Why Vinyl?

Seems like a fair question. I once said that CDs were the McDonaldisation of music, MP3 and digital music even more so. All of a sudden album content became irrelevant. See this post for more thoughts.

We see people doing mixtapes and playlists but anyone can list some songs or drag a couple of MP3 and share them , or share a bloody Spotify playlist, but there's hardly any personal investment and the chances are that the person receiving the said item will look at it and not bother listening to it. The iPod generation , or is it iPhone generation often don't even listen to whole songs let alone an album.

I once watched a bit of the X-Factor and the act covered the Moody Blues "Nights in White Satin" (a five minute song) which was cut to ninety seconds for the performance, so I wasn't impressed by that.

Digital media is great for when you are walking and this morning I was listening to the non album disk of "The Thrill of It All" by Roxy Music and "Sultanesque'' came on, one of my favourites. It's a Bryan Ferry composition , five minutes of drone sound and was the "B" side of "Love Is The Drug'' , and I used to love putting it on pub jukeboxes much to the annoyance of most of the clientele , but it is a great piece of music and a great example of Ferry's adventures in tone and sound, "South Downs" is another similar piece. I am thinking of buying the vinyl single because I like it so much.

So "Why Vinyl?" . Well thanks to the persuasion of my friend Marek at RPM I have a wonderful retro reconditioned record player, and when I listen to an album apart from providing a warm deep bass backbone to the music, there is no skipping or resequencing songs . You listen to the album , well at least a side of it , and that is twenty minutes or so, which is long enough but not too long.

CDs are up to eighty minutes and digital streams can never end , so vinyl lets you listen in manageable chunks and the only choice you have is what to put on.

It is my preferred listening medium these days, although I listen to CDs and digital when I work from home , and digital when I am walking.

Vinyl is a more personal way of listening, there is very little automation. You have to take the record from it’s sleeve and then there may be another inner sleeve you have to carefully remove it from. I always put it on the table, set the speed and start it running and then manually drop the needle onto the disk after checking for accumulated dust.

This does give a very personal connection to the music you are playing which you do not get from digital media.

Digital is all about convenience and that is it’s big selling point. Streaming media means that as long as you have a signal, you can listen or watch anywhere. But I feel it is something that is the control of corporations.

Having said that I am on holiday at the moment listening to the fortieth anniversary version of “Two Sevens Clash” by Culture on my Emopeak wireless headphone via Amazon Music on my Kindle Fire (I bought the digital version) and my daughters bought me the vinyl version last Christmas so I have the benefit of all versions as I also have a CD copy of it as well.

So there are benefits for all formats but I believe that Vinyl gives you a personal link.

So I will share "Sultanesque" with you as the sun goes down on this wonderful day.