Vinyl or CD? (Setting the record straight)

by Doctor B in Editorials, Opinion Posts

The great debate over digital versus analogue audio has been raging since a joint venture between SONY and Philips brought the (literally) logical successor the the vinyl record to market over a quarter-century ago. It came up again in the course of a review in Goldmine magazine, the New York Times of the music-collecting community. It was for the vinyl reissue of a long-sought-after 1973 album by the seminal German progressive (or “kraut-rock”) band, Faust,. whom I had the privilege of seeing live in concert at Philadelphia’s International House last fall. The Goldmine review lauded EMI’s 180-gram audiophile edition of Faust IV. I recommend this album or any other by this act without hesitation, whatever form you choose to buy it in.

I’m always glad to see great vintage music back in print. I do take issue however with the reviewer’s apparent assertion that vinyl always sounds better than digital audio. As I’ve pointed out from time to time elsewhere, the technology used to make a recording, analogue or digital, takes a back seat to the technique and skills of the engineer and the amount of care he or she takes in making the recording. The mastering process, as any producer can tell you, can make or break the sound of a recording. And the efforts of everyone else in the chain, from the performers on down, don’t mean a thing if similar care isn’t taken in manufacturing the final product.

As a f’rinstance, flashback to the “energy crisis” of the early-1970s. Overnight gasoline prices doubled. People lined up for blocks at gas stations only to have the pumps run dry. Vinyl, a petrochemical product, got scarce. Record companies began using inferior or poorly-recycled vinyl. They shipped warped, off-center and noisy records to retailers. At a time when stereo equipment was improving dramatically, consumers sometimes ended up with what Rolling Stone once called “mud on the tracks”.

Fast-forward, 10 years later. You may remember the hoopla over the CD when it first hit the market. “Perfect sound forever” was the music and electronics industries’ mantra. What buyers sometimes ended up with in those early days were CDs which were carelessly mastered, made from inferior master tapes, pressed off-center, and ones which were so full of errors that playback would stop or foul up in the middle of a track.

Improvements in manufacturing and quality control have long since shown up on both the analog and digital sides of the fence. But even the best records or CDs don’t mean a thing if the equipment they’re played on isn’t up to the task. In my thoroughly-biased opinion, shopping malls are the worst place to buy serious sound equipment. The build quality and performance just aren’t there and the sales people were probably selling tires or refrigerators the week before. Independent stereo shops, even the “high-end” kind, often carry good used and new gear which probably won’t cost that much more than what you might pay for mall junk.

I also agree with the reviewer’s taking a poke at MP3’s. They’ll do in a pinch but they’re not high fidelity. The MP3 compression technique works by discarding audio data, especially at the high end. That the electronics industry adopted the MP3 format as the coin of the realm for portable music players is the greatest disservice ever done to the music-buying public. I suspect that the reason vinyl is suddenly back in vogue is that some owners of MP3 players had a chance to hear their favorite tunes in that form, on a good stereo, and for them that was the turning point!

Everything else aside, I’m glad that record companies continue to reissue historic recordings with the care and attention to detail that they deserved but might not have gotten originally.