Vinyl vs CDs

On the 17th August 1982, the worlds first Compact Disc was manufactured at a Philips factory in Germany; a copy of "The Visitors" by ABBA.

To mark the 25th birthday of this piece of technology today, I'm reposting this article I wrote for an old website in 2002. My favourite thing about it is what it doesn't say, as opposed to what it does— as it was written about a year before the iTunes Music Store opened, apart from a passing reference to MP3s I've completely ignored the (at the time almost entirely illegal) music download market which seems to have replaced the tape player/walkman, and presently appears to be the best bet to replace the CD.

I remember the first record I ever owned. I had yet to form any musical opinions or tastes of my own, so the fact that it was a compilation of what someone somewhere judged to be the best singles that they had aquired the publishing rights for that year meant it was pretty much ideal for me at the time.

It also happened to be on CD, which shows that I can't really hark back to the golden age of when records were records and expect to be taken seriously by anyone. On the other hand, it also shows that this isn't just some nostalgic rant about the good old days; 2002 was the 20th anniversary of CDs release onto the market.

But that doesn't change the fact that vinyl is the best available format for a record to be on.

From the start- putting on a record.

CDs-

1. Look at your stacks of CDs (probably kept in an extortionately priced rack or two.) Choose one, based on the title on the spine.


2. Try to ignore the fact that the perspex cover could have been specifically designed to show up the smallest scratches and to leave traces of the price sticker or whatever other stickers the record shop has decided to use to obscure the 5 inch square of artwork.


3. Open up the plastic case, avoid thinking about how much of the worlds oil resources go into making the things, or how many scratched and cracked cases will be clogging up landfill sites and failing to biodegrade in years to come, and try not to notice how many of the little teeth things that hold the CD in place have broken off.


4. Chuck CD into drawer.


5. Close drawer.


6. Press play.

Vinyl-

1. Flick through your record collection. Choose one, based on the foot square of cover art, because you have to physically flick through records, rather than just stare at the spines.


2. Take the record from your collection (far more economical with space than your CD collection- why does such a thin piece of plastic need the packaging to be a quarter of an inch thick?)


3. Remove record from sleeve.


4. Place onto turntable.


5. Put needle on record. Hear satisfying sound of needle hitting record...

Basically, it's all about touch. When you're looking through your CD collection, you're just staring at the spines, looking for whatever title it is that you're looking for. About as interesting as reading a catalogue. Looking through a record collection means physically flicking through them- looking at the foot square of artwork on each one. And you're not just pressing play when you've put it on- you're actually putting the needle in the groove. You can see it, feel it and hear it. I've never seen anyone handle a CD with any visible real care- when you pick up a piece of vinyl, you know that you're holding a slice of real music- you can actually run a needle along it and hear the music. When you think about it, a CD doesn't actually contain music- it holds soulless, digital information- a binary stream of 1s and 0s which are read by the CD player, and decoded through a process of anti-aliasing, quantisation, sampling, oversampling, filtering and dithering to an approximation of the original recording. Which is all well and good, considering that the main advantage with storing music digitally is that it can be copied and reproduced time and time again without degrading, but fails to recognise that the so-called "degradation" isn't always a bad thing. Why else have guitarists been doing everything they can to degrade the sound their guitar makes since the first ever electric guitar was made? Why else do studios who make recordings to be put onto digital CDs and tapes record first onto analogue tape?

Then there's DJs- whoever heard of anyone making a CD player do things you'd never imagine possible? Ever wondered why DJs haven't "upgraded" to CDs? Or why in the 20 years since they hit the market, no CD player has reached anywhere even approaching the status of the Technics SL1210s?

And why is it that record shops that sell vinyl always look
more interesting than those that just have racks of CDs everywhere? Because old records look like classics. Plus you can get collectable records- picture discs, differnt coloured vinyl, test pressings, white labels, flexidiscs. Old CDs just look old and worn out, no matter what the CD is. If you're lucky, you might get one with an interesting box that doesn't fit into your CD rack. Great. Maybe that's just because the formats too young, and one day "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits will be as collectable as an original Smokey Robinson 7". (Then again, maybe not...) But then even when it all goes wrong and your record gets scratched, its still far less annoying than a scratched CD. At least you can just move the needle and listen to the rest of the record.
As if CDs weren't bad enough, now we have recordable CDs, meaning that while CDs once at least were (virtually) a guarantee of a decent recording, now means nothing- they could just as well have been recorded from a tape. And just to prove that they aren't even a great piece of technology, you can now get DVDs, which are the same size as a CD, and not only hold an entire films worth of audio (while CDs can only manage 74 and a half minutes), also manage to have high resolution moving images (ie. the film), and even alternate soundtracks (directors commentary etc.) Some DVDs have as much as 6 hours of sound on a single CD sized disc- and a film to boot!

And while the Beatles' White Album covers 2 CDs, by storing the songs as MP3s on a rewritable CD, you can have the entire Beatles catalogue on a single, normal compact disc.

All of which means that CDs manage to simultaneously be too small, too big, pointlessly new (because lets face it, they don't do anything you can't do with a vinyl record) and obsolete technology (superseded by DVD, MP3s etc.).

A lot of bad things came out of the 1980s, but I think CDs must be the only one that for some reason is still in fashion.

Now, while tapes, CDs and minidiscs are widely available, it's a real challenge to find a new stereo that has a record player. The average high street record shop doesn't sell vinyl, except for maybe a dozen or so of the latest dance singles. And in the few branches of the high street chains that do sell a few records on vinyl, they cost around 30% more.

Imagine if all the money, time and effort that went into making CDs as widely available as they are (and into making minidisks and DCCs to take over from them) had gone into improving the longevity of vinyl records, or reducing the cost of them, or making them more readily available.