There are many debates about the quality of sound on vinyl records, and many ideas about it. In short: yes, vinyl, due to its analog nature, has a more natural sound than digital recordings, even those with high sample rates. However, this does not apply to music that was created digitally; once it is digital, printing it onto vinyl does not magically make it analog again.
No, due to its nature, vinyl has a much greater limit on dynamics than tapes or digital recordings. While high-quality digital formats can offer a dynamic range of more than 100 dB, vinyl’s limitations are far less. Listening to music with a high dynamic range, mainly classical, orchestral, and symphonic pieces, means sacrificing much of the actual dynamics.
But all that aside, most people don’t listen to vinyl because of higher quality, but rather for the overall experience. A big part of the vinyl experience is the inconvenience: each side of a vinyl usually holds 20 minutes of music, in some cases up to 30 minutes at most. This means that listening to a full symphony or even a full album requires getting up to change the side. You can’t skip tracks, and you can’t fast-forward. Starting from a track in the middle of an album is possible, but not as easy as it is with CDs or digital formats. And perhaps above all, vinyl is not portable.
There are many more reasons why vinyl is inconvenient, and because of all these reasons, people slowly moved to tapes, CDs, and eventually digital music. But as Oliver Burkeman mentions in his book 4000 Weeks, these inconveniences are part of the experience, and we don’t know we like them until we lose them.
A Global Chronicle of History of the Music Recording Technology
The whole idea is that when you have to keep monitoring your vinyl player, changing the sides to keep listening, swapping the record to listen to another album, being careful not to touch the surface or drop them, and so on; all of this makes you connect with the content it carries: the music itself.
While listening to a playlist or even an album on a streaming service usually goes unnoticed, your mind wanders, and slowly the music fades into the background. Streaming never ends; it keeps the mood and genre going, continuing with other tracks as long as you like. You don’t have to do anything; it just keeps playing. It sounds amazing, right? Well, that’s where it all goes wrong. Music has become background in recent years; it is no longer intentional. It’s just something that plays in the back, requiring no attention. And even if a composer makes music full of big dynamics, bangs, and moments that demand attention, you simply skip it. Algorithms learn not to play that track or similar ones for you again. And today even listening to music has become fake, it’s become just another subject for numbers and stats without considering the depth of the experience.
In listening to music, like many other thing sin life, 1 does not equal 1. Listening to a concerto by Bach with all your soul, does not equal to hearing the same piece of music on the background while doing some other tasks. But Fakism of the modern world, considers them to be the same.
But vinyl defies all of this. You have to physically connect with the music, and therefore the main thing about music, giving attention, is not a burden anymore; it becomes a gift. When the medium itself takes your attention, listening to the piece you intentionally chose, put on the player, cleaned, and started is no longer a big deal. You start actually listening to the music. And as soon as your mind starts to wander and time’s up, you get up and change the side. So you keep coming back to the music.
While our lives are based on convenience, of course the return of vinyls, tapes, and CDs is not going to become a permanent mainstream thing. They are more like the candle industry: we still use electric bulbs for daily use, but using a candle from time to time gives us a different experience. It’s not about the light of the candle anymore, but rather about the existence of the candle. Physical music mediums, especially vinyl, are not going to take back their place over digital downloads and streaming services, but they do give us a different listening experience, one that is strongly needed these days. Music as a whole is slowly disappearing into the background, and vinyl is one of the ways helping it be noticed and listened to again.
In the Digital Album Era, Cassettes Quietly Return to Estonia
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