In the dark recesses of the mind, where dope-fuelled paranoia shares cerebral space with hidden psychoses, the perpetual fear remains that vinyl is dead, shot through the heart with a digital bullet.
The all-conquering CD, the marketing consultant's wet dream, has for many years been the format of choice for most buyers, a symbol of 80's minimalism and mass technological consumption. Hailed as a musical revolution, offering instant access, easy portability and virtual indestructibility, the CD marginalised vinyl almost overnight. Only the DJ, the romantic and the die hard collector retain any interest in vinyl. The CD offered everything and more, a perfect sound coupled with increased capacity, consigning to memory the incessant need to turn over the record.
It is only now that the disadvantages of the digital revolution are being realised. Track titles are reduced to mere numbers, music has become a disposable commodity, and cover artwork (an excellent medium for expression) has been much maligned. Much more serious is the fact that CDs are a compromise; a reduction in sound integrity caused by the translation of complex analogue noise into binary simplicity. With admirable, sensitive vinyl, the music is directly transferred onto the surface of the record, whereas for any digital format, it is reduced to a series of samples, which are retranslated when played. CD sound is not perfect as was claimed, merely digitally clean and precise, leading to a sterile and restricted sound that is only enlivened by the proficiency of sound engineers and producers. The sound produced on any of these formats is not 'true,' but reductive and cold.
Advertised falsely as a vast improvement over analogue formats, the market is determined simply by profit, as one format is replaced by a similar format; watch out for the soon to be released High Density Compact Disc (HDCD), which will require yet more investment in playback equipment and replacing music collections. A vicious circle develops, as the companies involved are guaranteed a return as they own both the music and any method of playback that is developed. Is this just another hallucination of a crack-addled mind, a half-formed conspiracy theory? Sony own CBS records and Philips own both Phonogram and A&M. We are destined to buy the same re-packaged, re-issued releases on sub-standard formats for the rest of our lives. Welcome to hell.
Mark Shaw.