Warped vinyl and digital transformations
On a recent Saturday, I spent the remaining 45 minutes of a 90 minute parking chit at a favorite record shop. In fact, this shop/chain buys, sells and resells multimedia of all sorts — music and video on vinyl, CDs, DVDs, not to mention erstwhile ‘formats of the future’ including Blu-Ray, cassettes and yes, even 8-track tapes. In past visits, I have purchased everything from skuffed trip hop compilations to a DVD set of the first season of Hill Street Blues. My complete collection of X-Files seasons 1–9 (including the special edition “Black Oil” compilation) has been curated from castoffs on the back wall.✝
For this particular search, I began on the vinyl side of the cavernous shop with no particular grail in mind. Not unlike used books, old albums toss off a complex perfume that includes mildew, dust, aging cardstock with evanescent notes of bong smoke and body odor. (The latter may well have come from those trolling the bins with me.) As I began soiling my fingertips flipping through the rock section, I noticed something that I hadn’t before. Alongside used albums marked ‘good’ or ‘fine’ were many labeled ‘new.’ To be sure, the store has sold new albums for years and I’ve noticed them in past visits. I recall the pioneer species being indie bands, although fetishistic vinyl jazz reissues were also familiar. Like wine, these audiophile recordings document everything from provenance to producer attempting to create a recording terroir to justify paying Bordeaux prices for what was often recorded on primitive magnetic tape in the 1950s in glorious monophonic sound.
What I finally noticed on this trip was that there seemed to be as many new albums in the bins as used. Not only were current bands represented, but legacy performers (even those who were no longer recording) were represented by shiny sealed records with price tags beginning at $18 with most averaging $24. (‘Shiny’ is pretty rare in used record shops.) In some cases, the bins were filled with dozens of the same recording which would suggest demand was strong. Based on my conversation with the gauged + tatted salesperson and an admittedly unscientific anecdotal observation in the Republic of Portlandia, vinyl is no longer solely the domain of old men with >$20K turntables or urban hipsters listening to Best Coast. And for the first time in many years, I purchased two new albums including David Bowie’s virtually posthumous Dark Star. ✝✝
This long, loving and perhaps gratuitous digression about the joy of vinyl, record stores and audiophilia is coming around to a point. Having lived through the musical digital revolution and the recurring post-mortems for vinyl and analog formats, I didn’t see this one coming. As much as I welcome the return of the beloved 12” long-playing album, I cannot help but think more broadly about other presumed digital revolutions and the perceived inevitability of innovation and change. Whether you call it a reverse paradigm shift, a pendulum swing or an analogue renaissance, like the bizarro 2016 presidential election, it would suggest that disruption is nothing if not unpredictable.
At a coffee shop twenty-four hours earlier, I ran into Shawn, a former colleague who used to sell books to me at Barnes and Noble when I was more of a librarian than I am these days. He said business is good. I think he even used the word ‘great.’ It was an unsolicited remark. He just offered it up as good news as put down a thick copy of Don Quixote onto the counter. The book caught the attention of the millennial baristas who seemed genuinely fascinated both by the size and subject of the novel. Seeking to make a relevant connection, the bookseller suggested the story was similar to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the mostly-overlooked 2013 movie with Ben Stiller. I assume he was referring to this version, rather than the 1947 original that starred Danny Kaye. But with Shawn, it could have been either. In my conversation with him, he also commented that the eBook business was nowhere near as hot as print. Acknowledging that the Barnes and Noble mobile platform may suffering the same fate as Betamax, his observations regarding eBooks is not unlike what I’ve heard from others in the business.
Considering the convergence of this exchange with my record store discovery 24 hours later, I naturally shifted to cosmic theories — are these gravitational wrinkles in the digital content revolution? While I don’t for a minute question the inexorable waves of technology and increasing digitality, I am drawn to recent astronomical discoveries which appear to further confirm an Einstein theory that I will not attempt to explain here. But one article I read provided a simplified explanation of what happened when two enormous black holes violently merged 1.4 billion years ago — it caused some serious disruption.
Well duh.
Considering that the waves had traveled 1.4 billion light years before being recorded on earth, that’s a big bang. While the analog to digital shift on the Planet Earth is a much smaller event, I cannot help but ride this cosmic meme and wonder what other ripples might occur as digital impacts our lives. My personal observations of the apparent resurgence of vinyl and the persistence of print suggest that the pace, predictability and path of change may not be as linear as the laser beam dutifully tracking my X-Files DVD.
When I paid for my albums, I used one of the newer credit cards that feature an advanced security chip that requires insertion into a reader until the transaction is complete. At some locations, you just insert the card and you’re done. But at the record shop I still had to sign a paper receipt. Like their merchandise, the store had one foot in the past and one in the future.
Later in the day when I was paying for gas, I noticed that I didn’t have my credit card.
I had left it in the futuristic card reader.
You may not want to sell your record collection or personal library just yet.
✝ Hint: even ‘Skuf’ CDs and DVDs will almost always play well. And error correction on a Mac is pretty dang good. Needless to say, this isn’t the case with vinyl and 8-tracks.
✝✝ While I would like to claim a deep David Bowie catalog, I can’t. (Long time listener; first time buyer.) That said, his last album is brilliant. I’ve already listened to both sides twice. Just like the old days. And yes, I was gleeful as a reached for a sharp knife to carefully unseal the album and place it on my turntable for the first time. There is nothing like virgin vinyl.
For full disclosure, I played it on a modern entry-level audiophile Pro-Ject Debut turntable (3 figures, not 5), amplified it on a 50’s era Eico ST-40 integrated tube amp and listened through high-efficiency Klipsch KG4 loudspeakers from the early 80’s. In the words of Ferris Bueller, it was so choice.
