IT’S A GROOVY KIND OF LOVE
What goes around comes around: with sales on the up, is it time to go back to vinyl?
The standard joke with vinyl record decks used to be about their appeal to men with enormous beards, who listened to their treasured discs at 3am when the National Grid was at its most stable, and audio purity was guaranteed (this is advice I’ve seen in print, and in all seriousness, to boot).
The beard part now, of course, no longer applies, as under-25s have embraced facial topiary with great enthusiasm.
Tellingly, while the Technics DJ SL-1200 DJ decks that powered dance music fell out of production, Linn’s Sondek LP12 turntable, is still going four decades after it launched. ‘We thought it was going to be DJs who saved vinyl,’ says Linn Records’ chief producer Phil Hobbs. ‘But it’s not. It’s rock, jazz, and the proper, timeless classics. DJs use laptops now – or iPads.’
Half a million vinyl records were sold in Britain last year, prompting Geoff Taylor of the Phonographic Industry to quip, ‘Vinyl is back in the groove.’
‘This is a quiet revolution,’ says Hobbs. The discs themselves have got better, he adds, and the process used to press them has improved ‘five times over’ in the past 10 years. For Linn, it’s just part of an ongoing process. The company has been making record decks since 1973, with a philosophy of producing ‘pure’ sound.
‘We have customers who’ve had their decks for 40 years, and who write to the engineers who built their decks, by name,’ says Hobbs. The Sondek LP12s are built by hand from belts, platters and wooden casings at a rate of maybe half a dozen a day.
They are identical to the original except for the fact that ‘every single part has been upgraded’.
One suspects vinyl will still be with us when CD is as distant a memory as MiniDiscs, Digital Audio Cassettes and LaserDiscs – and no matter what happens to music or computers, you’ll still be able to buy a Sondek LP12, signed by the engineer who made it.