Rough Trade
Out of context: Reply #13
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- mikotondria20
Oh to be riotously ambivalent about vinyl - en mass, whatever blips trend might throw up, there's no real living stocking and moving vinyl in the highstreet. To my mind nothing sounds or smells like music like vinyl does.. Did some dance music production back in the day, and always salivated about taking our finished masters (which we had processed and polished and expanded and compressed and 'aired' in their Sunday best), to the cutting rooms, when the engineer would just spend a few minutes adjusting the eq going into his particularly and personally known cutting machine, and run off a few grooves for our approval..
A - The digital master...
B - The sound of that ably and gently persuaded into a singular analog groove..
Oh ! The humanity.
Through a set of 40 thousand pound behemoth mastering reference monitors, the difference is palpable.. All parts of the program, however complex it is, are literally welded together, its like hearing the piece in color for the first time. Dynamically it seemed there was inifinite headroom, and the soundstage peeled off tantalisingly into the distance, in infinite clarity - a boundless horizon. If a flea had farted you could have heard it at any point in the track..
From then on, it is sadly downhill - The closest sonically similar, cheap available material is vinyl, and with the right playback equipment it does a mighty fine job of emulating the master groove.. And so on, down the scale, poorer equipment, damaging nightclub styli, scratches and dust remove more and more fidelity from what is in theory an almost infinitely complex structure - the resolution of the material at any one point being limited at the (albe they rather large), molecular level, also a thumbnail equivalent of billions of Hz sample frequency, as discretely behaving as polymer surfaces can be..No digital standard, encoding, dacs, or other chip-based psycho acoustrickery will match the breathless norse-god power of a freshly cooked groove, and I will never suck the shit-sandwich that sells itself as 'all your favorite music ever, right in your pocket'...MP3s suck satan's 16khz cock, and stroke his balls while he makes whistling sounds replace intricacy and definition in the music we love, to the extent that kids today actually think it's supposed to fphwsssound like that.
I think I'm done.