The Vinyl Revolution: Or, An Imperfect Analog

Sadly, the smoke box does not billow on the vinyl.

A long time ago I began a love affair with vinyl. Looking back, I think the impetus for this romance was Tool’s Ænima, an album that I was totally enamored with during my sophomore year of high school. The progression of my passion for Ænima followed a pattern that would continue for quite some time, and one that included resources that were rather novel at the time, certainly novel to me at any rate. First I downloaded the album on a whim from a disreputable source. At the time this meant dialing into the Internet with a 56k modem, finding an FTP site and queuing up the files in an FTP client to download for the rest of the night. The next morning, if you were lucky, you had a brand new illegal album. After I fell in love with it, I scoured the Internet for as many trivial tidbits as I could possibly find. For Ænima there was a virtual goldmine in the ridiculously exhaustive (and still available) Tool FAQ: unimportant factoids and dubious allusions galore! After a period of time, which turned much shorter as my “disposable” income increased and my self-control decreased, I purchased the actual physical album. This was, and still is, less to do with supporting the artist (though that’s part of it) and more to do with having a physical thing that is a manifestation of my interests. As time went on all of these things become more and more ritualized, to usually pathetic degrees.

For example: one of the things that I learned in the exhaustive FAQ, was that Ænima was available on vinyl. Of course, I grew up listening to records; for a long time that was the only way to hear music, in my parents’ house.  But I had no nostalgic attachment to the format, nor did I have any illusions about vinyl having any advantages in terms of audio fidelity. Nevertheless, I know wanted a copy of Ænima on vinyl. This had a lot with my metastasizing obsession: the artwork on the vinyl was different and there were strange properties described about it that I didn’t quite understand. I wanted it. Eventually, probably after several months, I dropped twenty bucks on it at the now defunct Brookfield Exclusive Company. When I picked it up, it struck me as strange that a vinyl would have the ubiquitous Parental Advisory Sticker I saw so often on the small and much more prevalent CD covers. At that point, vinyl was such an anachronistic format, it seemed odd that it would still conform to the trappings of more modern packaging. Certainly none of my parents’ albums had any parental advisory stickers… but then again they also didn’t have the sounds of Tool on them! Oh my, how strange. How wonderful!

One of the main reasons I bought the vinyl. I can't explain why, but I thought this was so cool. Oh, 16 year old Nathan. Why were you so silly?

Since I didn’t have a record player of my own, one night, while my parents were off doing something parenty, I started up their aging autochanger to play my new record, the one I’d heard so many times before digitally. I balanced the record carefully on the tall center spindle, and dropped the arm that sandwiched the record to the spindle on top of it. Then I pulled the little switched that dropped the record with a satisfying thud onto the turntable and automatically drove the tone arm to its proper place at the beginning of the record.

There was no revelation, for me, regarding the sound, except that the music was coming through an actual stereo as opposed to my tiny boombox speakers. The initial feeling I had was simply one of, “Well… it’s Ænima on record. A few pops here and there, but mostly the same.” However by the end of the album, I immediately realized a fundamental difference between listening to a record and a CD. This was almost certainly exacerbated by the fact that Ænima is a rather long: listening to an album on record is necessarily more engaging than listening to it on a CD. Whenever I listened to Tool before, I clicked the CD into my Discman, closed the lid and hit play. And that was that. 80 minutes later, I’d be done and in that time I’d engage in any number of activities. But when listening to it on record, I had to get up and change sides. I realized I had a much more engaging experience when I had forced intermissions every once in a while.

Now, though I’ve long since left Tool behind, I still seek out that engagement. I much prefer buying vinyl, much to the chagrin of my pocketbook and shelfspace, and a lot of it has to do with that physicality I discovered so long ago. Even when arranging MP3s, I keep the side specifications in there for a rather poor simulacrum of that feeling. Of course, I also still get MP3 copies of CDs and Records from sources of dubious legality, search the Internet for tidbits, and eventually purchase the physical item. Throughout the years I seem to have developed a rather contradictory relationship with how I consume my music. On the one hand, I like the convenience of having all my music on my hard drive, easily accessible and tagged. That way, I can just start shuffle and not have to think about what I want to listen to. On the other hand, I like the ceremony of cleaning a record and dropping the needle on it.