To a beleaguered record industry, vinyl’s iconic potency means profit. Alone among music formats in 2013, the LP record witnessed an increase in sales, up 33% against an 8.4% decline in overall music sales and a 14.5% drop in CD sales. ³ The increase marked the seventh consecutive year of a trend that has combined to multiply LP unit volume by a factor of seven. Anecdotal reports from record stores and perusal of online marketplaces imply that the market for used vinyl may be equally robust. Though overall sales are still a drop in the bucket, profit margins are high.

Despite vinyl’s steampunk cool and the fervor of many analog devotees, the vinyl revival has its basis in a thoroughly hybridized world of analog and digital sound, which I call digilog. What I mean by digilog is that rather than purely digital or analog, both the recording and the distribution of music media are both. Today’s vinyl collector has his musical cake, collecting LPs, and eats it too, via digital media. As one writer explains, “my iPod carries all of my music so I can wander San Francisco to the beat of my own soundtrack… But I love vinyl…. It’s one of the purest ways to listen to music.” ⁴

The extent of LP’s revival depends on a vibrant culture of legal streaming and illegal downloading or copying of digital music media that allows the vinyl collector to enjoy analog and digital as complements. The timing of LPs sales upticks corresponds exactly with the inclusion of digital media as a free bonus for LP purchasers. The internet culture of “sharity” includes communities who share homemade digitizations of LPs—even digital files, apparently, can by enhanced by vinyl’s mystique. On the flipside, CD and MP3 listeners are digilog when they listen to the vast oeuvre of music originally recorded in analog or transferred to analog in the process of production.

Perfect Sound Warriors

The compact disk, which debuted in 1982, found quick acceptance with the majority as the standard for accuracy, portability, permanence, and prestige. Only the high costs and initially limited availability of disks and titles impeded adoption. In the majority of installations, CD brought a major advance in both fidelity and convenience, embodying the highest ideals of modern technology. CD even helped advance the cause of culture, as reissue programs rescued out-of-print recordings from the dustbin. ⁵

Some self-appointed golden ears did loudly assert that something was lost on CD, seeing the issues as either inherent to digitization itself or merely the consequence of CD’s deficient implementation. Those determined few who complained about digital did so chiefly in abstract terms. Descriptions of CD sound mirrored the characteristics of the silver disk’s material form. An LP-loving police patrolman quoted by the New York Times in 1998 hit all the high notes, complaining of “tinny-sounding CD,” whose sonics he likened to “a sterile scientific lab” in which music emerged from “a fake quiet that almost sounds like a vacuum,” and conveyed “no emotional connection to what you hear.” As against the technological dystopia evoked by CD’s putative cold, abrasive, distant artificiality, some claimed human qualities and emotions like warmth and presence as vinyl’s domain. With LP, said the patrolman, “you feel like the band’s right in front of you sweating it out.” As rocker Neil Young characterized digital, in contrast, “the mind has been tricked, but the heart is sad.” ⁶ Classical and jazz loving audiophiles often asserted that digital lacked analog’s facility for evoking the sound of instruments placed in a virtual soundscape that floated free of the loudspeakers and extended beyond the boundaries of the listening room.

That people invested in an established sonic technology complained about the artificiality of a new one is no surprise. Many opera fans of the 1920s, including the philosopher Theodor Adorno, objected to the increased fidelity brought by electric recording in 1925. “As the recordings become more perfect…,” believed Adorno, “the authenticity of vocal sound declines as if the singer were being distanced more and more from the apparatus.” ⁷ Subsequently, audiophiles defended vacuum tube amplification against transistors. More generally, technostalgia is a commonplace, as long-established technologies come to appear organic and attract warm feelings. ⁸ What distinguishes the current vinyl revival is that it has gone mainstream, winning a substantial number of hearts and minds to the cause.

True, MP3s have been a boon to music fans, facilitating portability and the sociability of sharing culture. Most significantly, having the entire archive of recorded sound at our fingertips (if often illegally) has changed music appreciation forever. Yet for all these gifts, a vocal minority believes MP3s rob music of its true sound. MP3, which uses models of what we hear in order to throw away parts of the sound that we don’t, has attracted the ire of listeners who find the sound inferior. ⁹

Even for non-audiophiles, the ubiquity and immateriality of MP3s render them less suitable for expressing a connection to music than tangible commodities. In the words of Matador Records’ Chief Financial Officer Patrick Amory, “For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release….The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music.” ¹⁰

LPs offer the anchor of tangibility in contrast to the weightlessness of the digital slipstream, which—insidiously to its detractors—encourages ADHD via shuffle play and the click wheel and rootless wandering through disparate eras, genres, and moods. The vinyl format engenders a different relationship to music, one writer explained, “as something planned, engaged, and revisited.” Reflecting on the loss of his 170,000 track iTunes digital collection via computer crash, he asserted, “There’s no substitute for the real thing; for the sense of security; the feeling of hard, heavy permanence….” Gagnon of EMI hearkens back to John Philip Sousa’s complaints about canned music in likening LP consumption to “growing your own vegetables.” ¹¹ In this context, the defects to which vinyl is prone—skips, ticks, distortion, speed variance, and resonance—become part of the aura vinyl can impart to recordings.

Though digital détente arrived in the early 1990s, when mainstream audiophiles reported that standards for CD sound achieved acceptability, the war has become hot again. ¹² Digital’s prestige and reputation for fidelity have been damaged by the proliferation of MP3 and by changes in mastering practices (the so-called Loudness Wars) which mean that despite their manifold distortions, LP releases are arguably more faithful to the sound mix engineered by the artists than their digital counterparts. ¹³ Furthermore, if MP3 is “CD-quality” as touted, then feelings about the inadequacy of MP3 sound quality attach to CD as well. And if MP3’s selective approach to the original sound is problematic, then the very basis of digital sound, sampling, is also in question, regardless of how firm its technical and psychoacoustic basis. ¹⁴

LPs analog grooves offer an escape from the discomfiture with sampling and/or discarding sound. To EMI’s Gagnon, vinyl fans adopt an “almost a back-to-nature approach.” ¹⁵ Anchored in tradition and based on a mechanical process you can see with your own eyes, LPs feel more organic than CDs or MP3s. That sense of the natural is related to understandings of analog sound reproduction, which does literally transduce an analog of the original sonic waveform recorded.

Yet the “natural” aspects of LPs manufactured from petroleum-based polyvinylchloride and of most of the sounds traced on them are absurd on their face. Yes, LPs contain physical analogs of sonic waveforms etched into their surface, but the sounds are inherently deformed by the physical characteristics of the recording and playback gear and intentionally adulterated by the artists. ¹⁶ Many of the sounds used in today’s music are born electronically or processed until their acoustic origins are unrecognizable. ¹⁷ Furthermore, most current LPs were recorded digitally and most since 1980 was transferred to digital in the process of cutting the master disks. ¹⁸ Only a miniscule percentage of LPs made today are pure analog, and all-digital recordings are nearly as uncommon. ¹⁹ The reality of sound production and reproduction in the last thirty years is neither analog nor digital but both.

The Future Belongs to Analog Loyalists

Despite these realities, the LP remains a cultural icon. Part of the reason is that in the 1980s, LP became the symbol of independent culture and its values, unlike discarded sound media. To independent labels and their fans in the 1980s, CD represented a corporate attempt to put technological imperatives ahead of the craft of music-making and the profit of corporations over a richly varied ecology of non-corporate production and distribution. Where LP was a boon to independent labels in the 1950s, the high expense of manufacturing CDs and of maintaining dual inventory strained the resources of independent labels, stores, and bands. As the New York Times noted in 1994, “there is a surprisingly widespread conviction that the LP was done in before its time by the mainstream music business.” ²⁰ The economic critique of CD gained fuel in the late 1990s when manufacturing prices plummeted but retail prices continued to rise. Through the 1990s, LP typically underpriced CD, making it the music junkie’s choice. ²¹

As major labels pillaged the musical underground in the wake of grunge in the early 1990s, vinyl took on greater cultural symbolism. One of the figureheads of the independent scene, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, explained, “Vinyl has become the domain of the independent, low-economy, record-making kid…a real art underground.” ²² Many underground classics remained vinyl-only, adding allure to the medium. More directly, the vibrant hip hop culture which rose from the underground and exploded into popular consciousness in the 1980s and early 1990s made the mastery of the LP catalog and the physical manipulation of LP discs a realm of the heroic artist. ²³ Thus alongside its audiophile appeal, vinyl had the mystique of lo-fi DIY opposition culture.

Many musicians of the CD era signaled their allegiance to vinyl by offering incentives to those who bought it—early release dates, bonus tracks, elaborate alternate artwork, even the occasional vinyl-only record. But it took years for labels to hit upon the winning formula for reversing vinyl’s decline: digilog.

The first band to offer a digital copy of their music along with vinyl, Shellac, epitomized both the anti-corporate and audiophile critiques of CD. Founded in 1992, their members brought reputations for intelligence and integrity from the punk/underground demi-monde of the 1980s. ²⁴ Through its two- decade history, Shellac has done things overtly in their own way, abstaining from the recording/touring treadmill, signaling that every musical utterance they offer is art for art’s sake. ²⁵ Their music unabashedly subjects listeners to abrasive sounds and arbitrarily extended tension-building repeats and silences, often subverting such release as they do belatedly offer. As a 2006 record review in hipster bible Pitchfork Media explained, Shellac’s image as “the last real band standing,” earned by cutting out the promotional “bullshit,” had won them a “built-in audience” to whom reviews were “irrelevant.” ²⁶ As underground heroes, their support of vinyl has carried great authority.

Guitarist and main vocalist Steve Albini won a similar reputation for integrity in his career as a recording engineer/producer. In fact, he is known most widely not for his own music but for recording chart toppers Nirvana and an army of cult artists. ²⁷ His recordings are hallmarks of rock recording both for his distinctive attempts to represent the unadorned sound of a band in a room and for his all-analog signal path. ²⁸ Albini has made himself an anti-digital spokeman, titling a 1987 compilation CD by his former band Big Black as The Rich Man’s Eight Track Tape (Homestead 043CD) and emblazoning “the future belongs to analog loyalists. Fuck digital,” on the back cover of the CD edition of the band’s 1987 album Songs About Fucking (Touch & Go 24 CD). By framing the issue partially in terms of loyalty, Albini makes the opposition of analog to digital something more than mere pragmatism. In the lore of 1980s underground music, heroic Davids like Big Black stood up to the corporate Goliath with only obsolescent vinyl records, outmoded 8-track analog studios, decrepit vans, and photocopied fanzines as weapons. ²⁹

Albini’s feelings about digital media were foundational to his band Shellac, named after the material used in the first mass produced sound medium. Liner notes to Shellac releases include unusual details such as “recorded electrically,” “pressed on 165 grams of dye blackened vinyl,” and “Mastered entirely in the analog domain, directly to metal on a Neumann VMS 84 lathe.” On various records, the band has offered fans a lengthy list of microphones used, details about the tape machines (one with “10,054 hours on the clock,”) the fluxivity specification of the tape and the bias level chosen (and why), a photo print of Albini’s studio with 70 item legend indicating the contents, and even the type of letterpress used to print the album jackets. A Shellac record announces to its owner that matter matters.

Shellac’s support of vinyl for their fourth LP, released in 2000, didn’t exclude or penalize the CD listener so much as give the LP buyer access to the digital largesse now taken for granted. 1000 Hurts (Touch & Go 211, 2000) strikes its purchaser with lavishly executed cleverness and obsession with form. ³⁰ The cover art evokes Ampex master tape. ³¹ Housed in a half-inch deep box of the type used for 12-inch tape reels, or reserved for multi-record opera sets, the cover mocks monuments to dinosaur rock seriousness like Bruce Springsteen’s Live 1975-1985 and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass.

Opening the package brought a surprise. The anti-CD band included a CD copy of their album in the box, a lagniappe for analog loyalists, and a pie in the face of those who had forsaken vinyl. In one package, Shellac invited comparisons of all the major sound media—shellac records, analog tape, vinyl, and compact disk. Though the CD-only version of 1000 Hurts was lavish in its own right, also partaking of the tape box metaphor, it did so in miniature, and for the same list price as the heftier vinyl version. ³² The band appeared to be saying, “it’s foolish to buy compact disks. CDs are so crappy and cheap they should be a giveaway to LP buyers. If the convenience of CD for your Discman or car, would sway you from analog loyalism, well here you go.” ³³ Unannounced, unheralded, and unbeknownst even to its purchasers until they opened the LP, the band and its label Touch & Go offered the first digilog release. ³⁴

While downloading and LP ownership are often portrayed as opposites and threats to each other, the reality is digilog synergy, as LP sellers have implicitly acknowledged. Mail order houses have put digital icing on the analog cake, allowing customers to download MP3s for the LPs they purchase immediately, without waiting for their order to arrive by post, opening the package, and typing a long url and download code. If they wished, they could even keep their keepsakes sealed and listen to the files instead. Noting a spike in LP sales, indie Insound first offered this perk in 2008. ³⁵ Amazon went one better in 2013, adding permanent cloud streaming for many LPs they sell. Legal music subscription services like Spotify, Rdio, Xbox Music, Google Play and forerunners Rhapsody and emusic can also serve as a digital complement to vinyl ownership. Likewise, internet piracy can allow fans to download MP3s and save vinyl for those special moments, should they decide an album deserves a space in their physical collection and the honor of undistracted listening.

The Honesty Box

As in the 1930s, when the phonograph industry suffered under competition from free music via radio and new competition from sound cinema, the 2000s recording industry saw visions of its own demise due to downloading and new media. In the 1930s, hardcore fans and collectors offered a consistent market that the industry learned to exploit with subscription series of multidisc sets—including canonical Bach recordings by cellist Pablo Casals and harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. Likewise, as digital downloads make music consumers think twice about opening their wallets, the industry has learned that vinyl can be positioned as the medium with which committed fans memorialize their personal canon. In the age of the digital slipstream, the industry has offered fans lavish, heavyweight, multiformat—often digilog—sets that push prices to heretofore unknown levels.

This trend towards the digilog box set has been overshadowed by downloading and streaming. In 2007, as vinyl sales rose 33%, Prince garnered attention by giving away his latest CD in a London newspaper, auguring a business plan in which recordings were free and revenue derived from live performance. Next, the popular and critically acclaimed UK band Radiohead allowed fans to set their own price—including nil—for a download of their newest album, In Rainbows. In a pointed commentary on piracy, the band called the space where one entered the amount to pay the “honesty box.” In the firestorm of controversy raised by Radiohead’s gambit, many wondered how the recording industry could survive if musicians were giving away the product of their labors for free, while others praised the forward looking nod to sharing culture and the circumvention of corporate distribution.

For all that, the honesty box was a mixed bag. In three months, a million people used it to download In Rainbows, generating nearly $3 million dollars for the band, an excellent take by any standard. ³⁶ Nonetheless, a majority of them paid nothing, and 2.3 million others downloaded the music illegally in under a month. ³⁷ After a mere three months, the album became available on iTunes in anticipation of a New Year’s release on CD and LP. The hype helped push CD sales for In Rainbows to 1.75 million, a 75% increase over their prior two albums. ³⁸ The honesty box may also have helped reap the benefits that traditionally accrue from song plugging (that is, when people become familiar with a tune, they want to hear it more). Overall, it has had little lasting effect.

More influential, it turned out, was the other offer on Radiohead’s website in October, 2007. While the listener could pay for MP3s according to budget and conscience, to obtain a physical edition would cost a wallet-lightening 40 pounds/$80, nearly unprecedented for a new release. Dubbed the “Discbox,” the digilog box set included a CD of the album, a CD of bonus tracks, an LP version spread over two discs at 45 RPM for enhanced fidelity (to the digital masters), and a hard-bound book of images. Impressively, confirmed sales of the Discbox exceeded 100,000 copies, more than doubling the take from the “Honesty Box” donations. ³⁹

In the wake of the Discbox, the U.S. branch of Radiohead’s former label, Capitol, finally got the idea that Americans might purchase vinyl copies of the band’s multiplatinum, critically acclaimed back catalog, which they issued for the first time domestically as part of a larger “Back to Black” series that included download coupons. ⁴⁰ In 2008, the Radiohead oeuvre became fully digilog.

How many purchased the Discbox or its copycats specifically for the vinyl is difficult to judge. In Radiohead’s case, $80 just to hear a bonus cd destined to be uploaded to fan sites minutes after release seems like a lot. But then, paying anything at all for the download-only option defied rationality. One fan, who had covered his dorm room with band posters, said paradoxically of In Rainbows that he “wouldn’t take it for free” although he hadn’t in fact paid for any of the five Radiohead albums already in his digital library. To pay (in his case $2) was “symbolic,” he said, “like cheering loud at their concerts.” ⁴¹ Purchasers of the Discbox paid more and thus symbolized more—particularly since they received something tangible in return.

Tangibility offers its own pleasures, not least of which is a sense of superiority as a music fan. Insound’s Wishnow states many view LPs as branded merchandise, like T-shirts and posters, a way to display their status as cognoscenti. ⁴² Furthermore, collectibles like the Discbox, and, in truth, any new LP pressing, could serve as a store of value, which was not the case for downloads and seemingly unlikely with CD. The appearance of still sealed copies of the Discbox and countless other out-of-print LPs auctioned by individuals on eBay, often at prices far exceeding the original cost, appears to represent hoarding and speculation by fans who have taken note of the how expensive out of print LPs can be.

In an age where digital files offered a distilled form of music devoid of additives, many fans appear to agree with a vinyl fan Isaac Hudson, who told a reporter “I think music products should be more than just music.” ⁴³ Helped along by Radiohead’s Discbox triumph, the industry has taken note that hardcore fans will pay a hefty fare to possess scarce, luxurious packages of music from their favorite artists. Furthermore, they have learned that those who remain committed to buying music in physical form often desire vinyl. While a handful of established big-time artists, like Nine Inch Nails, have offered albums for free download, many more have seen their new works and/or back catalog exploited in super deluxe editions listing for $40, $75, even $150 or higher, often combining vinyl, CD, and sometimes DVD. Classic titles from the likes of the Rolling Stones and David Bowie are receiving the “Super Deluxe” digilog Discbox-style treatment, pushing the price upwards of $150 for LP/CD/DVD/Book boxes. As a case in point, Led Zeppelin sets in the same configuration are due in June 2014 at a price of $140.

Discboxiacs

For the majority of listening, the convenience and sonic qualities of CD and MP3 have triumphed, but the result has not been, as most expected, zero-sum. LP no longer means accessibility as it did when LPs were cheap, but vinyl’s aura of authenticity and its feel of guerrilla action has only increased with scarcity. Sales figures show that music fans are converging on a digilog world in which a promiscuous digital cornucopia complements the puritanical regime of vinyl and its fixed materiality. ⁴⁴ In an age in which musical sounds, in all their ephemerality, can be conjured with the merest of efforts, many are choosing the most difficult medium—at least for home listening. The digilog LP satisfies the desires for authenticity, embodiment, engagement, and memorialization without sacrificing convenience. Indie labels led the way in marketing LPs together with MP3s so that buyers could have their cake and eat it too, that is to have an LP to possess and enjoy at home while maintaining a diet of MP3s on their phones, tablets, and computers.

The success of super deluxe multiformat set demonstrates in extremis the power of people’s desire to have their cake. Seeing dollar signs and asserting their place in the canon, even indies are adopting the Discbox format. In January 2014, Touch & Go announced that they were releasing a commemorative edition of Spiderland (Touch & Go 64), the 1991 LP by post-rock godfathers Slint. ⁴⁵ The album attracted little notice when released, but has deeply influenced a generation of punk musicians seeking to add range and sophistication to their work without sacrificing intensity. ⁴⁶ Indeed Albini’s Shellac, like a regiment of other bands, took cues from Slint’s loud-soft dynamics, sonic minimalism, rhythmic flexibility, lyrical pathos, and stark, pristine audio. ⁴⁷ In other words, in the catalog of underground rock music, Spiderland was an obvious choice for exploitation.

But the discbox format is a bit ironic. Since indie labels such as Touch & Go specifically have prided themselves for offering value, it comes as a bit of a shock that at $150, Slint’s 3 LP, 2 CD, 1 DVD plus book overprices Led Zeppelin, those monsters of rock–and Time-Warner’s bottom line. ⁴⁸ Just as perturbing is the inclusion of CDs. Like their mentor Albini, in 1991 Slint took a stand for the dying LP, awkwardly instructing CD purchasers of Spiderland, via a typewritten banner superimposed on the back cover, “This record is meant to be listened to on vinyl.” ⁴⁹

Though that statement seemed to be an exercise in futility in 1991, today’s vinyl revival owes much to the credibility of musicians like Slint and their espousal of vinyl. Due in part to their influence, collectors demand classic albums be memorialized on vinyl. But even analog ideologues like Slint accommodate to the digilog reality: not digital or analog, but both.

Read the whole piece here.

A Carroll Gardens photographer is releasing a book of images that peer into the lives of vinyl fetishists — the record-collecting kind — and you can get your hands on an initial pressing during the book’s launch party at Dumbo’s PowerHouse Arena on April 19.

“Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting” chronicles 130 vinyl record collectors and their hoards, giving voyeuristic vinyl fans an exciting glimpse into some really saucy stacks.

Read the full post here.

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.

Librarian Sarah O’Holla’s journey through her husband’s (WNYC On the Media producer Alex Goldman) records is charming enough. “I’ve never been ahead of the curve with music,” she writes in her introduction to the project, “but my taste could probably also be described as eclectic on the snobbier side too — just in a much more clueless way [than Goldman].” Her writing is conversational and funny, and often perceptive in a plainspoken way. Rather than pretending to provide authoritative music criticism, she offers the rare perspective of a thoughtful listener encountering a wide range of albums for the first time. There’s something refreshing about this, certainly, even if it sometimes feels like O’Holla is playing up her ignorance and wonder for maximum adorkability.

Read the full post here.

It is hard to imagine that modern day hipster twentysomethings, smoking cigarettes on a Brooklyn stoop, have anything in common with a small early-twentieth Southern Jewish congregation. (Other than maybe being Jewish – apparently, Jewish hipsters are their own subculture, and they’re into vinyl!)

Read the full post here.

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

Mr. Chang’s peculiar project differs from standard collections in its purpose and its scope. Most collections focus on completeness in variation; collectors seek out all of the albums in an artist’s discography, or all of the variants of cover or vinyl color. They may strive for completeness in a genre, be it 40’s jazz or 80’s hardcore, or as a way of documenting their own experiences at shows or festivals. The White Album project, on the other hand, is interested in variations among sameness. Each record is supposedly identical. Each begins in a nearly identical condition, and each retains tremendous similarities over time, but each records the individual experience of the particular record or owner. This creates a peculiar paradox. While at first glance Mr. Chang is building a collection of identical objects, he is in reality compiling a collection of unique artifacts, each unlike the other and impossible to replace. No part of the collection is interchangeable, in the way that someone assembling a Michael Jackson collection might be indifferent as to which particular copy of the Bad album they have, so long as its condition and printing are acceptable. Mr. Chang owns no duplicates, and cannot feasibly part with any record in his collection without diminishing it. White Album #0276938 is the only such record in existence, and its particular pattern of wear, defacement, and imperfections in the vinyl are impossible to replicate. Perhaps appearing at first to be more of a compulsive tendency than an art project, We Buy White Albums offers us a window into the nature of collecting by turning our expectations of what a collection is on its head.

You can read more about Mr. Chang’s fascinating project here.

One of my responsibilities as Multimedia & Web Services Librarian at City Tech is overseeing the numerous media collections we have. I recently weeded numerous broken VHS cassettes, 3.5″ floppy discs, incompatible CD-ROMs from the 90s, audio cassettes, and currently 8mm and 16mm reel to reel films. What is most interesting is that we still keep our vinyl collection in the library. What separates this particular format from those that have been removed from the collection is that this format still circulates.

From spoken-word to Jazz, from country to rock, from foreign language to instruction to operas, the vinyl collection at City Tech spans over 3000 recordings of various genres. When I first arrived at City Tech I was awe struck at not only the collection, but that it still circulates. It was also in very, very, poor shape…

The stacks of vinyl in the media collection were not entirely organized. It suffered from many problems, some of which we are still working on 8 years later. Some logistical issues include call numbers not in the correct order, damaged items still in the shelves, and the crisis of running out of space were all concerns. Over the course of a few years, college assistants and myself sorted and cleaned the shelves. We re-arranged the vinyl in the correct order and discarded unnecessary duplicates and broken records.

Besides the physical problems we encountered, Monica Berger, City Tech’s cataloger, found numerous inconsistencies with the back-end of media pieces. Previous librarians and staff had erroneously created circulation created records instead of proper cataloging (or copy cataloging) of materials. Currently, we are going over these materials to ensure a proper consistency among all vinyl pieces. This is important so that students and faculty borrowing these materials have a proper access point and can find what they are looking for.

Out of the numerous audio formats that we have, including audio cassettes and CDs, the vinyl is what circulates the most. There have been no requests for audio cassettes, so last year we weeded the collection. The CDs have not circulated in over 6 years, as students turn more towards MP3 formats and streaming media. Along with the vinyl collection, these materials could be loaned for a period of a week. However, what leaves the library doors is the vinyl.

As a avid record collection, I am very pleased to see this. What pleases me more is seeing students checking out vinyl and not knowing how to use it. I feel that there is a greater appreciation of music when you can hold the material in your hand, touch the LP slip cover, and have something tangible that one can feel. You can’t do this with a web page, an eBook, or Spotify. As libraries move towards new electronic models of distribution of materials, something is lost. Vinyl has survived the 8-track, cassette, and CD. I strongly believe that it will survive the Internet stream as well.