How, in 2014, does a vinyl record sell 60,000 copies to become the best-selling vinyl LP since 1994,^[1] and top first-week vinyl sales (since Soundscan began tracking data in 1991) with 40,000 copies?^[2] This is exactly what’s happened with Jack White’s Lazaretto, which he released in June. Furthermore, the Lazaretto “Ultra” LP with secret tracks, a locked outer groove, an etched hologram, and several other party tricks, accounts for over a quarter of the album’s total sales. Lazaretto marks the resurgence of vinyl over the past several years, a phenomenon that is perhaps more head-scratching than impressive.

Only recently does technology seem to move backwards. Polaroid declared bankruptcy and stopped manufacturing its instant film back in 2009—but reflective of lingering demand for iconic product preservation, the The Impossible Project took over a polaroid manufacturing plant and now sells the film for legacy polaroid cameras and has even developed the “All-New B&W 600 Round Frame Film.” The niche market for polaroid products is, perhaps, smaller than the market for vinyl these days. But as Jack White’s promo YouTube video for his Ultra LP makes clear, vinyl is all about tweaking and repackaging antiquated technology too. Like a polaroid snapshot taken in 2014, a vinyl pressing ensures a relation between aesthetic content and the iconic before anything is actually seen or heard.

In fact, hearing has very little to do with it. The majority of popular writing on vinyl records focuses on comparing and contrasting the audio fidelity of the analog format with digital formats (CD, mp3s, etc.). Some articles are misleading and some articles are technically accurate, but to perpetuate an analog versus digital debate is itself misleading; the issue is low quality mp3 compression, not any inherent limitation on digitally encoding an audio signal. Having taught several undergraduate courses covering fundamentals of digital audio and digital music production techniques, I remain perplexed by the persistence of vinyl fetishism despite sufficient instruction in acoustics, psychoacoustics, and digital signal processing. Of course a digital signal is only as good as the dumbest thing you do to it, but barring excessive compression, limiting, downsampling, etc., a standard audio CD at 44.1khz sampling rate accurately represents both high and low frequencies across the full range of human hearing (with room to spare), and, with 16bits of data storage for each sample, provides approximately 96dB of dynamic range— enough to maintain the perceived difference in loudness between a jackhammer at 1 meter away and a mosquito buzz at 3 meters away. Can we even imagine a popular music with that level of detail these days? Doubtful. So what is it that we desire in music that exists independently of sound quality? Or, in other words, what do we get “more” of for what “less” fidelity there is, given the physical format of vinyl? I think this question is, finally, the right question to be asking.

I’ve had several encounters with electronic music newbies and highly trained electroacoustic composers alike who tout vinyl as a viable medium for releasing new music. Given my experience, I think there are three distinct but related reasons why people fetishize vinyl and continue to assert its relevance: the physicality of the medium, the interpretation of sonic imperfections, and nostalgia for an idealized social practice. I’ll take a moment to address all three.

Physicality

It’s rare to hear people endorse vinyl based on any objective measure of audio fidelity, but the physicality of the vinyl record itself is often mentioned as a key aspect of its allure. Given that musical experience is a defining characteristic of what it is to be human, we perhaps conflate music’s existence with our own. Holding an LP in your hand is somehow more real than holding even a CD, let alone your phone and all of its mp3s.

That the CD, upon its inception, provided us with noticeably greater clarity while maintaining the recording as a tangible object, seemed to be a win-win; no-one reverted to vinyl in the 80s. The plastic shiny CD was enough of a physical object to ensure the music actually existed independently of us or beyond us, despite the fact that no physical representation of sound remained. But with the rise of the mp3 over the last 15 years, music has suffered doubly: the audio fidelity of a 128kb/s mp3 pales in comparison to CD quality audio, and, despite the perfunctory inclusion of an album-cover jpeg accompanying your digital download, no packaging or real objects remain. The vinyl revival can thus be seen as a response to the trauma inflicted upon us by the mp3.

That CDs continue to decline in sales as both digital downloads and vinyl rise is perhaps more a matter of guilt by association. What some of us hate about the mp3 has been (inappropriately) generalized to include all things digital. Many electronic composers, producers, and engineers continue to fetishize analog gear of all forms due to perceived limitations of particular software tools, despite the fact that any such limitations are more a matter of programming and software development than any inherent limitation of digital computation. And for those who are happy with the experience mp3s provide, CDs are just as archaic as vinyl.

Furthermore, the CD, being digital and all, is easily ripped onto any hard-drive to make an absolutely perfect (identical) copy of the music contained on the now superfluous disc. The symbolic nature of digital audio transcends whatever physical storage device (read: CD, hard-drive, or flash memory) we might use to access the data at any given time. Cloud storage, shared playlists, and streaming audio only deepen our fundamental distrust of how a digital music file that is seemingly bodiless can speak to our own bodily experience and existence. To some, vinyl remains our best way to ground music’s suspect existence, and perhaps ground our increasingly digitized selves by association.

Imperfection

While intuitively one would think listeners appreciate sonic clarity above all, the lack of sonic perfection regarding LPs remains a draw. While the perceived “warmth” of a vinyl record is perhaps most directly a byproduct of technical difficulties in pressing and reproducing low frequency signals and an inability to accurately transduce signals higher than 16khz, the warmth of vinyl is now on a pedestal. The audible consequences of some technical limitations serve to distinguish those unique and idiosyncratic sound qualities associated with vinyl. The needle scratching and hiss sounds function similarly to the notion of warmth. What were once threats to clarity and fidelity, have become signifiers for a real listening experience. Embracing imperfection, it would seem, is one way to get closer to the music— closer to the reality of a fragile and tenuous existence entwined with our own. We’re all imperfect people, so any music that represents us or reflects our lived experience shouldn’t shy away from the grit and “organic” grime of the recording’s physical form, but rather reframe imperfection as a means to heighten the immediacy of being here now. In our photoshopped/auto-tuned world, refocusing our ear toward historical markers of imperfection serves to musically re-establish the mere notion of authenticity.

I empathize with the above motivation, undoubtedly. But the hiss, scratch, and warmth associated with vinyl are just sounds, and all sounds are subject to being reproduced digitally. There is nothing static about the relationship between these particular sounds and notions of what’s real or authentic. What were once just noises associated with LP playback have become the signifiers of musical authenticity, and now producers of digital electronic music incorporate the hiss, scratch and warmth of an idealized vinyl listening experience into their sessions to associate their music with an aesthetic of authenticity, regardless of whether the track is pressed to vinyl or uploaded to SoundCloud.

Nostalgia

Lastly, renewed investment in vinyl records reflects a growing nostalgia for bygone days when you didn’t steal music, when you saved your pennies in anticipation of an album release date, when you had mom or dad drive you to the record shop, when…. I get it; music meant something more to us way back then, when we first came to fall in love with how sounds could both affect and reflect us. Again, the role vinyl plays in conjuring such nostalgia has nothing to do with the sounds themselves and everything to do with the context of listening.

I once heard a wonderful anecdote from a professor who, when hosting architectural historian and theorist Alberto Pérez-Gómez for an invited lecture, met his guest one morning in the lobby of the Hampton Inn where Perez-Gomez was staying and politely asked: “How was the hotel?” To which Pérez-Gomez replied: “Oh, fine. Just another building without memory.” Is our response to iTunes not precisely the same? Despite the ease of use, intuitive layout, and desired amenities on demand, doesn’t iTunes make us forget— forget our remarkably differentiated and contextual attachment to each album in our collection? And conversely, don’t rituals associated with vinyl, from purchase to playback to restoration, force a reengagement with each individual record and thus strengthen an association between sound and memory due to the investment in time and space vinyl requires?

There is certainly some truth here, but I’ve found that the majority of people investing in records today have rarely themselves had the vinyl experience they are nostalgic for. Despite being an older Millennial, I certainly didn’t grow up listening to vinyl. The CD was widely available by the time I could pay attention (late 80s). Mail-ordering CDs through BMG Music Service was my first engagement in consuming musical objects. I’m not remotely nostalgic for that, particularly the part where my frequent failure to decline the selection of the month resulted in an unwanted album showing up in my parent’s mailbox with the accompanying bill. I know my Dad had LPs, but I think he sold them off in a garage sale in the early 80s. Any investment in records on my part would be for the novelty of accessing a relatively recent folklore surrounding a prior generation, not for the prospect of recapturing my own youth. Vinyl records function as antiques despite the fact that you can buy new albums on vinyl. The market for vinyl simply articulates a shared sense of loss for that which we never had but heard stories about and still lingers, symbolically, as an alternative to the thoughtless and slick consumerism that saturates our contemporary lives.

The vinyl revival is, in many ways, a response to our contemporary situation. But I don’t see it as the most appropriate response. Vinyl remains undeniably regressive, regardless of the motivations that support continued investment. In a way similar to the polaroid and the converted loft apartment, vinyl provides a physical encounter with the past, with the mere notion of authenticity, and an idealized social practice. The harder task for any new music is to confront the allure of vinyl directly, to reframe the virtuality and inauthenticity of digital music as both necessary and desirable. In understanding the problem or trauma vinyl fetishism seeks to alleviate, perhaps a more progressive notion of musical meaningfulness can emerge in relation to the digital. And any such progressive attempt to reframe the affective possibility of digital music will hopefully, in the process, relegate the mp3 to that same graveyard of antiquated audio technologies where vinyl should still be resting in peace.

[1] http://www.nme.com/news/jack-white/78954
[2] http://www.thedailyswarm.com/headlines/jack-whites-vinyl-fetishism-pays-lazaretto-breaks-sales-record/

© 2014, Sean Peuquet. All rights reserved.