It is a known fact, that there has been a rebirth of vinyl after the abysmal strike of the cassette in the 80’s and then the less terrible birth of the CD in the late 90’s. I personally have been part of this “revolution” if you will, for 2 years now, but I have entered it with full dedication and love towards this round black plastic. It is quite an odd subject to pick for a conversation; because the collector always ends up looking as the guy who “doesn’t know how to spend his money”. The usual discussion statements proposed by the downloader are; “It’s the same music”, or “Who cares if I have no album cover”, or my personal favorite “That is old school man”.
So what I wanted to do is analyze the experience of the listener to each different type of music format.
Digital Download:
Alone, staring onto the bright white light of iTunes or realistically speaking any torrent website, one presses the download now button, (in the case of a torrent, hoping it is the correct button not the pop-up one) and you wait for about 10 seconds max to have the song on your pc. Then you play it whilst browsing Facebook.
CD:
Well, you went to a store, or possibly ordered it online and it arrived at your house, and now all you have to do is put it into your computer and sort it out on any media browser, or you could play on your stereo whilst looking on the cd box to try and appreciate the album cover and through the use of a magnifying glass maybe follow the lyrics.
Vinyl:
You’re somewhere out on Sunday, maybe you find yourself near some kind of “car-booth-sale-thrift-shop-market-like” vestibule where you happen to see some boxes filled with “square paper folders” in which you find a black circle-shaped piece of hard "plastic’ — a vinyl. After asking the man behind the pile of crap of "antiques’ or just plain out-of-fashion broken objects from the late 90’s, for the price of the record, his reply is a stunning “2 ewros il-wa?da”. You pay the man, you go home, switch on the current, push in the “On” button on your turntable, put the record on the center or spindle if you like, and put the tone-arm or needle, on the record. Now you hear some grainy noises because you didn’t clean the poor age-infected record, but at one point something is being heard.
Now you sit down, and you look at the turntable, or you look at the sky from the window nearest to yourself, but your hearing abilities are focused on the record, and so is every other piece of your mind. Now you look at the 12” by 12” record sleeve, and you follow the lyrics (leaving the magnifying glass near your CD rack), and you admire the cover art as if you’re holding an original Van Gogh, only you’re confident enough to hold a glass of whiskey as well. At this point the second track has started and this mysterious album, has already touched your heart. You sit down and wait till your turntable shows you that you need to turn the record on the other side. The ritual is done, you’ve listened to an album, and you have connected to the music. The next time you do this you would be needing more glasses, and a bottle of whiskey, as you would have your friends over to interact with this simple yet wondrous way of listening to music.
As you can conclude yourselves the last section is drowning in a paradise of hyperbole, but it is truly for the sake of emphasis, as one cannot in any way show the reality of these different experiences, unless one actually sits down and listens to the clear cut, beautiful tone of the vinyl, and compare it to the unfortunately compressed sound of a CD and a digital download.