Turntables

I wrote the article below almost eight years ago. It was published on a long-since-defunct WrittenByMe.com, and got an honorable mention of the week, or whatever their equivalent of an elementary school smiley face sticker was. When I found and re-read it a few day ago, a few things jumped out at me immediately. The "new, even better digital formats" (SACD and DVD-A) never took hold, and are now all but dead. I had a reference to MiniDisc in the original version too, but that was already dead even then. The availability of used vinyl has shrunk significantly, and the prices have skyrocketed. I feel that I rode the last great wave of cheap, plentiful old records. The Tower Annex, along with the rest of Tower Records everywhere, is, very sadly, history. Thankfully, new vinyl is still being released, though it is usually no longer cheaper than the same title on CD. What I saw in 2000-2001 was the last vestige of vinyl as a normal format. Today, it is a 100% specialty market. Finally, needless to say I am no longer "not even thirty."

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A turntable?!?! You just bought a turntable? And a brand-new one, no less? This is the year 2000, for goodness' sake! We have CD! Perfect sound forever! We also have MP3, and new, even better digital formats are just around the bend. Have you been cryogenically frozen for the last fifteen years, or have you simply lost your mind? Well, no. Before you burn me at the laser stake for digital heresy, allow me to explain. I have not been frozen, and I would like to think that if indeed I am insane, it is for completely different reasons. Yes, there are CDs - I have hundreds of them. I love them and I think they sound great. Although to some extent I grew up with LPs (more on that in a moment), I am really a member of the CD generation. There still are, however, very compelling reasons to own a quality turntable.

First, there is the audiophile, specifically the analog-obsessed variety. There are people out there who never subscribed to the whole "digital is better" philosophy. They are convinced that analog recordings, when properly reproduced, sound warmer, more musical and more lifelike than digital ever can. As the respected audio reviewer Steve Guttenberg puts it, there is more "there" there. This approach may seem esoteric, and I think it is. Unless you are totally bluffing your way through the whole process, it involves being able to hear extremely subtle differences in inherently unquantifiable aspects of sound reproduction, which in turn requires learning how to hear these differences and having the opportunity, time, inclination and not insignificant amounts of money to compare various gear. Besides, an argument has been made - a very good one, in my opinion - that music listening is a fundamentally holistic experience: either it grabs your soul in its entirety or it does not, and when it does, everything else, including sound quality, becomes irrelevant. To talk about individual aspects of sound is thus to miss the point.

There is a further subset of audiophiles who enjoy gear for gear's sake. There is almost nothing else they would rather do than balance tonearms, twist counterweights and optimize stylus tracking angles, and they can debate relative merits of moving-coil versus moving-magnet cartridges long into the night. At best, this is appreciation of engineering, not art. In any case, these people most likely already own multi-thousand-dollar masterpieces of industrial design fashioned out of hand-polished rosewood and aircraft-grade aluminum to caress their cherished vinyl, so they are not who I am talking about here, or who I am trying to appeal to.

Second, there is the pragmatist. There is a ton of quality used vinyl out there available at bargain basement prices. It is true that it is becoming more scarce every year, but it is also true that so much is still left that even if I did nothing but listen to LPs for the rest of my life, I would not be able to get through it all, and I am not even thirty. Some of us are fortunate to live in or frequently visit places where quality used vinyl is plentiful. Between Bleecker Bob's, Second Coming Records and the Tower Annex in New York City's Greenwich Village, one can be in collector's heaven for years. Even elsewhere, there is hope. The day after the turntable arrived, at a used book store right here in Washington, DC - a notoriously vinyl-deprived place - I picked up Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto for $1 and Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert for $6, both in pristine condition, and this was before I visited a single thrift shop or garage sale. Fifty cents apiece, anyone? Seventeen records for $10? An entire milk crate for $25, crate included? Who cares that you will never listen to three quarters of the stuff. Buy now, sort it out later. You'll still make out three to four times better than the same titles on CD, and that's before you even consider that a good part of that music is probably out of print forever. Finally, new LPs are still being released in quantities larger than most people realize, and they usually retail for less than the same title on CD. At least a third of the Fantasy Records (umbrella label for Riverside, Milestone, Prestige and Stax, among others) 2000-2001 catalog is available on LP. So, if you subscribe to the non-comparative notion that LPs can sound at least good, which they most certainly can, you just saved yourself some serious money.

Beyond the audiophile and the pragmatist, there is the nostalgic sap. To paraphrase a certain tasteless t-shirt, I am 51% pragmatist, 49% nostalgic sap. I have always felt that holding a record in my hands, especially a used one, with its sleeve edges beginning to fray and the cardboard starting to turn yellow with age, puts me in touch with the time it was made more than a CD ever can. It takes me back to the earliest childhood I can remember, when my father would always have records around the house. His own, mostly Mozart and the Beatles, which he would spin on his god-awful one-piece record player, and his friends', which he would diligently copy onto tape using his gargantuan reel-to-reel tape recorder (this was a place where all non-military technology was at least twenty years behind the rest of the world). I recall tagging along with him to the apartments of his friends - men with longish hair who smelled of cigarettes and bad aftershave - who would promptly show us their stereo systems, almost entirely self-made (nothing like the Iron Curtain to create remarkable artisans out of average joes), dominated by a jury-rigged turntable, always large and ugly, but always functional. They would pull out a record and put it on, handing my father the sleeve and turning up the volume. "Wow, an original Oscar Peterson," my father would say with admiration, and they would talk for a while about what records so-and-so smuggled in on his latest trip to West Germany and how much money might convince him to part with some of them. Then they would retreat into the kitchen to smoke and drink tea, leaving me in the living room to examine the mysterious switches and wires in awe.

Even more recent times are brought into focus by certain records for me. I recently picked up a copy of Liz Story's Part of Fortune (1986). I didn't hear a note when I listened to it for the first time - I was too busy admiring the sleeve. It features a full-size portrait of young Story, her hair teased and sprayed beyond recognition, wearing a blazer with a paint-splotch pattern and exaggerated shoulder pads. The photo is touched up with just the right amounts of powder blue and pastel pink. Today, we might see a picture like this in an ad for a retro-Eighties dance party at the local multi-level dance emporium, but this is the real thing. People looked like this as a matter of course, and touching up a photo in pastel tones was considered chic rather than tacky. Putting the envelope down and noticing that the needle has long since reached the end of a side, I reflected on just how little we notice the changes in everyday things until something so simple as a record hits us over the head with contrast. Humans are nostalgic creatures. We love things that remind us of bygone days. While living in the past is dangerous, taking an occasional trip back never hurt anyone, and there are few better ways to do so than by spinning up a record.

February 2001