Go Analog Baby
Posted by grindz145 on January 09 2009 11:34:40
Have you re-purchased all of your music on vinyl yet? Why not? It seems to me to be the next in the evolution of music medium. In my generation, first we had tapes, then cd's/mini disks, DAT, and of course the MP3 player. But all of these are inferior to the new medium, made out of space-age plastics, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, known as the record. I am not usually in to ranting, but this is totally worth ranting about.
Its true, if you throw that kind of blue record on it might very well sound excellent. In fact for decades before any other technology was available people enjoyed music just as much as they do today on a pieces of bumpy vinyl. Because of this, there is a great heritage of sitting near the phonograph and no doubt a great deal of basements filled with heavy, dusty boxes all amounting to about an ipod shuffle worth of tunes...
Every hipster this side of brookyln (and the other side for that matter) will profess to you the reason for the resurgence is the sound: the music just sounds better.
Reality check: the audio reproduced using vinyl, even on the newest turntables lack frequency response. You can always get more data using a CD or MP3. In fact, you can get any frequency response you could ever imagine using digital means. You can in fact, re-create vinyl recordings, in perfect likeness, using digital means. Then what the hell is everyone smoking?
First problem, the speakers most of us have now grown accustomed to are no bigger than your pinky, and are usually much smaller. This is partially because the digital music revolution has made it so easy for music to be portable. We then like to have earbuds (or laptop speakers or desktop speakers or even crappy new home theatre speakers) to take along with us. Fair enough, lets all go out and buy a solid pair of (pick your favorite high end brand) for 100 bucks and start enjoying music again. Well there is a problem here too because now even though the digital storage medium is inferior, music is more and more being created to sound good on these tiny, worthless, audio reproduction devices. To prove this is the case, take out a cd of your favorite band from 10 or more years ago, say 1995 or earlier if possible. I don't even care what genre, and play it in a pair of headphones which cost you a little bit more than a DRM protected itunes track. Now switch over to something released last month and white ear jerkers. The difference, across the board, is putting glasses on a person who has been slowly going blind for the past decade and a half.
People also seem to like to have something tangible with their music. Who can blame them? Even I can't argue that a big old piece of album artwork is so much more to attach to than a cd liner note or worse yet, a 23 pixel ipod album image. I am not proposing a solution to this problem, only suggesting that buying music for the art it comes with makes as much sense as buying a refrigerator for the eggs inside (on second though mmm eggs...)
What about a musician, who loves his or her vintage analog synth pedal or tube amplifier. Thats great, honestly, if it sounds good I can't argue with that. However, chances are there is something better. We were lucking to end up with tubes in the 1950's that had a natural frequency response which worked well for the application. The fact of the matter is, today we could build an identical amplifier that is 1/8 the size and sounds better. How? Without getting too technical, we could use modern amplifier types, and digital processing, to get EXACTLY the right sound.
Which brings me to the single fundamental problem with musicians (and by proxy the listeners of); the lack of utilization of new tools. In my personal opinion, a very few number of electron artists are exempt from this. However, most people simple cannot handle a pallet this big. With the technology we have today, you can make something sound ANY way you want. Thats too many choices for most people it seems. Instead of turning the "tone" knob on the amplifier, there might be 4000 settings which can be manipulated. This is a problem for an artist who is used to a canvas which is 14x16 and uses only 4 colors of paint. It however, is not a problem for the artist who uses a landscape as his canvas, and every color experienced by man in their paint set. I know this is a daunting task at first but so ridiculously few are up to the task that it is depressing. We need to dump this lazy pro-tools culture that leads us to music that sounds so bad, we would rather listen to it on a record player.
I could probably right a book on this subject and I don't know much about it at all, but what I am saying is, learn to use the technology, don't go back into the cave, burn your fucking vinyl, but give the Album art to me because they pwn...
what can I say? I am a wanna be hipster in the end...