Vinyl music

Vinyl LPs are coming back? Once again we can listen to our music in 45 minute doses, on a machine with a needle guaranteed to destroy the medium, which will as a result start to snap, click, pop, hiss and, eventually, skip? On the positive side, when mothers yell at their children telling them they sound like a broken record, once again the kids will know why they're being yelled at.

Or put another way: After a quarter of a century of obsolescence, the LP is making a comeback worthy of any religious resurrection. How it has risen from charity shop basement to wealthy living room is a parable for our times, a classic example of popular resistance to the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence and market forces. This is a turnaround equivalent to the vindication of homeopathy, the revival of newsprint and the return of the French monarchy, a romantic defiance of intellect and reality.

What's going on here? Well, for the cognoscenti, it's the battle of the perceived warm beauty of the analog recording versus the icy cold nastiness of the digital recording. You can't possibly compare CDs to LPs. Impossible! (Or, as the French say, Impossible!) Norman Lebrecht tracks down that battle in Vinyl Revival Causes Discord. Needless to say (?), digital wins by a knockout, but at the end Lebrecht gets to where the real action is: recordings versus downloads. One thing we are not doing with mp3s is raising a generation of audiophiles. The most tone deaf listener can detect the difference between a CD and a download, on the chintziest equipment. Are we really going to settle for the latter every time?

It's a point to ponder.

[Photo by Zecas]

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