Getting Into Vinyl : Part One — Why Vinyl?

Before jumping into the nitty gritty of this article, as you might have guessed from the title, Getting Into Vinyl will be a series of articles covering as many of the important aspects as I can think of with regards to vinyl records. This includes why anyone would even consider going into vinyl, what you need, how to setup a turntable, various precautions to take, how to handle vinyl records, and how your listening environment can affect your listening experience. So, let’s kick it off.

Why Vinyl?

It may sound silly, today, for anyone to be getting involved in what seems to be an antiquated medium for storing and playing back audio recordings. Heck, our culture and indeed the collective global community is so heavily invested in all things digital, so much so that going back to vinyl can look like a massive leap backwards. But, there is method behind the madness.

Over the last couple of decades, since digital systems were introduced, great advancements in digital technology have been made. Practically all aspects of our lives are influenced, in some way or another, by a digital system. We can buy physical items and even book flights online all through a network of digital computers. Many aspects of our homes and cities are designed with the aid of digital systems, and even both the operational and safety systems of the vast majority of cars on the road are controlled by digital computers. There’s online banking, online shopping, streaming services, downloadable books, coffee machines and smart fridges….pretty much everything has gone digital. Objectively speaking, the advantages of digital systems far outweigh the advantages of analogue systems, especially when it comes to storage mediums.

So, this sudden resurgence into vinyl records certainly does seem like an incredibly futile attempt to cling onto the past. Surely we have moved away form vinyl because digital was an improvement, right? Some people will argue exactly that, and to a large degree they are very much correct.

And yet, there are thousands of die-hard vinyl fans who swear that digital audio can never sound as good as analogue, specifically with reference to vinyl. And again, to some extent they are correct too. Technically speaking, digital is better than analogue, as it has the potential to store music with greater dynamic range, on a less volatile medium, and whilst occupying far less physical space. But the keyword there is potential. Something being potentially better relies entirely on the assumption that it is being implemented and utilised to its fullest extent. As with most things in life, implementation is the key.

On numerous occasions the same album will honestly sound better on a vinyl record than what the digital version does, and the opposite can also be true. Again, implementation is key. A person who is an expert in mixing and mastering for analogue systems will likely do a much better job at producing a fantastic sounding vinyl record than what a mediocre person could manage to produce in a digital format. So, out in the real world, we can’t really say that one medium is better than the other in terms of audio quality as though it’s some sort of universal truth, but there are still other major advantages of digital audio over vinyl records that we should consider. So, let’s do exactly that — let’s take a look at what some of the advantages of digital audio is over vinyl.

First, let’s take into consideration the physical impact of vinyl.
We’re not even going to consider CDs here as they pretty much fall right in the middle between flash-memory storage and vinyl records. Instead, let’s look at just how digital music stored on something like a microSD card compares to vinyl.

You could easily fit around 7000 digital audio tracks in 44.1kHz/16-bit resolution into a 200GB microSD card, and it would weigh about 250 micrograms. For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that an album consists of an average of about 12 tracks, which means that 7000 tracks equate to around 600 albums (roughly accounting for albums that may have less than 12 tracks).

Now, if we were to switch that over into vinyl, depending on the type of vinyl and whether or not the album consists of more than one record, we could work on an average weight of around 350 grams per album including the actual sleeve(s).

So, multiply that by the 600 albums and we suddenly realise that such a big collection in vinyl form would weigh around 200 kilograms (440 lb)! To put that into perspective, a single 180 gram vinyl record has the same weight as about 700 of those microSD cards. So, you could potentially store nearly 5 million audio tracks across a total of 700 of those 200GB cards, and that collection, in total, would physically weigh the same as a single 180 gram LP. That’s pretty remarkable.

Both vinyl and digital storage mediums are, well, exactly that, just a medium for storing the data. Here we run into another advantage of digital over vinyl in the sense that vinyl is an inherently fragile medium. If you don’t handle it correctly or neglect to keep it clean it’ll be forever damaged, and those newly introduced flaws will always be present in the music when played.

Next, let’s consider what’s required for the playback of digital vs vinyl audio. For digital, well, all you need really is a small computer that can decode the digital data and convert it to an analogue form, and then finally you’ll need to hook a set of headphones or powered-speakers to the output of that device.

In the case of vinyl you’d need a turntable, which of course takes up way more physical space than a digital media player, and then you’d also need a phono-preamp if the turntable isn’t already equipped with one, and then finally you’d need a separate amplifier to actually output the sound to a set of headphones or speakers (unless the amp of choice has a built-in phono stage too).

Now, that’s just the playback equipment taken care of; other important factors to take into account is the need to properly set the turntable up in terms of ensuring that its level, that the tonearm is balanced, and that the stylus is applying an optimum amount of tracking force onto the record.

Lastly, let’s look at the actual playback of the audio. For digital it’s simply a matter of selecting the song that you want to play, adjusting the volume level, and then hitting play. It’s as simple as that.

Vinyl, on the other hand, requires you to carefully take the record out of the sleeve without touching any of the grooves, placing the record on the platter, and ensuring that the record is clean. You then have to power-up the turntable so that the platter starts rotating, followed by placing the stylus over the run-in grooves, and then finally lowering the tonearm onto the record.

Then, when the first side of the record has finished playing, you have to get up, lift the tonearm and move it out of the way, flip the record over, again ensure that the second side is clean, and then lower the tonearm into the run-in grooves once more. This is just for a single record — if you decide that you want to listen to something else, then you’ll have to go through all of that from the very beginning once again.

And speaking of…yeah, with vinyl, you can forget about automatic looping of an album or artificially created playlists that can be played in a shuffled order…that’s strictly reserved for digital. You can also forget about listening to vinyl records in a portable setting. Vinyl, by design, requires that the turntable be level and sitting perfectly still.

So, when we look back at all of those differences between digital and vinyl audio, we can see that the advantages and, more importantly, the practicality of digital is far and beyond what vinyl has to offer. In fact, we can take all of those advantages of digital, and consolidate them into a single concept; a concept which, for me, represents the biggest difference between digital and analogue as a medium — and that concept is simply an enormous amount of convenience.

Buying digital, storing digital, playing digital…it’s all very easy and convenient.
However, I can’t help but wonder if that exponentially higher level of convenience isn’t perhaps also the biggest evil of digital audio.

There’s a phrase, or rather somewhat of a philosophy, that suggests that “someone who doesn’t work for their money will not understand the value of what it means to work for or towards something, and as a result they could never truly appreciate what they have”.
If we get things too easily, we tend to start taking them for granted. Those of us who were practically born into the digital age never really got to experience what there was before digital. But, perhaps more importantly, is the fact that those who never really experienced music before digital came along also never got to experience the inherent culture that surrounded music back then.

I recently watched a documentary called All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records. Basically the documentary revolves around how the mismanagement of Tower Records lead to its ultimate demise, as did the greed of the record labels contribute to the surge of digital audio and subsequent downfall of vinyl.
However, I took away something entirely differently as well. What struck me most was the culture surrounding music in those days.

Going to the record store was an experience and a pastime. Teens, and young and old adults alike spent hours in the record store sifting through the albums and socialising with one another. Back then you also had a good chance of running into your favourite artists as they too regularly visited these record stores. Elton John famously made it part of his weekly ritual to visit a Tower Record store and purchase multiple copies of the same album (one for each of his houses). But, if you’re at around 30 years old, maybe a bit older, chances are that you never got to experience that, and it probably will never be quite the same again.

In all of that lies part of the magic of vinyl. That whole notion of physically being more involved in it makes you, at least to some extent, experience the music as an art-form and as a cultural force, rather than just lazily listening to audio.

And that’s the thing, music is about more than just audio, especially when we look at vinyl. You not only get the record, but when you buy an album you also get the large album artwork. Sometimes people might buy a specific album just for that particular album art. You often get little freebies thrown in too like posters and “behind the scenes” photos.
It’s something physical, something tangible, something you can collect and pass down.

In some ways the argument is similar for digital vs. mechanical watches, or a Kindle vs a physical book. What one person might perceive as being an “inconvenience”, another person embraces as being part of the experience and joy of collecting something.

Perhaps that is what we need to keep in mind when it comes to vinyl vs digital. We can argue day in and day out about the technical capabilities, the numbers, the graphs, and the charts and a whole host of other objective measurements — but at the end of the day we must remember just one thing…music does not occur naturally. It’s an art-form which is created entirely for the purpose of being enjoyed, connecting with one another, and in some cases, breaking social boundaries. And so, if the act of being more involved in the process, due to the nature of vinyl as a medium, makes you enjoy the music more, then that is all that matters. Like many things in life, vinyl isn’t going to be for everyone. But, if you’ve never tried it, just give it a go — you might be very surprised by it.

Well, that’s the end of Part One for this series of articles. Part Two will revolve around the turntable itself and which features to look for when making a purchasing decision. Catch you in the next one!