I rarely play my vinyl versions (though I DO have a record player!). I just like having them because it’s a way for me to feel like I actually own that music, forever. Streaming licenses can be revoked/changed/cancelled. It’s in the TOS. No license BS will ever take away my LPs. 🙂
One of the archivists I worked under pointed out that vinyl and shellac records (and similar) can be played without electricity. Magnetic tapes and all digital media are useless without it. She likes to think in the far long-term, ha ha!
I bought a record player for the first time in my life a couple months back because I decided I wanted to purchase As It ever Was... on vinyl (and I couldn't fathom purchasing it and not actually playing the physical thing - who ARE those people?). Since, I've amassed a small collection, and the thing I've been most surprised about has been the feeling of being so much more INTENTIONAL with my listening at home.
I love a good, endless playlist of things The Algorithm thinks I'll certainly be into, but there is also some real joy in slowing down. Playing a board game and realizing I need to flip a record. Helps me stay in the present. It has been a nice change of pace, at least on occasion.
I like how the music mediums create joy in different ways. Vinyl: my friends can flip through my records, we talk about them. My favorite chef has his six favorite records mounted on the wall in his restaurant. Digital: I can send you a playlist! We can make a playlist together! I have a friend that makes mixes on cassettes and lovingly designs the J cards and they are beautiful!
The exploded edition of IBYG is an amazing example where so much care and delight and joy was put into a physical object (I got this recently and I was giggling like Ron Swanson at a steakhouse). With digital media I can go on a beautiful walk to my own personal soundtrack. It’s just all quite amazing what we have available to us and the different kinds of joy that they afford. On the flip side there are disappointments (like your RSD example). As a consumer it’s good to reflect on why I want to buy a vinyl record. Yeah, it’s not just better. I just really like talking to the folks at the record shop :D
I play my records all the time and I’ll never stop collecting them. It’s like prefering the slow food movement over fast food. It makes you slow down and listen to the whole thing. And I appreciate good craftsmanship so don’t stop worrying over design.
You write about mastering engineers, which is why I wish you could have had someone like Bernie Grundman, Kevin Gray or Chris Bellman master the recent Decemberists lp.
Sadly I found the recent album a hit muddy on my lp, stream and cd.
You are right, vinyl isn’t the end all be all, but it can— if properly done- best other formats. It’s all in the mastering, recording, your system and - of course for an album- the way it is pressed.
Have your albums pressed at RTI, QRP, Gotta Grover, Optimal, or the Paramount Pressing in Denver (run by the old QRP folks).
Listen to all of Gillian Welch’s albums on vinyl— they sound amazing and I haven’t found any other medium besting it.
I buy vinyl because I believe it sends money to the artists whose music I enjoy. I prefer to buy vinyl from the artist's site or Bandcamp (or even at the 40+ live shows I go to on average every year) because when I buy from those sources, I think a tiny bit larger share of my vinyl purchase money heads your way. So again, you raise some great points, but some of us buy records not because they are beautiful, have amazing packaging, or even because we want the vinyl sound experience -- we buy records to help fund the artist whose art is so deeply meaningful to us.
Colin, I’d love to do an interview with you about vinyl and the Decemberists for my vinyl column. I’m coming to visit Boulder next month and am seeing you guys in Denver when I visit my daughter. You may remember us from about 7 years ago when we ran in to you and Carson at Powell’s Books. We visited Portland largely because of my daughter’s and my love of the band. It was amazing that we actually got to meet you and it’s been one of the high points of my daughter’s life. You both were so kind to my daughter and autographed her book and a drawing for her (and even took photos together). Cheers from El Paso!
Hi Colin, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I’d love to do a quick interview with you about vinyl. I’ll be visiting my daughter in July to see you guys in Denver. Here’s a copy of my most recent column. It’s about a lot more than records. You might see a few familiar faces! www.elpasoinc.com/tncms/asset/editorial/357b65d4-2fa4-11ef-8792-cb331c7cae0c
As a GenX music lover whose parents ran an indie record store in the late 70s into the late 80s, I witnessed the slow decline of vinyl, rise and fall of cassettes as CDs gave way and the ubiquity of low-res mp3s in the early 00s when ripping CDs to make mix CDs and sharing those replaced the mix-tapes of my teenage years. I have a healthy vinyl collection - a mix of stuff I inherited from my dad and the curated choices of my own. I still have my CD collection, a portion of which replaced worn the worn out vinyl copies of my youth. Throughout college and my later years, I had mid-fi stereo setup that allowed me to listen to nearly every format (reel-to-reel, cassette, CD and vinyl), 8-track not withstanding.
Amongst my friends, I'm the only one that still buys CDs and digital downloads of specific artists because, quite frankly they're more affordable to collect and own. I buy vinyl to complete the catalogs of certain artists that I had already started buying vinyl for. I stream, I spin vinyl and CDs all for the love of the music and because I enjoy the ceremony of dropping the needle on wax, or putting the disc into the tray, and listening to an entire album from start to finish without distraction or multi-tasking. I read the liner notes or the special edition booklet within the CD case, and admire the artwork of the cover. I don't get that level of satisfaction when streaming my own high-res library or a play list on Spotify but streaming serves a different sort purpose for me. Much like radio, it's a set-it and forget-it background music for daily activities. But late at night, after the kids are tucked into bed, I can enjoy a beverage, put my headphones on and blissfully listen to music in whatever format floats my boat.
I got into collecting vinyl when a family friend gave my husband and I his old record player. That was roughly 10 years ago and since the. I’ve been fully seduced. It’s absolutely about the serotonin-hit I get when a new album arrives and I crack it open and inspect the album art and the liner notes and the 180 gram marbled discs. It’s also about hitting flea markets and garage sales and music stores for old second-hand treasures - I built up pretty good Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie collections that way, and I even have a couple of Smiths records on vinyl.
I’m also a graphic designer/illustrator/arty person, and Decemberists records in particular appeal to me bc of the care and attention to detail you put into the design process. A big Carson illustration on the inside spread? A lyric booklet with super intentional typography choices? Foil and embossing and the records themselves have a little hidden message etched onto them? I’m here for all of that. It’s extremely My Thing.
I also love how vinyl makes listening to music feel more intentional. I’m not just throwing a playlist on shuffle, I’m listening to a collection of songs that an artist wanted me to hear in this order, and I selected this album and put it on because that’s what I committed to hearing today. There’s something kind of meditative about it that I really love. A bit of pageantry. And sure, it’s a little pretentious and sure, my collection is big and unwieldy (I just moved so trust me I know this), and sure I don’t always listen to my records as much as I should. But it’s been my preferred format for a long time now and I don’t really see that changing. I don’t even mind the little pops and clicks. And I’m pretty good at fixing them with a toothpick.
If the mediums are as equal as you suggest, why are all of the digital versions of your albums so compressed compared to their vinyl counterparts? I can’t imagine that with all of your concern for packaging, so little thought is given to how the CD and download versions actually sound.
How about 8-track?!?! My younger brother had an 8-track player in his car. In the middle of a song, it would pause and then clunk as it switched to the next track.
And 8-tracks were the predecessor of shuffled sequencing. Have to fit the timing just right to minimize the amount of tape used and not have long silent gaps at the end of each program, even if it meant fading out a song in the middle and resuming it on the next program. And as a bonus sometimes you'd get a repeated song.
But you hit the nail on the head -- the secret sauce for vinyl is the mastering engineer. I have well mastered LPs that sound significantly better than the CD counterpart and I have poorly mastered LPs that are far worse than the CD counterpart. We have to hope guys like Kevin Grey and Chris Bellman and a small handful of other engineers who are at the top of the game, pass on their techniques to others. The loudness wars for CDs have given CDs a bad rap. But there are still some well- mastered CDs. Vinyl and the analog medium is not inherently better or worse than their digital counterparts; they're just different. And if you want to eliminate pops and ticks emanating from your slab of vinyl and stylus, look into SweetVinyl's Sugar cube. It is a device that, in real time, eliminates most pops and ticks caused by scratches or contaminates. It won't fix defective pressings that have nonfill (hello GZ Media plants).
Strangely enough I think it also depends on the intent of the artist and producer. I have the recent Calexico album on vinyl and high-res FLAC. The vinyl sounds more restricted in a sense compared to the FLAC file. I think the master lacquer was cut to have less dynamic range which is why it sounds more compressed. It's just a different listening experience than the FLAC version. I have mid-80s and 90s CDs that sound great because they were before the loudness wars. When I buy vinyl or CDs by certain artists, its a hunt to determine which version (original pressing, 2nd pressing or decades later re-master/re-release) of something I don't have is going to be the best version.
For anything pre-1990, I tend towards original vinyl copies or 1st press CDs as those are closest to the original master as I can get. Whereas, later re-masterings on any format, but especially vinyl, can suffer from dynamic range compression where they just sound "off."
One thing the LP has streaming beat on, hands down, is a vocal track on "Oh No". Just re-downloaded it from the Music Today link and nothing, Spotify and others are also lacking. It's a good instrumental, and would be great with a beefier sax solo, but right now it needs help. :)
I have the top tier Tidal subscription and a highly curated vinyl collection with more pro audio (phono DI into +4dBu preamps prior to headphone amp) rather than typical high-fi (phono into -10dBu level preamp prior to headphone amp), so I am probably an even smaller portion of the vinyl audience….but when comparing the same recordings off a of a great vinyl pressing vs top end Tidal versions through as much of the same signal path as possible, there is still something more sonically pleasing about listening off the vinyl. Now this is admittedly under extremely specific circumstances, and for the casual music listener that wants speakers anywhere around their house (or in their car), vinyl is not worth the hassle. But for those of us who will sit down with headphones at the end of the day and listen to a full record from start to finish…it is still Vinyl by a mile for me.
I feel compelled to write in again. I must say I am disappointed in you, Colin, for not recognizing the record as an interactive piece of art. The argument as to whether the sound is better or worse is irrelevant to me, though of course I want it to sound "good". No, it is the package as a whole; the artwork, the notes, the texture, the look and sound of the record itself that speaks to me, as well as the deliberateness it takes to put the record on and stay focused on the music and the lyrics as a whole, not just as a sound byte. I'm not judging those who prefer CDs or 1s and 0s, they have their place with me as well, as in when I'm driving, but there is simply something about interacting with a record album that doesn't exist in a soulless mp3. Please do not stop putting effort into making this happen for those of us who choose this experience.
I rarely play my vinyl versions (though I DO have a record player!). I just like having them because it’s a way for me to feel like I actually own that music, forever. Streaming licenses can be revoked/changed/cancelled. It’s in the TOS. No license BS will ever take away my LPs. 🙂
One of the archivists I worked under pointed out that vinyl and shellac records (and similar) can be played without electricity. Magnetic tapes and all digital media are useless without it. She likes to think in the far long-term, ha ha!
Looks like I need to find a hand-crank record player for the zombie apocalypse! 😂
We did a craft in grade school using a cone of paper and a sewing needle, it lets you hear something.....
I bought a record player for the first time in my life a couple months back because I decided I wanted to purchase As It ever Was... on vinyl (and I couldn't fathom purchasing it and not actually playing the physical thing - who ARE those people?). Since, I've amassed a small collection, and the thing I've been most surprised about has been the feeling of being so much more INTENTIONAL with my listening at home.
I love a good, endless playlist of things The Algorithm thinks I'll certainly be into, but there is also some real joy in slowing down. Playing a board game and realizing I need to flip a record. Helps me stay in the present. It has been a nice change of pace, at least on occasion.
I like how the music mediums create joy in different ways. Vinyl: my friends can flip through my records, we talk about them. My favorite chef has his six favorite records mounted on the wall in his restaurant. Digital: I can send you a playlist! We can make a playlist together! I have a friend that makes mixes on cassettes and lovingly designs the J cards and they are beautiful!
The exploded edition of IBYG is an amazing example where so much care and delight and joy was put into a physical object (I got this recently and I was giggling like Ron Swanson at a steakhouse). With digital media I can go on a beautiful walk to my own personal soundtrack. It’s just all quite amazing what we have available to us and the different kinds of joy that they afford. On the flip side there are disappointments (like your RSD example). As a consumer it’s good to reflect on why I want to buy a vinyl record. Yeah, it’s not just better. I just really like talking to the folks at the record shop :D
“Giggling like Ron Swanson at a steakhouse” is my new favorite simile for unmatched glee. Thanks for that.
I play my records all the time and I’ll never stop collecting them. It’s like prefering the slow food movement over fast food. It makes you slow down and listen to the whole thing. And I appreciate good craftsmanship so don’t stop worrying over design.
You write about mastering engineers, which is why I wish you could have had someone like Bernie Grundman, Kevin Gray or Chris Bellman master the recent Decemberists lp.
Sadly I found the recent album a hit muddy on my lp, stream and cd.
You are right, vinyl isn’t the end all be all, but it can— if properly done- best other formats. It’s all in the mastering, recording, your system and - of course for an album- the way it is pressed.
Have your albums pressed at RTI, QRP, Gotta Grover, Optimal, or the Paramount Pressing in Denver (run by the old QRP folks).
Listen to all of Gillian Welch’s albums on vinyl— they sound amazing and I haven’t found any other medium besting it.
I buy vinyl because I believe it sends money to the artists whose music I enjoy. I prefer to buy vinyl from the artist's site or Bandcamp (or even at the 40+ live shows I go to on average every year) because when I buy from those sources, I think a tiny bit larger share of my vinyl purchase money heads your way. So again, you raise some great points, but some of us buy records not because they are beautiful, have amazing packaging, or even because we want the vinyl sound experience -- we buy records to help fund the artist whose art is so deeply meaningful to us.
Colin, I’d love to do an interview with you about vinyl and the Decemberists for my vinyl column. I’m coming to visit Boulder next month and am seeing you guys in Denver when I visit my daughter. You may remember us from about 7 years ago when we ran in to you and Carson at Powell’s Books. We visited Portland largely because of my daughter’s and my love of the band. It was amazing that we actually got to meet you and it’s been one of the high points of my daughter’s life. You both were so kind to my daughter and autographed her book and a drawing for her (and even took photos together). Cheers from El Paso!
Hi Colin, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I’d love to do a quick interview with you about vinyl. I’ll be visiting my daughter in July to see you guys in Denver. Here’s a copy of my most recent column. It’s about a lot more than records. You might see a few familiar faces! www.elpasoinc.com/tncms/asset/editorial/357b65d4-2fa4-11ef-8792-cb331c7cae0c
As a GenX music lover whose parents ran an indie record store in the late 70s into the late 80s, I witnessed the slow decline of vinyl, rise and fall of cassettes as CDs gave way and the ubiquity of low-res mp3s in the early 00s when ripping CDs to make mix CDs and sharing those replaced the mix-tapes of my teenage years. I have a healthy vinyl collection - a mix of stuff I inherited from my dad and the curated choices of my own. I still have my CD collection, a portion of which replaced worn the worn out vinyl copies of my youth. Throughout college and my later years, I had mid-fi stereo setup that allowed me to listen to nearly every format (reel-to-reel, cassette, CD and vinyl), 8-track not withstanding.
Amongst my friends, I'm the only one that still buys CDs and digital downloads of specific artists because, quite frankly they're more affordable to collect and own. I buy vinyl to complete the catalogs of certain artists that I had already started buying vinyl for. I stream, I spin vinyl and CDs all for the love of the music and because I enjoy the ceremony of dropping the needle on wax, or putting the disc into the tray, and listening to an entire album from start to finish without distraction or multi-tasking. I read the liner notes or the special edition booklet within the CD case, and admire the artwork of the cover. I don't get that level of satisfaction when streaming my own high-res library or a play list on Spotify but streaming serves a different sort purpose for me. Much like radio, it's a set-it and forget-it background music for daily activities. But late at night, after the kids are tucked into bed, I can enjoy a beverage, put my headphones on and blissfully listen to music in whatever format floats my boat.
I got into collecting vinyl when a family friend gave my husband and I his old record player. That was roughly 10 years ago and since the. I’ve been fully seduced. It’s absolutely about the serotonin-hit I get when a new album arrives and I crack it open and inspect the album art and the liner notes and the 180 gram marbled discs. It’s also about hitting flea markets and garage sales and music stores for old second-hand treasures - I built up pretty good Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie collections that way, and I even have a couple of Smiths records on vinyl.
I’m also a graphic designer/illustrator/arty person, and Decemberists records in particular appeal to me bc of the care and attention to detail you put into the design process. A big Carson illustration on the inside spread? A lyric booklet with super intentional typography choices? Foil and embossing and the records themselves have a little hidden message etched onto them? I’m here for all of that. It’s extremely My Thing.
I also love how vinyl makes listening to music feel more intentional. I’m not just throwing a playlist on shuffle, I’m listening to a collection of songs that an artist wanted me to hear in this order, and I selected this album and put it on because that’s what I committed to hearing today. There’s something kind of meditative about it that I really love. A bit of pageantry. And sure, it’s a little pretentious and sure, my collection is big and unwieldy (I just moved so trust me I know this), and sure I don’t always listen to my records as much as I should. But it’s been my preferred format for a long time now and I don’t really see that changing. I don’t even mind the little pops and clicks. And I’m pretty good at fixing them with a toothpick.
If the mediums are as equal as you suggest, why are all of the digital versions of your albums so compressed compared to their vinyl counterparts? I can’t imagine that with all of your concern for packaging, so little thought is given to how the CD and download versions actually sound.
How about 8-track?!?! My younger brother had an 8-track player in his car. In the middle of a song, it would pause and then clunk as it switched to the next track.
And 8-tracks were the predecessor of shuffled sequencing. Have to fit the timing just right to minimize the amount of tape used and not have long silent gaps at the end of each program, even if it meant fading out a song in the middle and resuming it on the next program. And as a bonus sometimes you'd get a repeated song.
But you hit the nail on the head -- the secret sauce for vinyl is the mastering engineer. I have well mastered LPs that sound significantly better than the CD counterpart and I have poorly mastered LPs that are far worse than the CD counterpart. We have to hope guys like Kevin Grey and Chris Bellman and a small handful of other engineers who are at the top of the game, pass on their techniques to others. The loudness wars for CDs have given CDs a bad rap. But there are still some well- mastered CDs. Vinyl and the analog medium is not inherently better or worse than their digital counterparts; they're just different. And if you want to eliminate pops and ticks emanating from your slab of vinyl and stylus, look into SweetVinyl's Sugar cube. It is a device that, in real time, eliminates most pops and ticks caused by scratches or contaminates. It won't fix defective pressings that have nonfill (hello GZ Media plants).
Strangely enough I think it also depends on the intent of the artist and producer. I have the recent Calexico album on vinyl and high-res FLAC. The vinyl sounds more restricted in a sense compared to the FLAC file. I think the master lacquer was cut to have less dynamic range which is why it sounds more compressed. It's just a different listening experience than the FLAC version. I have mid-80s and 90s CDs that sound great because they were before the loudness wars. When I buy vinyl or CDs by certain artists, its a hunt to determine which version (original pressing, 2nd pressing or decades later re-master/re-release) of something I don't have is going to be the best version.
For anything pre-1990, I tend towards original vinyl copies or 1st press CDs as those are closest to the original master as I can get. Whereas, later re-masterings on any format, but especially vinyl, can suffer from dynamic range compression where they just sound "off."
One thing the LP has streaming beat on, hands down, is a vocal track on "Oh No". Just re-downloaded it from the Music Today link and nothing, Spotify and others are also lacking. It's a good instrumental, and would be great with a beefier sax solo, but right now it needs help. :)
I like my music mortal.
I have the top tier Tidal subscription and a highly curated vinyl collection with more pro audio (phono DI into +4dBu preamps prior to headphone amp) rather than typical high-fi (phono into -10dBu level preamp prior to headphone amp), so I am probably an even smaller portion of the vinyl audience….but when comparing the same recordings off a of a great vinyl pressing vs top end Tidal versions through as much of the same signal path as possible, there is still something more sonically pleasing about listening off the vinyl. Now this is admittedly under extremely specific circumstances, and for the casual music listener that wants speakers anywhere around their house (or in their car), vinyl is not worth the hassle. But for those of us who will sit down with headphones at the end of the day and listen to a full record from start to finish…it is still Vinyl by a mile for me.
I feel compelled to write in again. I must say I am disappointed in you, Colin, for not recognizing the record as an interactive piece of art. The argument as to whether the sound is better or worse is irrelevant to me, though of course I want it to sound "good". No, it is the package as a whole; the artwork, the notes, the texture, the look and sound of the record itself that speaks to me, as well as the deliberateness it takes to put the record on and stay focused on the music and the lyrics as a whole, not just as a sound byte. I'm not judging those who prefer CDs or 1s and 0s, they have their place with me as well, as in when I'm driving, but there is simply something about interacting with a record album that doesn't exist in a soulless mp3. Please do not stop putting effort into making this happen for those of us who choose this experience.