At Washington Post, an interesting video-illustrated feature on how vinyl records are made today
Interesting, even though I have almost no interest - and zero participation - in the Vinyl Revival
Can't remember when I last bought a new LP .... and buying a second-hand, from back-in-the-long-ago elpee has become a vanishingly infrequent occurrence too.
I've almost fully shifted over to streaming... the logic of ultra-convenience has vanquished me... the sound is good enough for most situations.... It's so much easier than having to sift through my collection, which is not as well-organised as it should be.
And so all those LPs I hunted down over the decades, the CDs I got sent or bought... they mostly just sit there.
Still, even though it's all in the past for me now, the vinyl record remains one of the things that makes me feel a little bit mystical... even after having the production process demystified in that WashPost article.... because even after seeing all the stages of the manufacturing, I still don't have a rational understanding of how vinyl records work.... and consequently continue to find it more than a little magical.
This applies to any record in any genre really, but for some reason particularly stands out if I play an LP of avant-garde electronic music, something I bought back in my second-hand record shop haunting days... or in recent years, that I've borrowed from the amazing record library at the place I work, so I'd be playing it in on my turntable in order to burn it onto a CD-R.
These avant-electronic / musique concrete recordings are radically spatialized, teeming with minute textural details, sounds darting around the stereofield....
Their almost glossy sound jumps out of the speakers.
And I'm always like: "how do they get that into these narrow grooves... engrave all that information and space into these tiny furrows gouged into slabs of petrochemical matter?"
"How can all of that sound-and-space get extracted on demand via what - on the face of it - would appear to be a crude electro-mechanical process: the friction of a stylus - this pointy shard of mineral - dragged through that incredibly constricted furrow?"
It still seems magic to me.... it defies comprehension... it's a real "can't believe your ears" situation.
A mundane miracle.
And then to realise further that my decent but quite old hi-fi is extracting a tiny portion of what a record is capable of releasing, if it were to be put through some really advanced, superior, high-end equipment.
When I did a piece on the revival of interest in '70s underground disco that was going on in the 2000s with Body & Soul and so forth, I interviewed David Mancuso. After a plate full of pasta at a local restaurant, he took me round to a friend's apartment in the East Village, where this old Loft believer had allowed Mancuso to stash his ultra-expensive stereo.
He had to assemble parts of it and also let it warm up before playing a record.
The stylus alone cost something like $5,000, a multiple of my entire hi-fi's cost. The cartridge even more.
Memory is hazy, but I believe the turntable's platter was suspended in some kind of special cocooned space, held in place by springs maybe, so as to protect the playback from the effect of external vibrations.
The speakers were large, chest-height things.
I thought how generous and loyal and self-sacrificing it was of Mancuso's friend to allow such a large part of their apartment - which wasn't huge - be so dominated by this musical machinery.
Finally, he was ready to play some records - one was Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, a favorite of mine, rather than a disco record. And it truly was incredible, the shimmering, fluttering depth and detail in the playback, the sheer sonic presence.
I started to see how you could go down that path (which can become a tragic obsession as with this story of an audiophile fiend, who more or less ruined his life in pursuit of perfect sound)
Anecdotally, over the years I've noticed that most music critics I've know have had a fairly crappy hi-fi - sometimes I'd be surprised by the poor quality of tapes they'd do for me. Probably it was the case that all their money was going on records, rather than the mechanism for releasing their musical content - they were greedy for new sounds.
Conversely, the people I've known who were obsessed with hi-fidelity often had really small record collections - and distinctly square, conservative taste.
There's been some examples recently of lifelong vinyl fiends shedding their lifetime's accumulations, or preparing to do- perhaps sensing that time is running out, "you can't take it with you"
Maybe it's time for me too, to divest - or at least, to undertake a radical thinning down.
Practically speaking, I'm not getting use out of this stuff. Someone in Japan or Argentina would get more buzz of owning such-and-such a techno 12-inch or postpunk obscurity. Maybe it's time to strike while the iron is hot. While the demand is out there still.
But the idea of the effort involved - the expenditure of time and energy - makes me all weak at the knees and I put it off again.
Perhaps I will end up interred in a gigantic burial mound... shelves lining the vaulted interior, crammed with LPs and box sets.... my mummified body draped across a huge pile of unsleeved vinyl - like Smaug lying on his treasure in The Hobbit...
No comments:
Post a Comment