Walking into Amoeba Music, you’re going to have a hard
time finding cassette tapes for sale. And you won’t see
8-track cartridges, those bulky and lesser-evolved forms of
cassettes. The reason is obvious: Both these mediums of music have
been replaced by one considered to be far superior in nearly every
respect. I’m speaking, of course, about the compact disc.
If you’re like me, CDs had already become the standard
when you were old enough to start buying your own music. My
memories of cassette tapes consist only of my inexplicable
infatuation with Phil Collins’ “But Seriously” at
the age of 6 and of religiously making mix tapes for the car ride
to school every morning in the ninth and 10th grades. With only
these exceptions, I spent most of my childhood expanding my CD
collection with whatever spare change I had.
But I’m getting worried; now even CDs seem to be slowly
going the way of 8-tracks and cassettes. With iPods and MP3 players
taking a firm hold of the music industry, music stores are going
out of business left and right, unable to compete.
Will I one day be unable to find CDs, those marvelous silver
discs that I’ve invested so much of my money and time into
obtaining?
This line of thought got me thinking of whether there is any
medium of music that could last, anything I could use to satiate my
hunger for music without worrying that, in 10 years, the technology
will have been rendered totally obsolete by something new and
alarmingly convenient ““ and that’s when it hit me. The
answer is simple: vinyl.
Since its invention in the early 20th century, the vinyl record
has survived technology’s numerous attempts to destroy it.
You may not be able to find 8-tracks and cassette tapes at a music
store, but records are still being made and sold and, while less
music is available on vinyl, it surpasses any form of recorded
music in its longevity.
Its persistence can be credited to several factors. There is,
first and foremost, the undeniable charm of putting that glossy
black disc onto a turntable and setting the needle comfortably into
one of its grooves. There is also the advantage of having the album
art and liner notes in their largest available size so that the
thought that goes into the album’s packaging, which often
gets lost in other mediums, can be fully appreciated. And finally,
there is the long-standing argument that music simply sounds better
on vinyl.
In the last few months, I’ve become convinced that this
argument is totally valid. The opposition, those who believe
digital music (CDs, MP3s, etc.) is of higher quality, think that
records lack in both depth and broad tonal range, and argue further
that vinyl can be physically flawed, producing clicks, pops and
static hum, while digital music does not.
This is all true, though not necessarily good. One of my most
frequent arguments about contemporary music is how overproduced and
inhumanly precise it can be; the warm, analog quality of vinyl does
not often allow for this to happen and makes the music sound much
more like it would live, which, after all, is the point of
recording music in the first place. Ask any experienced musician
and he or she will tell you: Recorded music belongs on vinyl. And,
as far as the physical flaws go, I can’t help but find them
more endearing than annoying.
That’s why, from this point on, I will only be investing
my money in records. Not only is it the superior music medium, but
also the most permanent. It is music as it is intended to be, and
no amount of digital trickery and intimidating technology can
change that.
Duhamel almost spent $20,000 for a Velvet Underground
acetate on eBay. E-mail him at dduhamel@media.ucla.edu.