Why is it that we’ve fallen back in love with flawed vinyl technology, asks Jon Honeyball

We now have a population that hasn’t been brainwashed into hearing ‘wow’ and ‘flutter’ all the time

You know you’re getting old when things that were fashionable when you were young come back into the media limelight. It almost defines you as being unhip to note “it was better last time around”. It doesn’t matter if it’s clothing styles, something I’ve never understood, or hip technology. So the rise of interest in vinyl LPs is a fascinating thing to watch. For starters, for those of us interested in hi-fi and music, vinyl never went away. Firms such as Linn Products and Rega have held the torch for the highest levels of engineering quality, with products made here in Britain.

Unfortunately, much of the vinyl revolution has happened due to those hip creatures with well-groomed beards and topknots. It has become a trendy thing to have, a sign that you are “sophisticated”. I wouldn’t know, having enjoyed vinyl (and CD and, more recently, streaming) for as long as I can remember.

The problem with vinyl is that it’s not very good. I know it has a big, romantic following, but it’s a miracle it works at all. To cut a master disc, you must do all sorts of tweaking – much of the time the bass has to be monoed, to ensure the groove can be tracked by the stylus. Then there is the RIAA equalisation curve that’s applied to it, to make the whole panjandrum work.

Yet people think that vinyl is somehow more “human” and “emotional” than CD or streaming.

I think there are a number of obvious reasons for this. First and foremost, LPs are lovely things to handle. They have weight and size. They feel important. Next, LP sleeves can be works of art, especially a gatefold LP sleeve that you can open to discover the delights within. Compare this to the world of CD where we were reduced to a fiddly booklet with type so small that you needed a magnifying glass. Or, even worse, a modern streaming service such as Tidal or Spotify, where you must poke at the screen of your smartphone to make things work.

So there’s no surprise that people like the LP sleeve. It’s interesting, it harks back to an era of books and libraries. We are clearly aware, if only subliminally, that in gaining instant access to almost everything, we have also lost something fundamentally important, and deeply human, in the process.

This shows in how we listen. With an LP, you tend to drop the needle at the first track and then settle back to enjoy a whole side, taking some 20 to 25 minutes. With CD, we have become attuned to the “next track” button, which lets us leap around a disc to find the specific track, or even part of a track, that we’re hunting. With streaming, it’s even worse – jump from a Joni Mitchell track to an ABBA one and then onto that particular live version by James Taylor. Everything is available to you, right now. So you don’t sit down to listen to a side anymore – you grab from a pick’n’mix solution that rarely satisfies, but gives you anything you want without delay.

For vinyl, it’s a more considered process. Which album do you want to listen to? Which side? Then you put it on, and savour the process, getting lost in the performance, and while perusing the meaning of the lyrics printed on the gatefold album cover.

And it sounds “old” and “analogue” and “interesting”. Yes, there’s surface noise – the pops,clicks and bangs we’ve lost since the arrival of the CD. But life is full of random noise, so we instinctively manage to filter out much of this. A more interesting issue is wow and flutter, the slow (wow) and high (flutter) pitch instability you get on analogue devices, whether they’re record players or tape machines.

Having been measuring wow and flutter on some turntables recently, I was struck by how bad the IEC spec appeared to be: there’s an “IEC weighted” methodology, which is supposed to replicate our ear’s sensitivity to pitch wobbles, but even supposedly good results sounded remarkably poor.

And then it struck me – the IEC weighting factors were set decades ago. At the time, almost every music reproduction that the public ever heard was from an analogue source with W&F. Only a live concert broadcast on radio or TV would be clean, but all other radio came via tape, or even worse, cartridge tape. Or vinyl record. Even cinema film had wobbly sound on it. Your cassette Walkman wasn’t pitch stable either, nor was your in-car tape player.

But since the arrival of CD, the world has changed. We now have a population that hasn’t been brainwashed into hearing W&F all the time. So is it any wonder we find our interest piqued by vinyl when it does something wrong, in a way that we are simply not used to hearing anymore?