Vinyl sounds best
I’m with the heretics ...
RECENTLY , I bought a new turntable after more than 20 years without vinyl records. I bought it to listen to test pressings of The Legendary Knights at the Magic Swamp after being convinced to do a very limited vinyl edition of the all-Tasmanian album, on which I play guitar and produced with gun engineer Michael Shelley at The Green Room studio.
The reaction to the CDs has been so positive, and to properly honour the sublime album art by Hobart’s Chris Downes, we are releasing an LP at a launch in the near future. Stay tuned at www.thelegendaryknights.com
The return to vinyl was an emotional one because I was once an avid collector with about 2500 LPs picked up from all over Australia, New Zealand and the US. Every chance to visit a new city, I found the local record store and filled my suitcases with second-hand albums. I loved everything about LPs, their feel, size, sound and artwork.
That all stopped, however, when the rental I was living in tragically burnt to the ground on the New Year’s Eve leading into 1999, destroying all my things and leaving me in the dire situation of having no job, no income, no savings, no clothes other than those I was wearing, no possessions and no idea.
That New Year’s Day, I stood sadly watching my razed home smoulder and noticed in the corner, where the lounge once was, there were purple, pink, blue and green flames flickering off the embers, barely visible in the daylight.
It was my beloved records, reduced to an oily jelly of toxic bubbling lava, with a Jovianlike atmosphere of rainbowcolour flames, which belched poisonous gas with unnerving nonchalance into whispy trails that curled skyward.
The Marantz record player, its big beautiful speakers, were burnt to dust, unlike my guitars, whose metal truss rods proved indestructible. The metal bars that run through a guitar’s neck to keep it straight were tragic skeletal remnants in pitiful piles of grey-white ash, not so long ago cherished instruments that consumed my attention and invited my caress for hours.
The thought of starting from scratch to collect LPs was too painful. It would take years to re-find what I had lost so I didn’t bother, turning to CDs, Bluetooth and streaming. Until now.
I don’t know how much is psychological and how much is empirically measurable, but the turntable experience has been gobsmackingly good and has sparked in me a fervour of listening and a reborn joy and thrill in the listening process.
The fact there is a record spinning with a stylus on it, gives the eye a meditational focus that appears to relax the mind and allow the ears and listening to take precedence.
The fact a record is in halves suits my concentration span too, with listening sessions of 20 to 25 minutes, before having to get up and turn the LP over, or make a cuppa, ring a friend, or pour a vino or walk away.
If a fine Barossa shiraz can be described as chocolaty, the sound of a premium turntable with a good system is velvety.
It’s subjective, arguable and teeters in and out of the ether, and is as much about feelings and aesthetics as science.
But I know from working on The Legendary Knights at the Magic Swamp album that the mastering process required for CD and streaming is quite different to that for vinyl.
Vinyl cannot be pushed as hard, which seems to leave it with a little more clarity and dimensionality in the spatial positioning of instruments in the mix. In other words you can more easily distinguish where the drums or bass or guitars are in space; to the right and a little forward, or back to the left down the hall.
Generally, songs we hear on a radio have been heavily compressed to create a sense of loudness. This reduces the dynamics of the sound by clipping peaks and ramping up the quieter parts. A bit like flattening a Da Vinci into a Matisse, the subject becomes more intense and obvious. It squashes the detail and floods what remains with loudness.
This all helps a song sound OK on cheaper car stereos, crappy computer speakers, old radios and TVs. Since the 1990s this trend to sound louder has become outrageous, but if your song only works on a good system it ain’t going to have a big market. Most join the club.
The range of frequencies available on vinyl is thinner than a CD, meaning it sounds slightly flatter, grounded and not as dynamic in high and low frequencies. To my ear, this registers as “warm” analog tone, a unique vinyl-style midrange-only compression.
The sense of electricity when a stylus touches vinyl before the music starts is a delight, and a rare fireside pop or crackle far from intrusive.
OVER the past 20 years I incidentally acquired five LPs and what an eclectic mix they have proved over the past few days.
(1) Years ago a mate gave me Jimi Hendrix’s posthumous 1970 Crash Landing album. I bought legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s 1970 Moto Grosso Feio (2) on eBay, as I did (3) Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan’s divine 2017 album An Ancient Observer, and (4) British sax great Joe Farrell’s 1970 LP Song of the Wind. And, when the tip shop was around the corner from the old CBD Mercury building, I stumbled across (5) the Kurdistan Devil Worshippers’ Songs and Dances of the Yazidis, which I suspect was recorded in the 1970s, but it fails to properly detail.
To cap off this quirky five, a good friend just gave me Frank Zappa’s 1982 triple-album box set Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar.
New to me, it turns out my brother, who died in 2012, loved the album like I do, and when he left Hobart for work in Sydney — his madcap life its usual beautiful mess — he thrust the box in our mutual friend’s hand: “Look after this.”
For three decades or more, he did exactly that. It’s mint.