Records. Oh Records. Such a delight to listen to the same band for hours in a pre decided order with durable technology. CDs scratch so easily and spotify can sometimes be overwhelming with options of sound and music. Did you know there was over 4 million vinyl records sold in the UK last year? Thank you bar karaoke for teaching me that one. Anyways, I went record hungtin this last weekened. Found this lil rock stand in Brooklyn and managed to scope out some amazing finds!
Queen because who can resist such classics as We are the Champions and Rock you? Plus didn’t Bohemian Rhapsody restore the Queen nostalgia? What a voice, what a talent, what a treasure.
This Simon and Garfunkel record my friend Dave bought me. I’ve been looking for their music for some time and I guess he snagged it right under my nose! So excited for this and a nod to NY. This concert dedicated all its proceeeds to Central Park which at the time was unkept. HBO was the network that agreed to show the concert on tv. So excited to sing along to me & julio, late in the evening, 50 ways to leave your lover, and the Boxer. Such magic music to dance and reminisce to!
I can fully understand the revival of vinyls.
The ritual of putting the vinyl on the turntable and putting the pickup into the groove (best without plop 😉 ) is hard to beat and you can meditate over the great cover artwork in a decent size.
Listening to a vinyl can not be compared with just noise into the ears while streaming using bad earbuds.
A bonus about records is that they are often mixed mastered differently than the later “re-issue” CDs or streams. While since about 1995 almost all CDs or music streams often are dynamically compressed to death (look up “loudness war”), the recording engineers of the 70s and 80s tried to record and press the best quality and the maximum possible dynamic into the grooves of a record.
Such a shame that they now use the technically better medium (there is no discussion about the superiority of a *well* made CD or lossless stream) to produce worse quality.
Full disclosure:
I own roughly 3000 vinyls, collected (and listened to!) over the decades, so I might be slightly biased – but I own CDs, MP3s (a few) and FLAC or similar lossless formats too – so maybe I am not that much biased 🙂
I had no idea about the “loudness war”, but it’s definetly on my list of things to read up on now!
3,000 Vinyls? I probably won’t ever own that many but kudos to you for your broad range, adn glad to hear that there are more fellow vinyl lovers in the world ❤️
… to get to that number and much more was quite easy when “everyone” changed to the new digital stuff in the late ’80s and beginning ’90s. You could buy whole collections second hand for peanuts.
At that time I was quite involved in trading used records at used vinyl record fairs. After a thorough cleaning of the record and the cover most of the records found other homes, the 3k are only those I wanted to keep.
I love LPs and am so glad to see they’re having a bit of a resurgence! They really are my medium of choice. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was told that vinyl was dead and CDs would be around for ever. Regardless, I clung on to my record collection and always bought vinyl if available. There’s something about having that physical copy of the recording. Plus, when that 12″-square space was the norm, album artwork really was fantastic. You get so much more than just a sound. There’s the artwork, sleeve notes, lyrics sheets… all in your hands without having to navigate a website or search-engine! Plus, a well cared-for record played on a decent player sounds as good as (and sometimes even clearer than) a CD.
I also think an LP also forces you to pay more attention to the music. These days, a lot of music is just a background noise to have on while you’re doing other stuff. In contrast, I’ve always found that putting an LP on makes me sit down and give it my full attention. If I put on an LP, the lights go down, the TV and PC go off, I get out a beer, scotch (or tea if it’s too early), and sit there concentrating in front of that spinning, mesmerising black disk of wonder…
I can completely relate! The imagery of sitting down with a nice drink (hot or cold) and listening to some music sounds dreamy! A wonderful way to really take in the artistic talent.
As a side note prompted by quhno’s mention of the “loudness war”, this is why I often tell people that vinyl in good condition (especially vinyl pressed in the 80s and 90s) sounds better and clearer than the same recording on CD.
I had forgotten about the loudness war, despite having heard about it before. I had always assumed the clarity of well cared-for vinyl was due to vinyl being analogue, mastered from digital tapes that might have been recorded at 48kHz, thereby giving an analogue audio signal that was potentially equivalent to a higher sampling rate than that provided by a CD (CDs are sampled at 44.1kHz). I suspect that the true cause is actually a combination of factors, with the “loudness war” being by far the greatest.
I’m not sure which recordings suffer the most from the loudness war, but as a clear example of a vinyl recording that sounds infinitely clearer, deeper and “higher-resolution” than the digital copy, you can’t do much better than compare the CD to the 7″ single of “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran (1993). It’s a really, really stark contrast. I also get that impression to a lesser extent with Thunder’s 1990 album “Backstreet Symphony”, and a lot of 1980s LPs by all manner of bands, from Heart to Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians – but I think that these are all from before the loudness-war started in earnest. It was really a mid-90s phenomenon.