LP RIP

Like children, we are easily impressed by changes in scale.  On the one hand we are always delighted by successively bigger buildings, chunkier earth-moving equipment and longer single-span bridges; on the other, we marvel over the constant miniaturisation which lies at the heart of most electronic technologies.  Once that change in scale has occurred, we find it hard to take the old size seriously. False sophisticates, we laugh at other people's small aeroplanes and enormous floppy discs.

The same is true of LPs and CDs: the latter can make the former seem gross by comparison.  To some, the discs are their own emblems: the one, big and black like a huge piece of liquorice, the other small and iridescent as if a tiny galaxy had fallen to earth.  For converts to CDs, the 12 inches of vinyl belongs to an age of cat's whisker radios, Morse code telegraphy and horseless carriages.

Certainly the technologies seem to back this up.  An LP works by placing a physical stylus in a track which wobbles in a kind of three-dimensional hula dance.  Its operation is analogue; that is, the transcription process converts the infinitely subtle variations of music into completely equivalent variations in the surface of the record.

CDs are digital.  They take music and translate it to a kind of Platonic essence made up entirely of numbers. Proponents might argue that there is a rigour in this process which is almost metaphysical; CDs, they would say, glean the musicness from the raw sounds, and code it in the most abstract and therefore most spiritual of systems.  Moreover, the instrument for mediating this conversion is again purity itself: light.  Laser light, too, which is a super-purified, co-ordinated variety.  It seems clear, then, that the CD is the acme of technology, whereas the LP is positively Neanderthal in its crudeness.

And yet.  It is a curious but well-attested fact that the very best gramophone systems produces a superior sound to even top-flight CD players.  The difference is most telling for the human voice. Compared to the lean, clean sound of an LP, a CD has a certain indescribable edge to it; there is a distinct metallic tang to the sound of singing.  In the worst cases you feel that you are listening not to a human, but to an android offering a passable but not perfect imitation.  This effect is real, and is a product of the CD's vaunted technology.  By its very nature, digitisation is a finite process, and encodes only a finite level of detail in the music.  When reconstituted, there is a tiny element which is lost. The subtle human ear can detect this absence which it perceives as a harshness in the upper frequencies.

So those who cling to the LP are not entirely sentimentalists.  At the moment, this big, old, clunky technology is actually superior.  Recording companies are shifting to CDs for two simple reasons; it enables them to introduce a price differential, and on cheaper audio systems a CD does sound better.   The CD, then, is a glistening monument to corporate profits and the power of mass mediocrity.  Which only makes the LP, the antithesis of both, even more attractive to its unabashedly elitist enthusiasts.

(22.10.89)

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