The Martlet

With a light touch, a finger lifts the tonearm. The record player starts up, the motor emitting a near-silent whirr. Delicately, the needle touches the outermost groove and quiet static warmth begins to breathe from the speakers. The first few notes of the record sing out into the quiet.

Although the music industry’s slow-moving statisticians suggest a continuing decline, anybody who spends any time in Victoria’s smaller record stores or is a music afficiando has probably noticed a serious upswing in the pressing and sales of vinyl records over the last couple of years.

Independent bands and smaller labels have been releasing both their back catalog and new material on vinyl, and the markets for vintage and re-released records on eBay and in used record stores are also growing.

Turntable producers like Numark and Technics are suddenly selling record players to a significant number of non-DJs for the first time since the early 90s.

In a world where even Luddites have dumped their CD players for iPods, vinyl seems like an outdated and bizarrely analog format — a gigantic but fragile relic that went out with 8-track tape and betamax more than two decades ago. So why is it still around? Could it be (knock on wood) that vinyl is making a comeback?

Gary Anderson has been running The Turntable out of Fan Tan Alley since 1986, making it Victoria’s oldest and most revered record store.

“There has definitely been a big younger crowd in here over the last few years,” said Anderson. “Kids these days, their parents hand down their turntables and record collections, so they get started with maybe 100 records and it gets addictive.”

Ernie Brach, Anderson’s partner The Turntable, adds that the sound of records is really what differentiates them from other forms of media.

“When I’m working around the house, cleaning, sketching, I’ll put some CDs on, but when I sit down to listen to music it’s always on the turntable ... CDs sound so thin,” said Brach. “You can hear the body, the depth [of vinyl] on a decent stereo. You can hear the whole soundstage.”

From a purely technical standpoint, it’s understandable why audiophiles might prefer to listen to records. The most widely-used format for music in the digital age is the mp3, which offers solid quality and a very compact filesize.However, the mp3 is a lossy compression format, meaning that the file does not fully represent all the data in the original; subtle nuances of an album are lost, like the jangle of ROBO’s bracelets on Black Flag’s “Damaged.”

“If you run your iPod through a good stereo you can hear holes that you could drive a truck through,” said Anderson.

CDs aren’t exactly perfect either. Although they have the capability to provide a huge dynamic range, it’s never used because of an industry conflict called the loudness war. The human brain often thinks music is better when it’s louder because the ear picks up more high and low frequency content, and over the years record labels have increasingly compressed albums to increase the perceived volume, competing with each other to have the “loudest” releases.

The price paid for this is “flattening,” or a loss of dynamic range, meaning that quiet sounds like a whisper are suddenly as loud as a snare drum or guitar riff. Severe compression can even clip or distort louder sounds. If you compare a CD from 20 or 30 years ago with an album that just came out, you will probably notice that the new album sounds squished.

“Modern CDs are always far over-compressed and tiring on the ears — literally hard to listen to,” said Josh Szczepanowski, lead guitarist for the Victoria-based Pink Floyd tribute band, PIGS. It’s impossible to compress music on vinyl to such extremes, so vinyl often has a presence that is unattainable with other formats.

“With vinyl, you get a natural warmth that most people find pleasing. Vinyl is easy on the ears,” said Szczepanowski.

Sound quality isn’t the only reason people prefer vinyl, however. For many, vinyl records represent a better connection between the listener and artist.

“The best part of vinyl… [is that] it forces you to listen to albums as albums, not just random songs,” said Szczepanowski. “The listener has to hear the entire work of art, instead of fast-forwarding to their favourites. With vintage records, you’ll be hearing exactly what the artist actually wanted you to hear.”

This connection makes sitting down and listening to a record a kind of special ritual. The fragility of the medium and the apparatus used to play it also demand a certain finesse and attention, in contrast to the convenience of scrolling through your playlists on iTunes.

All this contributes to the reasons that many young music fans are dusting off their parents’ record players or going out any buying their own, and this growing market may represent a lifeline for the ailing music industry. While the difference between store-bought CDs and downloaded mp3s isn’t large, vinyl represents a physical product that downloads can’t replace.

“A lot of new LPs are coming out with a one-time digital download, because you’re going to do that anyway,” said Brach. “They still make money off of the record, and giving you the mp3s doesn’t cost them anything.”

While prophesizing the end of the CD is a bit presumptuous, vinyl records and their accompanying downloads are definitely cutting into CDs’ market share.

Overall, the return of vinyl is a promising sign. People are paying more attention to artists and their music, and listeners are showing that they are still willing to support the industry if they feel they are getting bang for their buck.

Doomsayers and music critics may don sackcloth and lament the days of the “classics,” but maybe the problem isn’t that today’s musicians aren’t as creative as previous generations. Maybe the problem is that we just aren’t listening closely enough.