De vinyl
My friend Robert is an audiophile.
I'm sure he won't mind the typecasting one bit. For months now (years?), he's talked about the joy of sitting in the perfect spot, with the perfect sound... and a perfect vinyl record.
My youth was filled with vinyls and cassettes—even (gasp) 8-track tapes. But I loved records the most, in a ritualistic, almost sacred way. The manipulations, the weight, the artwork, the needle...
And yet, when CDs came out I embraced the tech with downright vigour: no crackles or scratches? No flutter, or speed/pitch issues? This was heaven. Listening to "two sides" in a single sitting was heaven too. I remember feeling a definite sadness at the loss of those sprawling covers, but digital was progress. The future. By the time Napster and mp3s hit the scene, I'd shifted away entirely: weeks of endless music? Yes. Playlists to shame those cute but anemic mixtapes? Check.
The rest, of course, is history: the great jukebox in the sky became part of our everyday reality and I never looked back. I watched from afar the resurgence of vinyl in recent years, mostly with bemusement; I'd listen to Robert with a smile—sometimes even a smirk (sorry man).
Until, that is, our last conversation, just before the holidays.
I suddenly found myself vinyl-curious, filled with pangs of nostalgia and a longing for physicality. A few days after Christmas I went lurking around our basement, made a mental note of the high shelf where my old turntable was sitting, gathering dust. I spotted where we'd stored the boxes full of records. At the back of my mind this was slowly turning into the holiday assignment.
I brought down the turntable just before New Year, dragged it to my work space, plugged it into a wall socket. No smoke, still spinning. Good. But I no longer owned an amp to test it, so I ordered a very basic phono pre-amp, to see if it still produced...you know...sound. It did. Surprisingly lovely sound too. There were, however, a few issues:
The needle was visibly way past its prime.
Ditto with the cartridge: the whole assembly looked as if someone had sat on it.
The left channel would randomly cut out, likely due to the cartridge's old wiring...or because someone had sat on it.
Then, in a weird moment of serendipity, Cynthia told me her mom's phono amp had died. So when we visited a few days later, I gave her the one I'd just bought.
End of story? Nah. That die was cast. When we came home I ordered another, less basic pre-amp, along with an Audio Technica cartridge and headshell kit (the AT-VM95E) to replace my crumbling Piezo setup. I'd already installed the turntable right next to my desk, so when the delivery came in I was ready to roll: I screwed in the new cartridge, plugged the turntable into the phono amp, the amp into a mixer already connected to my nEar05 reference monitors.
The needle dropped on Bowie's Low.
It blew me away.
There's nothing here that's anywhere near audiophile gear: the new stuff is all entry level, and my turntable is just an 80's midrange Pioneer PL-512 (the model with anti-skating). I've had it so long I honestly don't even remember where or when I actually got it. I don't remember buying it either, which is strange. The Years of Fog taking their toll I imagine.
I'm not ditching our Apple Music account and I'm not about to start spending insane amounts of money on new albums. A few perhaps, eventually. But I'm enjoying revisiting my existing collection, going down memory lane with those covers I spent so many hours gazing into. Rediscovering a different, richer, warmer sound.
And you know what? One side of a vinyl record isn't a bad pomodoro timer either.
P.S: None of this (at the onset) had anything to do with the vinyl project I mentioned earlier this week. That's just another happy/eery coincidence I'll tell you about at some point.
