Back to vinyl

The flawed yet somehow perfect sound. The crackling between songs. The stunning art work. These are all things that come to mind when the needle drops down on that treasured piece of vinyl, offering that much craved connection between the musician and the listener.

Decades on the tape, the CD and downloads have graced our music industry. Yet what have they added to the whole experience? Digitally enhanced music. Songs at the touch of a button. Like everything in contemporary society even music has fallen into the commercialized trap. A throw away culture, where we don’t even place value on the music we listen to.

Despite what modernistas will tell you, no other medium replicates the sound of a live performance in the way vinyl does.
Are we being nostalgic, are we stuck in the past, still in love with a medium that should be extinct because we don’t want to move on, because it’s retro and because retro equals cool?

For so many people vinyl is the only choice and always will be. Vinyl records offer the ear music as close to the original sound as possible.

CDs and downloads, the mediums that have threatened their existence are digital recordings and therefore fail in capturing the complete sound wave. Vinyl records have a groove carved into them which mirrors the original sound’s waveform and insures that no information is lost which explains why vinyl still remains king in a world dominated by technological advances.

As these technological discoveries are unearthed, we keep finding new ways to ‘improve’ everything. But at what cost? And can we really call it an improvement? First came the tape which would always leave a tangling mess in its wake, then there was the CD, drop it awkwardly and it scratches leaving the bottom of bin as its only future. Now we have downloads, enabling us to download any song in the world and to flit from artist to artist without a second thought. And when we’re done we can just hit delete. That is of course if we don’t drop and smash the iPod first or the beloved PC crashes while we sit there in a horrified mess because we never got around to backing it up.

Fast forward twenty years from now. Will we still own our first tape, our first CD, How about our first download? The music industry of today places very little emphasis on talent, it fuels the one hit wonders and stimulates this throwaway attitude towards everything contemporary life has to offer.

The record allows you to lie back and hear all there is to hear, every drum beat, every guitar riff, every buzz of the trumpet, nothing goes unnoticed.

Yes it’s retro, yes that’s cool but the real reason for this love of vinyl comes down to more than that. It comes down to sound and it comes down to walking out of that music shop with that record proudly tucked under your arm for the world to see. Not everything contemporary is better. Time to go home and dig out those old records from your parents mod or rocker days.

With a growing group of artists releasing albums on vinyl and the industry embracing the return, vinyl is finally back; in fact for those of us with an ongoing love affair, it never really left.