The voice of the father of the gramophone, Emile Berliner, is only slightly muffled as he recites Friedrich Schiller’s ballad “Der Handschuh.” But his words — preserved as an image in a German magazine from 1890 and resurrected through today’s technology at Indiana University — represent what can be considered the oldest record in the world.

Read the full post here.

Many of the 1950s recording formats listed above never achieved widespread popularity and, in this sense, their presence marks a particular moment of commercial failure. Still, the brief production run of such formats also reveals certain mechanisms of experimentation as labels attempted to successfully adapt to new technologies and emerging consumer demands. Put another way, the failed formats from 1948 to 1958 offer a prehistory of the industry’s standardization to the 12-inch LP. This matters not only because it helps contextualize the now-ubiquitous 12-inch, 33 1/3 rpm LP. It also points to an alternative history of vinyl records that accounts for the dynamic nature of customers, manufacturers, and producers of records in the mid-century United States. As I explore below, this can especially be seen through the changes in visual design that accompanied the many experimentations surrounding format. ²

Media in Transition and Prestige Records 

Several significant changes in the visual, physical, and sonic design occurred during the first decade of the LP. Nowhere was this more apparent than at Prestige Records, a small independent jazz label that catered to connoisseur listeners and featured up-and-coming stars such as Miles Davis, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk. Founded in 1949 by Bob Weinstock, Prestige’s growth into a leading independent jazz label coincided with the industry-wide transition to the LP. The label’s experimentation with variations of the LP format offers a glimpse into the creative and experimental business practices that characterized the 1950s record industry.

Prestige adopted the LP in 1952, initially offering only the 10-inch variety. Employing the strategy used by George Avakian during Columbia’s initial run of LPs in 1948, Weinstock filled his first discs in the label’s PRLP 100 series with reissued material from Prestige’s back catalog. ³ These discs had three or four tracks per side, with each track lasting two-and-a-half to three minutes each (the standard length for recordings in the 78-rpm era). This strategy of hedging between formats enabled Prestige to offer music on both new and old technologies without having to invest in costly recording sessions that would not necessarily guarantee sales.

By 1953, Weinstock offered listeners several other options for purchasing and consuming Prestige records. The label continued to issue the same content across a variety of formats that differed in both size and rotation speed. One example was the 7-inch extended play (EP) disc, a variation on the standard 45 single. Due to narrower grooves compared to the regular 45, EPs held nearly twice the music per side (around seven-and-half minutes) although at the expense of sound quality. The EP, after its introduction by RCA Victor in 1952, gained some commercial traction with independent jazz labels, including Clef, Savoy, Contemporary, Mercury, Debut, and Prestige. ⁴ The major labels—Columbia, MGM, Decca and Capitol—released pop and crossover EPs but did not use the format for jazz specifically besides the occasional discs featuring crossover stars such as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. ⁵

Prestige began issuing EPs in 1953 and eventually released a total of seventy-four records in their PREP 1300 series. ⁶ Like their first LPs, Prestige used EPs to repackage and reissue recordings already in their catalog, ⁷ but with one key difference: each EP displayed “Prestige Extended Play Documentary Series” somewhere on the front cover (usually on the top right corner) and the tag line “Each Album represents an individual record session” on the back. The first discs had a short paragraph on the back jacket that explained the purpose of the series:

PRESTIGE presents jazz for the modern collector on extended play. This series represents the best in modern music from 1949 up to today. Each album is an individual record session in itself, with actual dates of the recordings inscribed on the cover. This series will be invaluable to all students and fans of jazz as it will give them an accurate, documented, chronological picture of both the jazz scene as a whole and the important musicians as individuals, beginning with 1949 and continuing on as each new year brings new developments in jazz. ⁸

At the time, it was not standard practice for record companies to name specific session dates on the record. ⁹ This “documentary series” claimed to give listeners access to the most modern music while simultaneously allowing them to track the trajectory of the music. With the phrase “actual dates inscribed on the cover,” Prestige marked the record jacket as the future location for such documentation while also emphasizing the need to preserve and chronicle the music’s development.

In the changing landscape of the early 1950s jazz industry, formats like the 7-inch EP and 10-inch LP had a relatively short lifespan. With the EP Documentary Series, Prestige explored how new formats could meet new demands for jazz on record, specifically by using the record jacket to document the details of the record session, a practice that would become standard by the end of the decade. Seemingly small elements of marginalia—such as including the recording date—point to much larger changes in the relationship between music making and recording technology that the transition into the LP era facilitated.

Design Changes in the Margins   

The adoption and standardization of long-playing technology made recording labels rethink their overall presentation in other ways as well. Cover art became increasingly sophisticated, detailed, and creative. Record jackets began to feature liner notes that educated consumers about the music and new technologies or detailed the label’s own history. Even the record sleeves, once simply a blank piece of paper, became an alternative place for advertising. ¹⁰ The increased emphasis on the visual design accompanied a rethinking of production processes meant to take advantage of the “long-playing” aspect of the new technology. Such changes made records into audio-visual objects that accounted for the physical, visual, and aural elements in tandem.

This transition did not happen overnight. Prestige treated their early LPs much like 78-rpm records, which were generally sold in blank paper sleeves and had only simple lettering on the label itself that indicated artist, song title, record company, and issue number. Prestige’s first LPs included only the leader’s name in block letters, a list of tracks, and issue number. Consider the unadorned cover of James Moody Favorites Volume One, which displays the album and track names in dark blue, block lettering with the Prestige logo beneath. The top left and right corners, respectively, included the issue number, “PRLP 110,” and the phrase “Long Playing Micro Groove Non-Breakable Record,” a marketing slogan developed by Columbia in 1948. The back jacket was dark brown and blank, much like the typical sleeve of a 78-rpm disc. ¹¹ This approach was partly pragmatic since the costs of printing ornate graphics would increase the price of discs that were already more expensive than their 78-rpm counterparts.

Soon, Prestige began to place a simple, two-toned image of the band leader on their record covers. Employee Ira Gitler recalled Weinstock’s preference for such design: “I can still visualize the front cover [of Swingin’ With Zoot Sims (1951)], a photograph of Zoot blowing his tenor saxophone printed in blue on yellow paper. That was Prestige’s version of a two-color job but Weinstock’s attitude was: ‘They don’t buy it for the cover, man. If they dig the music…’“ ¹² By the mid-1950s, Weinstock’s stripped-down approach—his feeling that listeners “don’t buy it for the cover”—began to change. More complicated graphics began appearing on the covers after 1956 when Prestige hired designers Don Martin, Tom Hannan, Gil Mellé, Reid Miles, and pop-artist Andy Wharhol. The photos and often-abstract artwork of Esmond Edwards and Don Schlitten regularly appeared on record jackets after Prestige adopted the 12-inch LP as their standard format in 1957. ¹³ Notable examples include Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus and Tenor Madness, Miles Davis’s Walkin’ and Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, and John Coltrane’s debut album, Coltrane.

Prestige’s change in visual approach coincided with the rapid growth of the record industry as a whole. By the mid-1950s, record companies were selling more discs and making greater profits than at any time in their history. According to the New York Times, from 1947 to 1957 industry-wide sales increased from $203 to $360 million and units sales of LPs from 1954 to 1956 rose from 11.1 to 33.5 million. This resulted in a significant increase in percentage of industry sales for the LP: from 30% in 1953 to 61% in 1957. In contrast, sales of 78s had all but disappeared and by 1958, the predominant format of the previous era accounted for only 1.2% of the industry’s total sales. ¹⁴

The new focus on visual design brought Prestige closer to another leading independent label, Blue Note Records. Similar to Weinstock’s approach at Prestige, Blue Note co-owner Alfred Lion felt that jazz should not be, as he said in a 1956 interview, produced “like ball point pens” and that the music was “not the kind of commodity you can market in every candy store.” ¹⁵ Unlike Prestige’s gradually increasing concern for visual design, Blue Note emphasized the appearance of their LPs from the beginning. Under the direction of photographer and co-owner Francis Wolff, Blue Note became one of the first labels to use photos and artwork on their records, despite the accompanying financial burden. ¹⁶ Even their first LPs, issued in 1951, featured elaborate graphics on their covers. Compare Prestige’s James Moody Favorites Volume One cited above to James Moody And His Modernists released by Blue Note in 1951. Blue Note’s LPs includes detailed artwork, intricate design, and various fonts that puts this album cover in sharp contest to Prestige’s text-only approach.

By 1955, both Prestige and Blue Note began using 12-inch LPs as their standard format, breaking away from the genre conventions of the previous recording era. When Columbia introduced the LP in 1948, the label anticipated continuing the same format practices used with 78s: 10-inch for pop, blues, and jazz, 12-inch discs for classical and opera. Most jazz in the early 1950s did in fact circulate on 10-inch LP, including those discs issued by Prestige. Yet by the end of the decade, production of 10-inch LPs—along with EPs, and most 78s—had all but stopped, replaced by the 12-inch LP and 7-inch 45 single. Still, Prestige’s experiments reveal an industry in transition, where the 12-inch LP was simply one format among many.

Conclusion

The modern-day image of a vinyl record is, by default, that of a 12-inch black disc, spinning at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. Though these discs—along with the 45 single—dominated the industry for the several decades, there were several other variations of LPs that came and went. In the context of such shifting modes of representation, small independent record companies such as Prestige experimented with disc size, rotation speed, cover design, and liner notes. Like the rest of the industry, Prestige eventually settled on the 12-inch LP. Yet this outcome was not determined from the beginning, but the result of an interrelated web of cultural forces, business practices, and consumer habits.

In the recording industry, more technologies fail than succeed. These failures allow scholars to examine this history in a way that accounts for the experimental business practices needed to succeed in the highly competitive record industry. With a market in flux, record labels strived to balance their production and manufacturing costs with customer preferences. Such negotiations influenced the future of records. Failed formats, in other words, have the potential to reveal the dynamic nature of how customers, manufactures, and producers adopted and found new uses for emerging technologies of sound.

A German company, vinylrecorder.com,  has come up with a home record lathe that takes any digital file and cuts it onto a vinyl disk. You can see an entertaining video about the process at the link below. The man in the video is entirely wrong about digital files and stairstepping or squarewaves–its a complete misunderstanding of how digital audio works. But it’s a common misperception

Mildly Entertaining but Erroneous Video

Although this thing will cost $4000, and requires that it be hooked to a vacuum cleaner (to clear the pieces of cut vinyl away from the cutting head), it’s being aimed at the “home” market–people with a lot of money who want to make records of their digital files. There are others machines to do this available, but they cost more than twice as much. It’s doubtful that taking a modern mp3 or wav file and cutting it to vinyl will make it sound better–it will add some forms of possibly pleasing distortion, but most likely the mp3 file will have been “loudness maximized” and will sound really lousy when it’s cut to vinyl.

But beyond that, it seems like a really odd thing to do. Lets’ say vinyl sounds better–maybe it does, I don’t think so but some people do. Turning your digital files into vinyl is like turning your ballpoint pen into a quill pen. The experience of writing with a quill pen is in some ways much better than the experience of writing with a ballpoint. But there’s the leaks, and the need for an inkwell, and blotting paper, and random blobs of ink, and a pen knife for shaping the nib, and etc etc. I don’t doubt that there are quill pen aficiandos out there, and that they see using a quill pen as a sign of aficion in the way of Hemingway characters, committed to purity. But turning your ball point into a quill pen won’t replicate the experience of the quill pen, any more than hitching a horse to your Prius will replicate the experience of driving a conestoga wagon. Maybe I could get a device that would attach an earphone on a wire to an iphone, and put a little handcrank on the side?

This seems silly to me. The MP3 file isn’t just music, anymore than a record is just music. It’s a product, a “delivery system,” embedded in a wide range of social and technological systems on which it depends–like the Prius and the horse cart.

Vinyl might sound better, but it’s not because of “stairstepping” or “square waves.” Digital audio depends on the “Nyquist-Shannon Theorem,” produced at Bell Labs in the 1930s by Harry Nyquist and Claude Shannon, one of the pioneering figures in digital computing. The Nyquist-Shannon theorem says basically that to reproduce a sound perfectly, all we need to do is sample it at twice the rate of the highest frequency present. For human listening purposes, the highest frequency present is 20,000 hertz (hz)–we can’t hear above that. Sound comes to us like waves, with peaks and troughs. Think of hz as cycles per second–the number of peaks and troughs per second. 20,000 is the maximum we can resolve–and people over 30 can’t resolve that.  CD or mp3 audio is “sampled” at a rate of 44,000 hz, or 44,000 times a second. This is often drawn as a stairstep, as in the link below

Sampling theorem

But soundwaves are physical artifacts, and how they sound to us is their frequency. If we get their frequency from sampling, we need no other information to perfectly reproduce them. Sound waves don’t suddenly change frequency in the middle of the air for no reason. If a violin emits a single note, the note does not change once it leaves the violin. It has a frequency (or a set of frequencies; a fundamental tone and overtones) and each of these can be sampled and reproduced. All you need is two points to sample a frequency perfectly. Think of it as like a circle–you only need two points to perfectly reproduce a circle. If this doesn’t make sense, here’s a video which explains it beautifully:

No stair stepping!

There are no square waves or stair stepping in what comes out of your speaker when you play an mp3 file. So there’s no such thing to remove.

If vinyl sounds better, I’d still argue it’s because it’s not overcompressed and loudness maximized.

But it might also be that digital audio is too perfect–it gets into “the uncanny valley.” This is a school of aesthetics that says we don’t want imitations to get too close to the original. A robot or a doll is cute but  if it gets too life-like it becomes creepy and “uncanny.” If it’s so good that you don’t notice it, that’s one thing, but if it’s really close but not close enough it falls into the uncanny valley. Computer animators confront this all the time–too real is creepy and off-putting.  Alternatively, movies or novels that are too much about real life, too realistic, are generally boring and unappealing

Audio on vinyl is objectively much less realistic than digital audio. It’s full of distortions and artifacts like dust and scratches and wear. It may be that preferring vinyl is like preferring CGI animation that doesn’t look too real. It may be that digital audio is either so realistic that it’s slightly uncanny and off putting, or so realistic that it lacks the interest that comes from mimesis, from imitations which aren’t the same as the things they imitate. You have to get the similar/dissimilar ratio just right.

It would be fun to have your own record cutting lathe. It used to be fairly common, before the advent of tape recording in the 1940s. Alan Lomax used one to record Leadbelly. The “presto” recorder was marketed for home use and field recording starting in the 1930s. Fidelity was low–a professional record cutting lathe like the Scully Lathe required perfect isolation from vibration, temperature control, and literally microscopic control over detail

Notice that the vinyl recording.com lathe has a microscope attached. It probably uses some form of digital compensation to reduce the effects of vibration. The larger question here is “why.” Musicians can already send their digital files to services that will press records. You can buy vinyl copies of a lot of popular music already. I think the appeal of this thing has to do with the failure of digital files as own-able objects. They can’t be displayed, they don’t take up space–they are unsatisfying as consumer goods

n.b. from Ted: I posed my responses in the form of interleaved paraphrasings of what Njoroge and Rich wrote. Consider them reverberations or recapitulations. Making only a limited claim to accuracy, I am hoping that there is as much if not more value in the ways I got it wrong. In a few instances I mark what I thought were the implications of a passage that could be drawn out further. Maybe Njoroge, Rich, and the readers will find these useful as points for re-intervention by way of correction and clarification.

Njoroge

What is the meaning of music in the 21st century? ¹ How do we understand the transformation of a material art (i.e. people actually doing things – rehearsing, recording, manufacturing, producing, distributing, and listening) to the basic transmission of “data?” ² What is the heritage, history and use of vinyl in the age of binary code? ³

To sample/steal from Mark Twain, the reports of the death of vinyl have been greatly exaggerated. It seems to occur in about eight to ten year cycles. Every time new sound recording/disseminating technology is introduced we hear the chorus of the ultimate obsolesence of the vinyl LP… First it was the reel-to-reel, then the cassette, the 8-track and, later (once the “digiphiles” emerged) the CD and the MP3. ⁴

The simple fallacy holding all of these claims of success together is due to the misguided idea that somehow with the advent of these new technologies things will sound “better.” ⁵ This simply can’t be proven. ⁶ While digital technologies offer the promise of endless replication and dissemenation of “the sound,” what gets lost in the equation is the experience. ⁷

Many authors wax (no pun intended) poetically about the “warmth” of the sound of vinyl. But what we are missing here is basic physics. A stylus moving across a grooved platter generates sound through friction. That’s what brings satisfaction to the listener. ⁸ You actually hear (not simply “listen” to) the music. Between the wax cylinders of the early 20th centuries and the MP3’s of today, most people heard their music via vinyl (jukebox, radio, whatever). Music was recorded, produced and mastered to match the medium. This is key. Even with the wonders of digital recording that sound cannot be matched. ⁹ Further, part of the experience is tactile. Listening to the grooves (literally and metaphorically) and holding the album in one’s hands are part of the whole sensation. Record companies — at least the good ones — were actually making multi-media art pieces: paintings, photos, drawings, liner notes, and more. ¹⁰ As Walter Benjamin would say, the “aura.” ¹¹

Clearly, the recent resurgence of vinyl is due to the political economy of popular musicking in the 21st century (DJ’s, artists, audiophiles, hipsters and wannabes). But the solid-state pleasure of dropping a needle on some serious cut cannot be denied (sonically or otherwise). ¹²

Rich:

I have to begin with a denial. I will not be making any claims about the death of vinyl, its fidelity, or truth value of a medium of any sort here. Nor will I deny the social and sonic pleasures of vinyl. My argument is simply about what the possibilities of vinyl/analog (and sometimes digital) audio are as media — what Harold Innis calls the biases of these forms of communication — and how these biases have actually been deployed in culturally and historically specific ways

The sound of music on vinyl is distinctive and brings many more things to the table than just data. This is fortunate, as it necessarily brings extra-musical noise and distortion, and a greatly reduced musical signal in the realms of frequency response and dynamic range. Thus much of what the vinylistas love about vinyl is the sound of the medium itself, not just (even?) the musicality and social relations it engenders. In addition, the costly and capital-intensive process of creating vinyl records made it what Lawrence Lessig calls “read-only” culture, where music is a commodity to be consumed much more than something to be made by everyone.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that I proposed the idea of a conversation on the merits of vinyl at a gathering at Njoroge’s home. As the hour grew late, someone found a box of his rare 45 RPM singles and Njoroge proceeded to give us a tour through some amazing 1960s and 70s Midwestern funk. The gentle rumble, crackle, and hiss, the ritual handling of the object itself (hold only edges, label, the outside of the sleeve): All comforting and charming, as close to sitting around a winter night’s fireplace as one can get in Hawaiʻi. As one who (mis)spent a portion of my youth trying to suss out the covers of Pink Floyd and Yes albums before falling into the welcoming DIY ethic of the punks, I agree that the loss of LP art is tragic, sort of like the loss of good sonnet writers. ¹³

But as Njoroge points out, it is more than just product that makes vinyl vinyl. The sound from the first thousand or so copies that a record press produces is listless and flat when compared to the ones pressed once it warms up, as anyone in an old band that ever tried to cut a demo 45 learned, often through bitter experience. ¹⁴ The frequency response of a vinyl record changes between the inside and the outside of the of long playing vinyl, with mastering engineers and producers introducing various filtering and song order kludges to offset the issue. When the stylus gets around to its friction, it gets filtered out by an EQ curve called the RIAA rolloff that takes about 20 dB out of the very low end and adds about the same to the high end on a linear curve. On playback, the amplifier’s turntable inputs reverse the curve. That is why you cannot play the turntable through the “aux” channel of your vintage stereo or record a turntable directly into a computer and get decent results. In the proper signal chain, the turntable input preamplifier then cuts out the lowest frequencies completely because they consist of rumble: the artifact of boosting a signal that is mostly noise because recorded so low. That is OK though, as too much bass would make the stylus jump the track (club Djs compensate by mixing in the ubiquitous “four on the floor” thump from digital sources with their full bass response intact). The higher frequencies, which are boosted on the vinyl only to be cut in the amplifier, have a better signal-to-noise ratio when the record gets played back. This dulls the worst of the crackle and hiss (and part of the signal) down to an ambient level: the sound of the vinyl.

Signal, not music: Some music, particularly from the 1960s and 70s, when all the kludges were refined to high art and millions of LPs and 45s were pressed each month, sounds better because the sound of the vinyl and the sound of the music fed back into each other in a mutually reinforcing loop. Musicians played for it, and as Njoroge rightly points out, engineers and producers recorded and mixed for it, just like they now do for lossy digital formats played on iPods and the like. An informal study by a Stanford music professor indicates that young people today may be developing a liking for the “fizzy” sound of low bit rate MP3s just like an older generation prefers the warmth of vinyl. ¹⁵

On the hearing side, the human ear is actually a sort of digital instrument when it comes to frequency response, so the vinyl affinity between medium and “musicking” has a correlate in digital audio being designed for the physicality of embodied hearing. We do not sense a continuum from low end to high end in the ear itself. The digital to analog conversion takes place further in. Thousands of tiny hairs are spaced throughout the inner ear, with taller and shorter ones picking up different frequencies. Just like we do not see 30 still pictures when we watch a second of a movie, the brain fills in the dots for sound and gives us the perception of continuous frequency response. Lossless digital audio is currently recorded with the ‘dots’ twice to eight times more closely aligned than the tiny hairs are capable of sensing. ¹⁶

The first generation of digital audio was fairly hideous, not because the sound was inherently worse, but because in the rush to get to the new format, new recordings were made using old methods and music mastered for vinyl was cut straight to digital in the rush to market. The point about the culture of a medium playing a huge role in its perceived quality is important, and much of the first impression of digital audio in the 1980s was justifiably negative. But then again, the hi-fi, stereo, long playing vinyl record did not spring fully formed onto the landscape either. ¹⁷

The advent of higher sampling rates (how many dots per second), bit depths (how many dots to choose from), and born-digital recording and mixing has cured most if not all of these greed-induced woes. But record company (and yes, musician) greed has introduced a whole new set of problems, with throwaway pop songs being mastered as loud as possible to make sure they do not get lost behind others making the same ear-fatiguing choices in what has come to be called the loudness wars. The loudness wars were not however an issue for vinyl, which already needed to have its dynamic range squashed to prevent the stylus from jumping out of the grooves. ¹⁸

A new digital folk music from the bedroom producers has made inroads in returning music-making to everyone (important global caveat: everyone with a computer) instead of a few. Read-write culture is returned from the days before recorded audio (though doubtless in forms Benjamin would still object to) and flourishing. Today, the ability to digitally record and mix electronic and acoustic instruments is available to anyone with a modern computer and a little patience, with results far more transparent than the costly centralized mysteries of the analog-and-vinyl age. This democratized accessibility has caused a major upheaval in the music business as production and distribution have become decentralized and record companies try to litigate their way back to the good old days. ¹⁹

Lossless digital audio is more transparent, not better. Like Victorian homes, the sound of vinyl will remain valued, whether in its actual form or in its digital incarnations. Granted, lossless digital audio can act like a magnifying glass on the face, providing detail that a listener or musician might prefer smoothed over in the style of the vinyl/analog commodity chain. ²⁰ But that extra level of detail in the digital is in the sound rather than being introduced by the medium, and the warmth, smoothness, decreased frequency response, squashed dynamic range, and noise of vinyl is there to be added in as an effect if desired. ²¹

Musickers, whether playing listening or — best of all — both at once, are adapting to these new possibilities and creating a vast new world of sound outside the purview of the record companies, a world where the sound of vinyl is one option on the palette rather than the only one.

Ted:

There is hope in this technological trend. New vistas of human input and affect opened in the relation between humanity and the sonic realm, and new vistas of human input and affect opened in the relation between humans through the sonic sphere.

Njoroge Njoroge: is assistant professor of history at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Rich Rath: is associate professor of history history at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and is leading the digital arts and humanities initiative there. He is the author of How Early America Sounded. His born-digital music can be found at Way Music

Ted Sammons:  is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College

But: there is one absolutely irrefutable advantage to many modern vinyl releases, and that virtue has nothing at all to do with the medium. It’s the data on the record that’s superior, and it’s a conscious choice made by today’s artists and producers.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the loudness war. Essentially, tracks are being mixed louder and louder in production—maybe because when played on a radio station, a slightly hotter recording will sound more intense than the track which preceded it; maybe because loud audio sounds better on cheap speakers. The volume’s been creeping up, up, up, far past the point where peaks got clipped against the dynamic “ceiling.”

Below are the left channels from Radiohead’s “15 Step”. On top, the vinyl’s audio; below, the CD’s:

If we were to scale the CD’s audio to the same average volume as the vinyl’s, we can literally see the missing data:

Of course, your eyes can’t be the judge here. Only your ears can choose the winner. Here are 15 seconds from “15 Step,” first from the CD, then the same sample from the vinyl:

It’s not just Radiohead. This effect manifests on almost every modern mainstream release which had a vinyl edition: everyone from Arcade Fire to Ben Folds to Mars Volta. Maybe it’s time to hit up your local record store.

This piece is cross-posted from Square Signals with permission from the author.

All music has “dynamic range,” variations in volume between the loud parts and the soft parts. People sing and play at different volumes. Individual notes have an initial attack and then a gradual decay as they fade to silence. But most of the music you hear today–and by “most” I mean “everything except classical music” has been treated to have little or no dynamic range. It’s been “slammed” and “loudness maximized.”

Audio engineers manage this with something called “compression.” A compressor is a hardware or software device that sets a limit on how loud a piece of audio can go. It sets a top range, and when the audio signal exceeds that point, it turns it down. Imagine you are listening to a piece of music, and a really loud part is coming up, and you turn the volume knob down just as that part arrives. It’s like that, only automated. How does this make things louder?

It lets you set an overall high level, and squishes everything that was over that level down. So let’s imagine a piece of music. “Ten” is the maximum volume of the loudest parts. The singer is screaming: it’s really loud. And three is the level of the quietest parts. If you increase the volume level so that the quietest parts, formerly 3, are now at 10, and the compressor is squishing the loudest parts so they stay at ten, the result is a recording that comes to your ear at ten and only ten. The hushed and quiet passages are just as loud as the crescendo. Imagine that a whisper and a scream are the same volume. That’s modern music.

Here’s an excellent illustration on video 

Why would anyone want such a recording? Well for one thing human beings hear “louder” as better. If you play two identical pieces of music, and turn one up only very slightly, people will inevitably hear the louder one as better. Salesmen still use this trick to sell audio–turn the more expensive unit up, and it will sound “better” to everyone. For the last twenty tears, music has been getting more and more compressed, more and more uniformly loud.

And here’s a visual explanation, from Wikipedia’s excellent entry on “the loudness wars.” It’s pretty clear, showing the ZZ top song Sharp Dressed Man as it was issued, and than as it was “remastered” for reissue as a digital file. Watch the animated gif. The first version has little spikes in the waveform, but with each remaster it turns more and more into a solid block of sledgehammer volume

The reason you might prefer vinyl records is that you simply can’t do this kind of thing with a record. A record turns sounds into grooves in vinyl. As the sounds get louder the grooves swing wider. If the grooves are too wide, too loud, either the needle will jump out of the groove or you won’t be able to fit all the music on the record. So there are physical limits on how loud a record can get. Susan Schmidt Horning describes the process here.

Vinyl records have more “dynamic range,” more variation between the soft parts and the loud parts. Which in turn is closer to how we experience sound in the natural world. If you compare an old vinyl record to a digital remaster, you’ll hear the difference right away. The rule of thump on a modern recording is that you can’t have more than about 2 db of dynamic range.

Digital music doesn’t have to be loudness maximized, and in fact lots of recording engineers want to find a way to stop the tendency. You can celebrate “Dynamic Range Day” and find an index of the dynamic range of thousands of albums.

If you find yourself preferring vinyl, dynamic range is probably why. It’s worth speculating why we create for ourselves a musical landscape crushed an hyped into a impossible level of consistency.

So it was when I started writing about music piracy and copyright law over a decade ago.  Clearly, the story of piracy did not begin with Napster and digital file-sharing in 1999, but with the rise of magnetic tape in the 1970s.  There, the origins of our contemporary dilemma over technology, sharing, and property rights would be found.  I soon learned, though, that Philips released the compact cassette in 1963, and magnetic recording in its various forms—four-track, reel-to-reel, wire—had a history reaching back to the late nineteenth century.

But what was far more surprising was that copying and sharing were not native to the cassette era at all.  The recordability and erasability of tape seemed fundamental to the business of illicit music—the essence of piracy, bootlegging, counterfeiting, or however you want to describe unauthorized reproduction of sound.  Yet people had been pirating music since the dawn of recording itself.  Somehow, jazzheads in the 1930s, opera buffs in the 1950s, and rock radicals in the late 1960s found a way to duplicate a seemingly solid and fixed medium—the disc record.

How was this possible?  Vinyl seemed to be the essence of an analog medium.  It possesses none of the qualities of “new media” as defined by theorist Lev Manovich: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.[1]  A turntable had no record button, and an LP was neither searchable nor easily subject to remix or rearrangement.

While tape does not quite match Manovich’s definition of new media—which essentially means digital media—it did have qualities that presaged an era of copying, sharing, and near-effortless recombination.  As William Burroughs discovered in his 1967 essay “The Invisible Generation,” the compact cassette was a subversive little box.  Sound could now be recorded at the push of a button, secretly and covertly, and then cut, spliced, or otherwise manipulated. It could be recorded, rewound, and mass-reproduced with a few tape decks and a little determination.

Yet it was not really magnetic tape that touched off America’s first great skirmishes between piracy and copyright in the twentieth century. For example, in one extraordinary episode in the early 1950s, the major labels made a big show of their determination to stamp out the piracy that had proliferated since the end of World War II.  “Now there is a babel of labels,” record collector Frederic Ramsey Jr. observed in the Saturday Review in 1950, surveying a scene thick with shady and elusive outfits that bootlegged old jazz and blues recordings in the new medium of vinyl.  A Victor spokesman vowed in 1951 to “seek injunctions and damages, prosecute, throw into jail and put out of business” the lawless competitors who flagrantly copied their records, many long out-of-print, without permission.

Victor, then, was deeply chagrined to learn in November that one of the most brazen bootleggers—the indiscreetly-named Jolly Roger—had been pirating records in the label’s own facilities.  Using a custom-pressing service that was meant to produce limited batches of records for small businesses and community groups, the jazz enthusiast Dante Bollettino had produced reissues of Jelly Roll Morton, Cripple Clarence Lofton, and other artists at Victor’s plants—making the label an accomplice in its own defrauding.  Bollettino insisted that he was simply making music available that the major labels refused to keep in print; the market, they said, was simply too small to warrant committing scarce resources of advertising, production, and shelf space to such obscure records.

In retrospect, Victor in 1951 looks like the epitome of what scholars call a “Fordist” enterprise: a company that maximized profits by committing its factories and sales staff to selling as many copies of as few records as possible.  The early 1950s was the heyday of a few major labels and a few big radio and television networks.  The vast multiplicity and variety of contemporary media was far off in the distance, if visible at all, at mid-century.  But a handful of renegades like Bollettino still found a way to turn the infrastructure of the industry against itself, to press vinyl records of out-of-print music for a niche audience in runs of 300 or 500 discs.

Vinyl became the vehicle of piracy again in the late 1960s.  A massive bootlegging craze was touched off by the surreptitious release of Bob Dylan’s “basement tapes” in 1969, but few listeners experienced the music in the medium of magnetic tape.  In fact, the radical bootleggers who exploded on to the scene at the close of the decade, vowing to free music from corporate control, did so primarily on vinyl LPs.  With the subsequent leak of unreleased Beatles tracks (which circulated in San Francisco several months before Let It Be was released) and live performances by Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young and numerous others, a rich material culture of bootleg vinyl spread around the United States and the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Records appeared with titles like Stealin’ and Kum Back (a joke on “Get Back”), as different assortments of the same unauthorized and unreleased recordings appeared under countless names by a panoply of “labels,” some of which put each record out under a different business name.

Figure 1. Detail from Little White Wonder bootleg cover, courtesy of http://theband.hiof.no/

Consider Dylan’s basement tapes.  Variously called Great White Wonder, Little White Wonder, and Troubled Troubadour, depending on the countercultural scamp who made them, these recordings all appeared on vinyl, manufactured at independent pressing plants that had proliferated since the 1950s, as the major labels lost their grip on the means of production.  One of the most notorious of 1960s pirates, Rubber Dubber, operated a facility in East Los Angeles—all while sending his bootlegs to Rolling Stone to review, giving interviews to Harper’s Weekly, and dodging probes by the RIAA and the police.

(In one comical episode, Dubber misled investigators hired by David Crosby to track down the notorious bootlegger; the detectives showed up at a house in Kansas and served papers to an angry and harassed homeowner at four in the morning—who turned out to be the local sheriff of police.)

Aficionados of jazz, blues, and classical music had quietly copied and shared records for decades, but the eruption of rock bootlegging in the late 1960s prompted the first major reckoning with piracy and copyright since 1909, when Congress amended the Copyright Act to deal with the challenges of an age of wax cylinders and piano rolls.  Lawmakers at that time declined to give labels or artists a right to own their recordings; only written music could be copyrighted, and recorded sound lacked protection in the United States for another 62 years.  Rubber Dubber and his brash fellow pirates helped provoke a lethargic and uncertain Congress to pass the Sound Recording Act of 1971, which created the first American copyright for the recorded performance as a distinct work.

Thus began a period of unrelenting expansion of copyright that continues to this day—terms of copyright protection grew longer, penalties for infringement became dramatically stiffer, and the scope of intellectual property itself expanded to include many “works,” such as biological life, that were not ownable prior to the late twentieth century.

But piracy in the late 1960s did not just prompt a rethinking of intellectual property law; it also reminds us that social, political, and cultural upheavals do not derive purely from technological change.  Yes, magnetic recording likely made it easier for the Beatles’ and Dylan’s “tapes” to leak out of the studio, but as most listeners experienced these seminal bootlegs, they were still inscribed in the medium of vinyl—despite the technological and institutional barriers that stood in the way of illicitly reproducing disc records.

Vinyl, in its strange way, was a kind of transitional technology: the midwife between  a twentieth-century model of mass production and a contemporary culture of mass reproduction typified by cassettes, “burnt” CDs, and MP3s.  Vinyl itself is a more flexible medium that one might expect—at least when it’s placed in ingenious human hands.  After all, Kool Herc figured out how to chop up, mix, and loop recorded sound using two turntables in the early 1970s, pioneering the quintessential music of postmodern pastiche—hip-hop—without the help of tapes or digital samplers.

In everyday use, boundaries between technologies are often much less clear than they appear.  Dylan’s basement tapes were actually LPs, in the same way that many hip-hop “mixtapes” were actually CDs and now can be downloaded as MP3s.  Das Racist’s Shut Up, Dude is still a mixtape, even if no magnetic particles or ferric oxide intervened.  The dawn of free culture began with vinyl, even if it seems like an unlikely candidate for opening the way to a file-sharing revolution.

Figure 2. A Jimi Hendrix bootleg from Rubber Dubber

Once the final mix was complete, the third stage of making a record involved cutting a master disc from the mixed tape. Before magnetic tape became the standard recording medium, this master disc was made at the time of recording, just as mixing was done during the recording. When tape became the primary medium, the final mixed tape became the master and the lacquer master cut from it became the master sent for processing to vinyl LP or single disc. To reduce noise inherent in the process, the mastering engineer boosted high frequencies and might also apply some equalization to bring up the sound of certain instruments, but this was the extent of what the mastering engineer was expected to do. Once multi-tracking introduced the post-mixing stage—that is, mixing after rather than during the recording—some of the postponing that took place in recording spilled over to the mastering stage.

Until 1954, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) established a standard recording curve, record companies had used a variety of different recording, or equalization curves in cutting a master disc. To avoid overcutting and reduce surface noise inherent in disc recording and playback, the RIAA curve reduced the bass and boosted high frequencies at the time of recording (the recording curve), and modern phonograph preamps included circuitry to reverse those changes at the time of playback (the playback curve). Even after the RIAA standard, Bill Stoddard said, “in the mastering room we did what sounded best!” In the late 1950s, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) specified disc-recording reference levels (7cm/s at 1 kHz for mono, 5 cm/s for stereo), but most mastering engineers used those as minimums, preferring to cut with as much level as they could get away with. As Columbia engineer Doug Pomeroy recalled, “It was never hard to find discs which were cut MUCH hotter.” Stoddard recalled that in the early 1960s there was one popular record that was “the loudest and hottest record ever. We had a copy of that record [The Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” Wand, 1962, mastered at Bell Sound], and would compare everything we cut to that record for level and apparent loudness.” Jack Wiener, mastering engineer at Universal Recording in Chicago, agreed that the level that the RIAA curve designated was considered by the major record labels to be a “hard and fast rule that thou shalt never break,” but which he consistently ignored, particularly because of the influence of record producer Randy Wood. Wood, who ran Dot Records, had a jukebox delivered to the mastering room at Universal Recording and instructed the mastering engineers to increase the level until they reached a point where the record would not track in the jukebox; then they would reduce the level just enough so that it would play. According to Stoddard, “Wood said he didn’t care if he had to eat some records . . . he just wanted [it] to be the loudest.”

Mastering “hot,” as it was called, seemed to be the goal of every record company in popular recording to make its records stand out when played on jukeboxes. As soon as Mitch Miller moved to Columbia Records from Mercury, Bill Savory recalled that Miller would come down to the engineering department and say to the engineers, “’Hey fellas, we’ll go to lunch today, this little deli has a jukebox, and I’ll bet you anything, you play any record on there and it’ll be louder than a Columbia record.’” Miller’s purpose was to get the engineering department to come up with a better method of mastering to make Columbia’s popular records louder. It could be done but not by adhering to the RIAA curve and usually at the cost of record length because louder passages required wider grooves, thus reducing the number a given disc could accommodate. Making hot masters that could still track on most phonographs (play without skipping) was the goal of every mastering engineer and rarely would the artists or producer be involved at this stage. In 1964 mastering engineer Clair Krepps received a tape from his client United Artists, with the request that he cut a master. As he listened to the tape, Krepps recognized it as a song he had just mastered the previous year, “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” a song by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich that The Exciters recorded in 1963. That record had not done all that well, and since the tape of the new version by Manfred Mann did not sound any better to Krepps, he called the company and asked why they wanted to put it out. Claiming contractual commitments to the band, United Artists told Krepps, “‘Look, do any damn thing you want with that record, we don’t care!’ Krepps recalled. “So I started playing around with it. And I got the idea to shock the industry, so I used some equipment that my brother and I designed, and I had undoubtedly, I made the loudest record ever made–45 it was. And pretty soon, other engineers, once it became a hit, they called me and complained, ‘What the hell are you doing Clair, you know better than this!’” Because no producer or artist was looking over his shoulder, giving direction on how the record should be mastered, and the record company did not care, Krepps was able to experiment. When the record hit the top of the charts in England, Canada and the United States, of course, no one complained, and it seemed to reinforce the idea that hot masters made hit records.

Few mastering engineers, however, could enjoy that kind of freedom as artists and producers increasingly stipulated that their masters be cut a certain way. Grundy recalled that some producers would send their tapes to be mastered with explicit instructions like “The first four bars on the left track of song two are okay, but the next four bars require a boost in the high end.” The engineer was then expected to make changes during the actual mastering process, sometimes adding reverb or changing equalization. Grundy said that these instructions “began to grow to absurdity,” to the point where it ultimately became necessary for studios to put in a duplication of all of the signal-processing devices: the equalizers, limiters, compressors, phasers, all of the things that might be used to affect the sound of the music in the mastering process, and each of these would be available on two different systems, A and B. As Grundy explained, “The left and right channel of the first song on the record would have certain requirements for EQ and whatever. Well those are set up on the A channel, the left and right A; and then the requirements for the second song are on the B, [to avoid] switching instantly during the spiral from [band one to band two]. Then while B is being cut, like a three minute song, you’ve got to set up A again for the third band, and then switch back to A during the spiral between two and three.” So where the mastering engineer once could set his equalization curve, making slight adjustments from one song to the next while inspecting the grooves, he now had to do double-duty to set up one song and then switch to the second channel quickly while the cutter spiraled to the next song. Here, too, the job of the mastering engineer grew more complex, even more creative as a result of multi-tracking and post-mixing, and this led to the rise of independent mastering engineers and studios that did nothing but mastering. And certain mastering engineers became highly valued for their ability to do this effectively. Bob Ludwig and Bernie Grundman in New York made their reputations by being able “to take poorly prepared master tapes and produce a master disc that was amazing in the corrections that they were able to implement,” Grundy recalled. “And, of course, everyone wanted Bob to do their record because he could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

Some mastering engineers refused to respond to these requests. When Bill Stoddard was a mastering engineer at Fine Recording in the late 1950s, Kapp Records was one of the studio’s biggest accounts. Kapp made so many requests in mastering that Bob Fine eventually set a limit on the number they could make. But Stoddard recalled getting instructions like “two more notches of bass on band three,” which just made no sense as far as he was concerned, so he would just cut it the way he wanted to. He figured, “The hell with it. Nobody ever said anything. This was a foregone conclusion—with Bob’s blessing too—it was just a way to get the thing out. The more sides you cut the more money you make.” Stoddard’s decision to ignore the client’s request was not driven by economic motives so much as it was his conviction that it was the mastering technician’s job to use his own good judgment to make a record as close to the tape as possible, and it was the client’s job to supply an edited tape ready for mastering. But this trend toward expecting more out of the mastering process only escalated during the 1960s. Eventually, the decline in the number of ready masters and the increase in the amount of those that were passed on to the mastering stage for further adjustment led to the rise of mastering as a specialized field. Since engineers who began after the advent of tape were not required to learn disc cutting to record, the disc-cutting skills required for mastering became the one area of recording that retained “the most trade secrets,” and as those trained during the era of disc recording began to retire, new engineers could only learn from the technicians whose tacit knowledge and skill had been gleaned over decades. By the 1970s, mastering was no longer simply the transferring of a recording from tape to master disc, it was considered the last creative step and the first manufacturing step in the record-making process.