I hope we don’t see a resurgence in vinyl DJs. Generally, it sounds shit in a club (give me a wav or a CD any day – I always sigh when I’m working a dance music event and the ‘vinyl DJ’ comes on and I have to put up with woolly, low-fi sound for 2 hours, usually while some floppy hipster spins worn-out, dirty records on blunt needles). To any ‘vinyl purists’ out there, I’d love to know how a track, produced on a computer (digital), bounced out as a wav (digital) and then mastered (digitally) before being sent to a pressing plant to be imprinted (often quite clumsily, in the case of dance records) as a groove on a piece of plastic and read by a small metal needle disrupting a magnetic field can possibly be more ‘pure’ than the original mastered wav, emailed straight to Beatport and downloaded to a laptop? Any sonic difference is, by definition, distortion. This distortion might add a certain character to certain types of music (with old-school hip-hop records, ingrained spliff ash and sweat only seem to add to the grittiness), but modern electronic music IMO deserves a format capable of reproducing its nuances – production has come a long way since I was a teenager buying records on Oldham Street in Manchester fifteen years ago.
I do look back romantically on evenings spent hanging out in damp basements with my mates smoking weed and taking it in turns to spin hip-hop records; I liked looking at the cool artwork on the sleeves, and knowing that I’d still be able to do the same in thirty years time, as long as I hadn’t sold it. I liked the satisfaction of grabbing the spinning record and attempting to physically wrangle it into time with the tune playing on the other deck; Traktor doesn’t feel the same. Physical mediums do have their benefits. But coming from a purely sonic viewpoint, vinyl is an inferior format – the basic technology is 130 years old ffs!
I agree with GL’s point about hi-fi equipment – you can’t play a record on a phone, or on tinny laptop speakers. I guess maybe this is partly why I meet all these people who think vinyl sounds so much better than digital formats – even the £50 worth of old-school hifi equipment from Ebay needed to interface with a turntable will likely sound better than the latest £300 whizz-bang speaker from Apple (I was in one of their stores a few weeks ago in America and had to ask the assistant whether the white orb in front of me was for playing music, ordering my shopping or doing the hoovering). I think there’s also a certain degree of ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ syndrome when it comes to audio, and vinyl in particular. In the same way that everyone thinks they are a better-than-average driver, I’d say that most people (or at least DJs, sound engineers and self-proclaimed ‘audiophiles’) think they have above-average hearing, and are reluctant to admit when they can’t hear a difference, or to say that vinyl (which as everyone knows is pure, analogue, and warm), actually sounds pretty fluffy compared to a high-bitrate, uncompressed digital format for fear of being labelled a cloth-eared philistine by their fellow audio-enthusiasts.
