This past Saturday was the bi-annual Record Store Day. While I didn't get out to buy vinyl for myself this year (I got the Devo 12" and Elvis Costello 7" last year), I was there in spirit.
Record stores are starting to disappear except in large cities like Vancouver and Seattle. In some ways, the record store seems like a quaint holdover from old times, like campus radio, championing dead or dying music forms. But, this is far from the truth. Vinyl record sales have been on the upswing in the past two years. And there's something to be said for holding a piece of music in your hand, rather than having it as a digital file on your mp3 player of choice.
I've always said art is an artifact, in that, it needs to be a physical object in order to be fully appreciated. If you'll excuse some sentimentality, the days when you could hold a full length album in your hand, with full cover artwork, and artwork on the inside of the album in some cases, showed you more insight into who the band was. Even a CD case gives you a booklet of liner notes you can read in addition to enjoying the music. That sense of effort put into a piece of art is lost if you just have a digital file. You have the name of the artist, the title and the song itself. What about the lyrics? Or the producer? Or even the record label? All that is lost with strictly digital music. You can't sense what went into making it. At the very least, you lose out on the little things. Similarly, you could look at a high quality megapixel photograph of the Mona Lisa, but wouldn't you rather go into the Louvre and see it for yourself?
Another aspect is what is called the Loudness Wars. Back when CDs were brand new, there was a lot of talk about their benefits as recording technology, namely, their dynamic range. Vinyl records had a dynamic range of 60 dB, which meant you could push the volume up to 60 dBs before the sound started to distort. CDs have a dynamic range of 100 dB, which meant you could push them even louder without distortion, which meant the sound was much clearer and less prone to distortion. If you give a listen to a CD made in the late 80s, you can hear how quiet they are recorded in comparison to a CD produced in the last ten years. Once the CD became accepted, instead of seeing more recording exploiting that dynamic range, engineers and producers were instead pushing the initial recording volume up, so instead of starting at 0 dB base, they'd start at 40, 50, even 60 dB as a base, wiping out the dynamic range that a CD format gave as a benefit. So, the CD format is now *LESS* dynamic than vinyl and sounds worse than vinyl in terms of distortion. This is one of the reasons why vinyl is making a comeback, because it sounds better than CDs. Most vinyl fans also say that vinyl sound warmer than CDs as well. It's also a factor in why big record labels are taking a beating in sales right now, but that's a post for another day.
Adding into this is the digitalization of music, which flattens out the sound of music. Digital music is compressed in order for it to take up less space, which means that the extremes of the music are usually clipped off. This means that louder sounds sound quieter and quiet sounds are loudened up, making everything sound flat. A trained ear can hear a digitally compressed track immediately. Modern engineered rock music is over-produced, recorded to loud and lacks the subtlety an older, more properly engineered album does. The only CDs you hear today that fully exploit the range of a CD format is high end classical and jazz albums. The modern rock CD is like comparing a caveman's club to a diamond-headed drill of a vinyl album.
Perhaps the most important part of Record Store Day are the special incentives, which are produced strictly for the music fan and the record store lovers of the world. You get lovingly crafted vinyl, with coloured vinyl, unreleased tracks, special pressings and other goodies. Most of the major record labels don't get too involved in RSD outside of a few special releases, which means we get to support the artists themselves.
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