I don’t hate vinyl, I was just very pleased when something came along that let me listen to music without that air of tension which always crept in when you knew that the song with the awful pop after 1 minute 23 seconds was up next. For me it was the crack on the edge of my copy of Be Bop Deluxe’s ‘Live In The Air Age’ that meant you couldn’t play the first track on either side without scattering shards of stylus across the room. I tried cassettes but if there was ever a format that felt like a swindle when you walked out of HMV after parting with a fiver it’s tape. Something small, so badly put together it rattled and that my cheap player was likely to eat was never a great option.
Now I’m not saying I didn’t like the sleeves, which is one of the big arguments often given in favour of LPs. I poured over the liner notes to Aja, trying to pick out some nugget of information I may have missed before. Of course later on I found out they were written by Becker and Fagen as a parody of the essays on Blue Note albums from the 50s. But the click that developed halfway through Pete Christlieb’s solo on ‘Deacon Blue’ stopped me playing it for ages.
CD’s aren’t perfect, Steely Dan themselves suffered from poor quality digital transfers of the original tapes for years. If you care about this sort of thing then read this Wikipedia post on the “Citizen” box set. With the market for Super Deluxe remastered to within an inch if it’s life multi disc box sets I’m slightly surprised that new editions of their albums haven’t appeared yet. I’m sure Mr Fagen has it in mind for his pension plan if his shabby lawsuit against Walter Becker’s estate succeeds.
Anyway with the news that Sainsburys will stop selling CDs prompting a bit of clickbait from the BBC, the fact is that physical product of all sorts is still alive and well and living in collector land. Vinyl, old or new, sells well although I do wonder how many of the hip kids in charity shops sifting through for nuggets actually play their purchases. If vinyl’s so great why include a download card? One of my ways of keeping dog food on the table during the current unpleasantness has been selling CDs on Discogs, and the collector market there is thriving, with over 3000 sold in 9 months. Yes I use Spotify, yes I download most of my CD purchases onto the iPod, convenience is king and frankly I just don’t want to accumulate more stuff, but the right CD reissues I will keep, and have a small but perfectly formed collection of what I think is the best music.
“Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, “Listen, mate, life has surface noise.” John Peel
I’m sure there is a law against disagreeing with Peel, but while I see what he meant my ears are 57 years old and frankly need all the help they can get to creep past the surface noise.
I know ‘each to their own’, and ‘live and let live’ may be unfashionable views these days but let’s embrace them. You play your vinyl, and I will carry on with CDs. Just please don’t try and convince me that something that reproduces music by dragging a piece of diamond across a bit of plastic has some mystical “better sound”. 160gigblog
For another view of the debate Paul Sinclair at SuperDeluxe Edition wrote this 18 months or so ago
