heck

  Over the last few years, vinyl records have emerged back into popularity. Known also as ‘LPs,’ vinyl are now more available than they have been since CDs replaced them as the popular medium for storing music. I have been collecting LPs for a few years, and considering how popular records are now, I would like to share my particular reasons for having this hobby. It is a reasonable question to ask why, with internet radio, digital distributors like iTunes and Amazon music store, or easily accessible physical mediums such as CDs, would someone want to use LPs. What sets vinyl records apart is the unique experience they offer as well as their historical value.

Records are big, fragile, and listening to them can be rather tricky. They skip, scratch easily, and require being flipped because each side is not long enough to hold an entire album. I think that these flaws are both what caused CDs to replace LPs as the most popular music storage medium, and are also part of the reason they have enjoyed such a resurgence in recent years. Most people, like myself, are not able to distinguish between the quality offered by vinyl records and that of CDs. If sound quality was the decisive factor, CDs would not have eclipsed LPs in the 90s. So, although I am sure LPs offer higher quality sound, it is not what I like about them. To better understand how clunky LPs are, I will go over how they work. Now, I'm not an expert on how LPs work- and if you are, that’s awesome- but I want to get across the basics because it is central to understanding my position.

Turntables use a needle attached to an arm to reproduce the sound recorded on the discs. Both sides of an LP have grooves cut into them in tight spirals. Placing the disc on the turntable and setting the arm on the outer edge of the album aligns the needle to the grooves. While the record spins, the needle follows the grooves cut into the album. The music has been imprinted in these grooves, and as the needle passes over them, the process creates vibrations. These vibrations are then amplified by a transistor and sent out by the turntable to the speakers. Vibrations are frequencies, and what the eardrum is able to detect is only a fraction of the frequency spectrum of sound. During the mechanical process of the needle moving through the groves of a record, the needle will pick up the frequencies that have been imprinted in the grooves of the album. This is how a turntable reproduces music. What is really neat is that you can actually hear the LP being played right on the turntable.

Now this process is very delicate, as you can imagine, because what’s happening is that whatever sound is being picked up by the arm of the turntable will be transmitted to your sound system. That means the environment a turntable is in can easily affect what sounds are being produced. For the most accurate reproduction, you need to be in a very stable environment, otherwise the needle will be affected.  For example, sometimes when I walk by my turntable, it skips because the vibrations I make while walking by cause the needle to jump. Vibrations from activities in the turntable’s environment can also cause the sound to be distorted because they move the needle. Aside from the environment, other factors degrade the sound quality produced by the turntable. Scratches and overall degradation of a disc will permanently corrupt the sound recorded on the record. Over time, simply playing an album will degrade its sound quality, not to mention all the other damage that can happen to them if you are not careful. I have the album God Bless Tiny Tim, and it is covered with small scratches. None of them make it skip, however; the small scratches covering its surface simply come through as that classic crackling noise often associated with LPs. In my opinion, this degradation helps make my album more enjoyable and nostalgic, prompting thoughts of yesteryear.  It’s likely the crackling sound is more notable because before vinyl was used for making records, people used harsher materials that could not be smoothed out as much as vinyl, and as such these older discs the crackling noise was always present. That material was replaced by vinyl precisely because vinyl didn't do that due to being smoother. My idea of the cracking sound being nostalgic comes from these old types of records, and not the more modern LPs that I actually listen to and am writing my paper about. Regardless of where the idea originated from, it is here, and listening to an album through fuzz is like listening to music through the veil of time. I do have a few albums that do have scratches that cause them to skip while being played. While playing these albums, I simply lift the arm with the lever and then nudge it just past the scratch.

It is also important to handle LPs carefully, because you can easily scratch up an album. Big scratches on an album will cause an album to loop and will require you to fix the problem by either shaking the needle out of a groove or using the lever to skip over the scratch. This means that stomping on the ground or tapping on the turntable can get your album to stop skipping, but may not be the best way to go about it, as it is likely to further degrade the albums quality.

So you may be wondering why I consider these things to be strengths of the medium. From my point of view, it’s all about the interaction with the medium. You need to be more careful with LPs than MP3 or CDs. You have to pay attention to the music being played, or it may start skipping and not stop. You also have to be mindful because vinyl have their music recorded on both sides, rather than a single one. Playing a record requires your attention and respect. Listening to LPs is an engaging experience because it is your job to keep the record from skipping, to flip it over when one side is done, and to pick a new album out when one is finished. Vinyl records also demand respect, in that if you do not treat a vinyl properly, it will end up being unlistenable. Respect and engagement are central to what makes listening to vinyl records an experience beyond just listening to music.

Having a record collection is essential to the listening experience. This is because having a library of LPs to look through adds to the overall experience of LPs. With a library, you have the opportunity to search through different albums and pick one that you are most interested in hearing. When you only own a few albums to choose from, the decision of what to listen to on your turntable is almost automatic. You could end up just listening to a couple albums over and over, causing the music to become stale and old. If you are like me, then you may tend to listen to music while you do stuff around the house and as such, tend to have your music playing for at least a couple of hours at a time. This means that when I listen to music, I am constantly flipping and changing LPs. The music I end up playing becomes very reflective of my mood. This is possible because at the moment, my collection sits at just shy of one hundred albums. The variety contained within my collection is enough that I can listen to a few hours of music in a variety of moods and not have to repeat albums or play music I am not in the mood to listen to. When I choose the next album, I make a point not to repeat any- something I used to do growing up. I would put a CD on and listen to it over and over, until I knew it by heart. Since I do not listen to my records like this, they remain fresher for longer. One of the goals I have had while building my collection is to find music I am unfamiliar with, so that I can broaden my musical tastes. This means buying music I have never heard before so that I can experience the joy of discovering new music.

My collection of albums spans many decades and genres. Each album is unique: some have fantastic art, some have complicated covers, but all of them hint at the music that lay within. Looking through my collection is like looking through time. While looking through my collection I might say to myself, ‘Here we have The Ink Spots, here we have the soundtrack to Woodstock, here is a copy of Operation Ivy.’ Each album is a time capsule containing a piece of its culture. My Woodstock album was recorded at Woodstock and is not a reprint. When I put the album on, I think about the journey that album has gone on, who else may have listened to it, and when and where. Inside of my album is an article about Woodstock. It was published in the Milwaukee Journal in 1984, and talks about how the town of Woodstock is generally opposed to its historical society, placing a commemorative marker on the site of the legendary concert. The fact that the newspaper inside the album and the city I picked it up in were both the same place makes me nostalgic. I think about how the album was probably sold in Milwaukee shortly after 1970 and stayed there until I picked it up and took it home with me in 2014. Knowing most of my albums had a past before I owned them gives me something to think about while choosing an album from my selection to play.

To build a record library of your own does not require you to spend a lot of money. Many places, such a Half Price Books, sell used records for cheap. I have been able to pick up quite a few good albums there for only a dollar each. Sometimes they have specials that allow you to buy albums for as little as fifty cents. Albums there are split into selections of higher and lower prices. There are more cheap albums, but they aren’t organized in any way, so you will have to hunt through to find something you might want. I personally like this, because it seems like there could be anything down there. Most record stores follow this sort of paradigm. Old, less sellable stuff on the bottom shelves near the floor are usually unorganized but cheaper. The newer, more well-known or sellable stuff is priced higher and placed on the top shelves, so they are easier to look at and they are better organized. It seems to me that you will find old LPs more often and for cheaper than old CDs.  If you want to start listening to records, I recommend building a collection and only buying cheap albums to begin with, because it forces you to pick up new music and really helps you to get into the hobby. If you start collecting and then find out you don't like it all that much, you are not as heavily invested.

I personally started with the mindset that I should only get cheap used albums. Not having grown up with a very wide exposure to music, building a collection with the qualification that the albums I choose must be cheap has forced me to be exposed to new musicians I would not have otherwise been exposed to. I like to consider the dollar I often spend on an album to be a gamble- I may get an album I really like, or something awful. With the price being so low, the gamble I make is always worth it. I also buy albums based on the cover art. One of the first albums I bought this way was The New Vaudeville Band’s album Winchester Cathedral. I picked it up because I thought it looked super silly and reeked of the sixties and it did not disappoint. Having to build my collection by buying albums I am unfamiliar with has given me a better appreciation for music.

Another factor that I think gives LPs the upper hand is how long lasting they are. The LP was first introduced in 1948, meaning that when you are looking through used albums at a shop, you have so much more variety to choose from compared to CDs, which have only been available since 1982. Let's use my collection to see how time factors in. From what I can tell, my oldest album is Marty Robbins’ album Gunfighter Ballads, released in 1959, and my newest seems to be a re-released version of the Smiths’ album, Hatful Hallows, that came out in 2012. Technically, my newest album is Total Clarity, released in 2011 by Against Me!. So within my small collection, I have albums that span from 1960 to 2012. When I play Night Ranger’s album Midnight Madness or The Lovin' Spoonful album The Best of the Lovin' Spoonful, Vol. 2, I'm listening to rock from 1983 and 1969 and able to hear the distinct difference between how those two genres were thought of during those time periods. Another added bonus is that while listening to these discs, I enjoy knowing I am listening to the very discs that were being played back in the 80’s and early 70’s.

        Another thing that I think albums have going for them is that they are works of art. Unlike CDs, they are rather big come in a variety of covers and age, similar to books. Firstly, due to the size of the record, their covers are a better platform for artwork. Because they are bigger, the artwork can be far more intricate and might be better appreciated. It seems that people might not look at the cover of a CD much. Since they are portable people often end up listening to CDs in their cars and do away with the cumbersome jewel cases in favor of CD wallets. Digital mediums have relegated album art to advertising and icons; while listening to music, you rarely see the artwork at all, and when you do, it’s too small to really be appreciated. The covers of LPs are mostly uniform, but not as much as CD cases. Album covers are mostly made of cardboard, but vary depending on what the artists were trying to do with them. Covers can come with no opening flaps, with one, and sometimes even two. Some come with extras that can be pulled out, such as Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick, which comes as a multi-paged newspaper. I have some multi disc sets that come in nicely designed boxes. All of them look good on the shelves, even the more unusual album covers, like the one for Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s album Brain Salad Surgery. This cover interestingly opens up with two flaps on either side that come together in the center of the jacket to create a sort of puzzle piece design. The art underneath these flaps is a metal casing, with the shape of a skull just above a circle depicting a lower portion of a face. When you open the jacket, the full face is revealed, implying that this album has something to do with the inner self. The album is quite unique, but because all the covers are roughly the same length and height when together, they have a similar uniformed look to that of books on a shelf, each spine showing just enough color and size variance to be seen as a collection of individuals and not a collection of all identical units. Also similar to books, the covers of albums acquire that majestic smell of age. I am a big fan of the smell of old books and comics. To me, it is the smell of vintage, the smell of the past.

        Vinyl records have something unique to offer that other music mediums do not. Each album is a piece of art, not only because of their covers, but also in the design of the package and disc. Each album is a time capsule holding, art, music, and design that allows you to tap into the time they were printed. Playing a record is more than listening to music, it is an experience. Starting with choosing a record from a selection of albums you hunted around for, and then playing the album and all that is entailed with keeping it playing. I personally have a nice sound system that fills my whole apartment with music, and I burn incense as well- I noticed that most record shops smell strongly of it, and so I began associating the smell of it with LPs and burning it in my own home. The result is a unique atmosphere and a whole experience that engages all my senses, and I think this is what lies at the heart of what I like about listening to vinyl.