Posts Tagged ‘vinyl record day’

  
Thursday, August 14th, 2008

What’s So Great About Vinyl, Anyway?

by Mojo Flucke

I am a reformed audiophile. A hybrid type of sound geek, with one foot in the strange world of excellent sound and the whackos who populate it, and the other among the great unwashed normal people who get along just fine with, you know, anything you can buy at Target and factory stereos in their cars.

That’s not saying much apropos to vinyl, yet, except that I do have an ear — and appreciation — for geeky “audio-synchrocies” between the formats. For the record, my ears cannot take any normal, mass-produced computer audio system; I rolled my own rig with a 250-watts-per-channel 1980s Adcom power amp hooked up to my Mac, which serves as a preamplifier through which I pump my MP3s out to Cambridge Soundworks Newton M80s. In the man-cave — our house’s half-finished basement has a stone foundation, which isn’t magic, acoustically, but it’s not bouncy like the usual rec room — I have a vintage ’80s EV club PA I bought from a DJ off Craigslist suitable for a 300-capacity. Plug my iPod right into a tiny mixer that an ex-wedding DJ gave me. Crown amp, 600 watts a side. Freakin’ loud for weightlifting time, I tell you.

I settled on this gear after years of experimenting, thousands of dollars down the tubes, and hundreds of hours squandered at hi-end audio shops sampling different systems and musics to figure out that most of the audiophile products are a lot of hot air to part you from your hard-earned income. No doubt this stuff sounds better, but incrementally so: To get what I would consider a couple hundred bucks’ worth of incremental improvement, you gotta spend thousands more. And nod in appreciation when the salesperson asks how great it sounds. (more…)

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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

Future Retro: Vinyl Record Day

by DJ D

LOCATION: Anytown, USA
TIME: The Early ’80’s

A young, burgeoning music fan has got to start somewhere. This is the brief, snappily-written story of how a young man with a quick wit and a smart answer for everything began his slow, steady evolution into a full-fledged music obsessive.

MAGNIFICENT OBSESSIONS

The time was 1981 and the popular music scene was having its own personal identity crisis. Disco was now officially “dead,” much to the delight of so many mullet-sporting, air guitar-playing music elitists. The reality is that disco was not actually dead, but was certainly on life support. After being embraced (and then abruptly abandoned) by the mainstream, it had boogied its way back underground to the black and gay clubs from whence it came. However, to anyone listening to Top 40 radio, it certainly seemed like the roof was no longer on fire. The newest British invasion had yet to come into full swing and New Wave was still a few minutes from its global takeover of radio stations and video channels.

None of this was apparent to an 11-year-old boy living in a small town next door to nowhere. He was also having his own identity crisis, at least musically. Not knowing or caring what was hip, cool or contemporary, he began to devour anything and everything that was spinning on the radio. He spent countless hours watching badly-dressed artists flash across his television screen every week on American Bandstand, Soul Train and Solid Gold. They were filling up his life with music, putting rhythm in his soul. He was informed by a schoolmate and fellow music junkie that a small independent record store was located in the mall just one town over. After gathering together a list of songs that he just had to have, he made that first fateful trip to his future home away from home.

(more…)

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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

(Vinyl Record Day) Mix Six: “Soundtrack Sounds of the ’80s”

by Ted Asregadoo

DOWNLOAD THE FULL MIX HERE

When you’re a young adult and trying to find your way in the world, it can be a very liberating period.  It’s a time when your tastes aren’t solidified, and your mind is open to musical forms that people older or younger than you may find utterly abhorrent.  The science of this phenomenon is detailed in the book This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin, but I’m fairly certain we’ve all experienced what Levitin writes about:  the music of our teen years (and early 20s) is just so much better than the crap that’s produced today.

I was going through my LPs the other day and found an inordinate number of soundtracks.  Yeah, the Footloose soundtrack was in there, but I started to find others that reminded me how intently I listened to the music used in films.  If I heard something I liked, I would usually drive down to Tower or Rasputin Records to see if I could get a copy after seeing the movie.  That was back in the days when, despite making just a little more than minimum wage, I had a disposable income for things like records.  Nowadays, while I still have a disposable income for music, there’s a kind of “download and forget” mentality that’s crept into my listening habits.  Sure, it’s more convenient to buy music as a digital download, but I would argue that it comes at a price.  And that price is the loss of anticipation and excitement about a record you bought at a brick and mortar store.

Dropping the needle on a new LP meant that you had to do more than just click a button.  It meant tearing off the cellophane wrapping, taking out the inner sleeve of the record (pausing to eye the cover art, if there was any), gingerly extracting the LP from the sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and carefully putting the needle on the vinyl.  For me, it was a ritual that reinforced the importance I placed on really listening to music.

While the music was playing, I would pore over the credits, liner notes, album art, and lyrics (if any).  I would file away nuggets of information gleaned from those notes, which would enhance the experience of listening to the music.  I can’t quite explain why, but knowing that composer X scored a film for director Y was important to me.  Somehow I think it made me feel more connected to the movies I was watching because I was able to enjoy the film on multiple levels. It is that total devotion to the music experience I find myself missing these days.  You know, getting completely lost in the music as you either cranked it up on the stereo speakers, or cranked it up on your headphones.

Alas, I find myself doing that less and less these days. Rediscovering the soundtracks presented here, however, has rekindled those memories of listening to music back in the day.  And the lesson learned is that I have to slow down and really start to listen again.

Because it’s Vinyl Record Day today, here we go with six selections from soundtracks that have all the snap, crackle, and pops that you may remember from those days of LPs and 45s. Oh, and this time I’m offering this mix in the usual “full mix” format and as individual mp3s. (more…)

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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

Vinyl Record Day: Five Ways to Trash a Precious Platter

by Jon Cummings

When the compact disc was introduced in the mid-’80s, one of its main selling points (along with allegedly superior digital sound) was its durability. Vinyl records, we all knew, could be scratched, warped, chipped, broken in half; CDs, on the other hand, were forever.

Nevertheless, I found something sad about the shift from vinyl to metal, in a purely tactile sense. Sure, records required careful handling, upright storage and frequent cleaning, and could be ruined by a slip of the hand or the poorly executed scrape of a needle – but to me that made them precious. Getting a record from sleeve to turntable was an intricate maneuver, if you were doing it right – kind of like pinning a corsage on your prom date: One screw-up, and somebody was gonna get hurt.

Those screw-ups were an inevitable consequence of record collecting, and the experience of destroying such precious commodities made me value the ones that remained all the more. Still, with 20 years gone since my personal switch to CD purchasing, I now reflect on my experiences trashing records almost as fondly as my many years of removing them gingerly from the cardboard, then from the tissue, then making sure my fingers never touched the grooves, then …

To wit:

1. Warp speed. I’ve committed the usual crimes of record warping, from stacking too many 45s horizontally to leaving an LP hanging on top of the spindle for too long. But nothing approached the damage done to my copy of Pilot’s “Magic” 45 when I left it in the back seat of my mom’s car for a couple of sultry summer days in ’75. When it came out, that sucker didn’t just have a bend in it – it existed in two parallel universes. When I put it on the turntable, it also played at two different speeds, one of which I believe was considerably slower than 33 1/3. (And considering how dicey the vocals were on “Magic” in the first place, you can imagine the impact of the sliding speeds.)

If you Google “warped records” today, you’ll find 79 homeopathic cures which mostly involve panes of glass and moderate heat; in 1975 the cure was 79 cents … and a new copy of “Magic,” one of the few times I ever had to replace a record while it was still a hit. (more…)

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