For the record – all hail vinyl

Today was going to involve a trip to the cinema to see Singin’ in the Rain on a big screen, but a chill I picked up when my lower legs and feet got soaked while working outside on Thursday put paid to going anywhere.

So instead, the day has offered another chance to indulge in a newfound household love of music – when it’s on vinyl rather than CD or digital.

Like the predicted demise of cinema as a result of TV, the death of records as a result of CDs and then the digital revolution has been greatly overdone.

Indeed, vinyl has been making a comeback for some years – particularly with DJs on the club scene: after all, how does scrubbing work when the music is on a CD or is digital?

There’s been a deck in wherever I’ve called my home – it’s been the one removable piece of one of those stacked hi-fi units. But it hasn’t been compatible with anything else we had for at least two decades. Some years ago, The Other Half bought a Bose amp and speakers that would link with our digital music, but it never worked with the aforementioned deck.

And yet …

Last month, the OH decided he was buying a new deck. The old one could be used in our study to digitise vinyl.

He went to Richer Sounds (a very ethically sound company, by the way) and came away with a very nice deck. But it didn’t quite work with the Bose kit. I suggested that, since he has a ‘big’ birthday coming up in January, I could get him a new amp and speakers as a pressie.

He didn’t want to wait that long – so I got it early. From Richer Sounds – which company I really do recommend. Ethically excellent and therefore, with superb, knowledgable staff. We’ll be back before the end of the year, because it looks increasingly likely that he’ll get a good CD player to add to the system, as a birthday present for me. I fully intend to take up the chance to test drive what they have with some of my favourite classical recording.

When we get that, we’ll use it to check just how much better vinyl is than CDs – or perhaps not. But for the moment, the evidence of our ears – and our souls – is overwhelming.

We’ve listened to easy, classical, rock, jazz, pop, folk-rock … and guess what? It’s all better. The sound is deeper, warmer and less … how to put it? Flat. You can easily imagine yourself in a concert space or a cathedral or in a recording studio – in other words, somewhere with space. For the first time, I see the shortcomings of CDs and digital.

Because for the first time, I’m listening to vinyl on really good kit, even if far from the top of any available range.

Growing up, my parents had one of those huge radiograms – the size of a big sofa, but probably lacking in the actual sound department. 

Back in the 1970s, the first really grown-up album I listened to was Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, when babysitting and reading my employers’ copy of Emmanuelle as a much-needed sex education. Yet I’ve only ever owned it as a cassette and then a CD. A new, 180gm vinyl copy arrived yesterday: it’s like hearing it for the very first time.

Herbert Von Karajan

Last weekend, with a desperate, almost physical craving for something lushly late Romantic, I got hold of a new copy of Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Dance of the Seven Veils by Richard Strauss. Recorded in 1959 and 1960 respectively, by the Vienna Philharmonic and Herbert Von Karajan, these are iconic recordings.

We had listened to a recording I'd had since the 1980s of the Berlin Philharmonic, with Von Karajan conducting, playing Ravel’s Bolero and Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d’un faune. A revelation.

The Strauss was no different.

Hearing all these on vinyl, was extraordinary. I know them well – or so I thought – yet there I was, clocking things I’d never heard before.

It’s true: vinyl produces greater warmth, greater detail – and a greater sense of space: it’s not ‘flat’. You are suddenly in the concert hall or the cathedral (if listening to organ music or a requiem) or even the studio.

Earlier today, I put on my 7” of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (copy from the 1970s: eight-track and all that stuff). A work that I am almost unbelievably familiar with. And yes – it’s warmer and there is more detail – there’s a shimmer of bells at one point that I have never noticed before.

Then I followed it with an LP of James Galway playing Mozart’s flute concertos and, by god, if you don’t benefit from added detail with Wolfie, then where do you benefit from detail?

I have orders on the way for some minimalist American music (Glass, Adams and Reich) and for the new two-disc Jonas Kaufmann set of songs of Vienna, Wien. Apart from actually experiencing music live, I haven’t been as excited by it for years.

And what do we learn from all this? Certainly that, while tech and innovation can give us new things that are good, they are not inevitably better than what went before. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – and other such clichés.

Oh – and investing in seriously good hardware will produce seriously good results.