Why I Hate Vinyl

VINYL SIDING

The strongest viewpoints, I guess, are the changed ones. The last essay posted here began with "I used to..." and I'm able to take a similar path here, but first, a little history.

Vinyl is a vehicle for recorded music that served a sizable purpose at one time. It has been superseded by a number of subsequent formats, but one can't deny that there is a romantic historical aura now inherent to old records... and it's deserved, because for a lot of people, an adoration of pop (or other) music began with these things. But now it's going too far -- I've been in so many conversations with people in the last few years who own maybe three records and argue that they sound better than any CDs. And now they sell labels that, owow, look like vinyl to put on CDRs. How quaint! While I'll admit there's something cool about the image of a record, that, to be honest, is all they have going for them, so the punk-rock cult around the medium strikes me as silly.

I used to have a record collection. No lie. I inherited lots of '60s and '70s stuff from my parents and even more from my brother. Starting the night my dad bought me the United Artists LP of A HARD DAY'S NIGHT when I was in first grade, I was obsessed with music. Cassette tapes were fine but they wore out quickly (everything on my RUBBER SOUL tape now sounds like a funeral dirge), so vinyl was my medium of choice. I thought of compact discs as a novelty; my brother was the only person in my family who owned a CD player as far as I knew, and he only had the twelve free CDs BMG had sent him when he was in high school. I don't remember having any opinion at all about compact discs except that they were expensive.

Today I find this miraculous, but I was easily able to get numerous amazing LP's and 45's, some of which I still have. The Chess "Sweet Little Sixteen" single introduced me to Chuck Berry, a pile of Byrds discs found at a yard sale fascinated me for days on end, I gathered an nearly-complete collection of solo Beatles material, and found Beach Boys compilations I've never even heard of since. It was not a huge or wide-ranging collection, but it was a well-played one and it sat on a shelf for a long time, a shelf that sagged. (In my infinite elementary-school wisdom I put some National Geographics next to them.)

Eventually I grew tantalized by the CD section at Roses discount. They had the Beatles albums -- the original fucking British configurations! -- at $15 each. I knew nearly all of this music by heart, but to have it more or less permanently on a neat little shiny disc was an idea I enjoyed. Plus I'd started listening to the radio a lot more and CD players had become (this was 1994) the primary hardware of contemporary music. I convinced my parents to buy me a new stereo for my birthday, a GPX with a turntable, cassette player, radio, aaaaand CD player. It took forever to fucking arrive. When the mail lady finally brought it, my only problem was (a) the turntable was tiny and when you put a 33rpm record on it, it hung halfway off the damn thing, but that's okay, and (b) what the hell is a "graphic equalizer"? and (c) I had no CDs to play in it.

My first CD was HELP!... I was indeed fixated on the Beatles. Anyway, I spent a long time just staring at the disc and the jewel case. I cleaned it rather compulsively, and brought it everywhere for a while. My other CDs remain jealous of the time I spent with that one.

I kept acquiring new records for about a year after that, then I just kind of stopped. I started moving beyond the world of the Beatles and reading about rock music in general, snatching things up to try them out and discovering things I loved and things I hated. I grew addicted to things on the radio that, sans the timing, would probably never attract me today. I knew every song on SIAMESE DREAM back to front and now I can scarcely tell them apart.

By the time I neared high school, the records on my shelf had become an eyesore. I never listened to them, mainly because it was too much damn trouble to take them out of their packages and set them on the turntable... not just because my stereo was a piece of lopsided shit. LPs, I don't know if you've noticed, but they are HUGE. Huge and clunky and ugly. You can't really hold them, you can't touch them, you can't do much of anything with them. They come in these pretty cardboard covers that wear out very quickly, and within those they're generally kept in little paper sleeves that cling tightly to the vinyl.

Now comes the challenge. In order to preserve the integrity of your record you have to be careful with it, preferably not even touching the surface where all that sweet music is kept. HOW? It's next to impossible to remove the cylinder from its home without compromising it somehow, and once you manage you have to grapple with it until arriving at the ultimate goal -- the album is on the turntable.

To be fair, 7" singles are much easier to deal with, but who the fuck wants to get up and grab a different selection whenever the song's over? And no matter what the size or speed, the effect is the same when you put the needle into the grooves.

Now I don't deny the charges that vinyl, as an analogue medium, has the capability to represent the master recording of a performance a bit more closely than typical digital storage. I'll even grant that a lot of CDs manufactured in the '80s sound far worse than the same music on vinyl. But put some headphones on or crank up the volume or whatever and tell me what you hear.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
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SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Yeah, man, I'm groovin' to that vinyl hiss. Maybe it's a personal quirk but I find that noise intolerable. The same goes for the cracks and pops and little skips that records go through on set schedules even when they're fairly new. I do understand audiophile arguments, but it's like Dave Marsh said -- vinyl may sound better than CDs if you have astonishing top of the line equipment, in which case you ought to be spending money on music instead of hardware.

See, when people talk about the "warmth" of their favorite record in its original published form, they're either being nostalgic or they're deaf or they're full of shit. The only "warmth" is the miserable signal-to-noise ratio on the wax, and the tinny, overbaked quality of the sound that results, especially in terms of vocals.

The hardware is rough-going -- turntables are difficult to deal with, and when your needle needs to be replaced, good luck -- and the software is simply useless with the advent of superior media. Of course it's nice to be able to look at the banding and tell where to put the stylus, but get this -- my CD player has a skip button that does the same thing! And hey, storage of the records is impossible, so much so that the few albums I have left -- I sold most of them happily -- just sit on the floor. There's no place to put 'em! They're awkardly shaped and you can't do much of anything with them without threatening "damage."

As far as the beauty of the packaging, well, I can see where people are coming from with that, but this is supposed to be about music, not pretty pictures. And hey, most of the "classic" album covers are pretentious tripe anyway. You're not missing a hell of a lot just because you can't unzip STICKY FINGERS or peel THE VU & NICO. And if you give them anything resembling regular use the corners will be worn in no time, with the rest sure to follow.

I can't stop people from enjoying records. It is still inhumanely annoying when they start arguing with me about my preference for compact discs. I love CDs... their packages have hidden compartments, and they fit very nicely on a shelf, and you can have a whole fucking lot of them -- say, close to 600 -- without threatening to crash through the floor, invading the private lives of your neighbors in the apartment below. You say you want to get away from all this artificial optical nonsense, and I think you and your beloved LPs are both ridiculously outdated.

And continuing our series "Nathan Hates Everything," that's why I hate vinyl records.