h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm in my middle forties. Especially after discovering You-Tube, I think it's great that I can dial up recordings of favourite acts at one or two clicks of a mouse away. I've seen concert footage of favourite bands and watched old TV perfomances and gone "hey, wow!", as you do.

But there's a little bit of me that remembers a time when...

..buying music meant going to the record shop. It was not something you did lightly as a goodly proportion of your weekly income went on a 7-inch single, and buying an LP, a great big satisfying tangible chunk of black vinyl, meant saving for weeks. In those days, oh my children, music weas big and tangible and relatively expensive. Listening to the music... the ritual of easing the white inner sleeve out of the cardboard outer. Carefully and reverently sliding the black vinyl disc out of the flimsy white inner bag, whose open edge had been rotated 45 degrees to the open end of the outer sleeve to safeguard against dust and damage. Holding it very carefully by the edges so as not to damage the fragile groove, lining it up with the central spindle on the turntable, carefully guiding the playing arm to the run-in groove at the outer edge of the spinning record, (and in my case mentally redesigning a record player for ease of use of a left-hander).

Then to settle down with the sensory experience of the sleeve design, liner notes and photos, which if you were lucky were on an open-out gatefold cover measuring 24" x 12", and if you were even luckier, continued onto the white inner sleeve and maybe even a booklet.

You could get excited about buying LP's. The tremble of "wow!" at discovering something worthwhile in a second-hand record shop persists even today, in 2007. And up until about 1986, this was the only way to buy new music.

Then those little drink coaster efforts started to come in.

OK, I buy CD's now - I'm forced to - but I don't get the same "all-senses-engaged" thrill that 12" black vinyl still gives me. CD's are just a soul-lessly functional and efficient way of buying music, nothing more than that. Borrowing them and using a computer to burn a copy, this is good, this works, but I can get no more excited about a "new" shop-bought CD than I do about a home-burnt copy. They're just functional music discs. The romance is dead.

Even more so with downloading and copying. Too easy. In 1974, a 7" single was half my weekly spends - a big buy. I wonder whether restricting downloading to the equivalent cost, rationing by price, might restore something of that magic... it might stir the musicians to making a product worth buying, if cost came into the equation more...

or maybe I'm just a jaded old rocker of forty-five with loads of memories of a time when...

I'm a fan of CD in preference to vinyl for one reason. If it's produced properly, it sounds better on normal home entertain systems.

There is no doubt that if you put vinyl through a nice class-A stereo amplifier powered by valves, through some full range, frequency neutral speakers, that it sounds better, warmer and overall, nicer.

CD, however, has a great dynamic range (by about 20db, I think), allowing for better sensory engagement (at least with your ears). When it comes to the cover art, and so on, I tend to agree about vinyl, they're just so BIG and obvious. Something you really know you own.

It's funny, though, and a little unfair when people go and bag CD in favour of vinyl when it comes to Audio quality. Simply put, when vinyl was the prominent player, record producers were not twits (at least, not in the same way they are today). It seems as though, as soon as CD came out, people thought "wow, great! More dynamics to play with, more headroom, woohoo! We can now capture all that lost information that analogue physically couldn't handle!", then they thought "well, hell, let's sacrifice dynamics and just make everything really, ear-smashingly loud!" which is the attitude displayed today.

I've spent the last 8 hours trying to fairly write a review on Vanessa Carlton's new CD, and believe me when I say it's difficult. It's actually fatiguing for me to listen to due to the above, among others.

Do a youtube search for "The Loudness War", there's a good video on it.

I also read an article on Wired today about vinyl possibly coming back to take over from CD again - my response was this; if record producers keep producing how they do now, going back to an analogue format will be a placebo, the problem is still in the recording.

There's something oddly romantic about vinyl records. I believe that vinyl records do produce better-quality sound because the top bits/bottom bits of the sound waves (that can't be directly heard by the human ear, but do have an effect on the sounds heard) don't get chopped off in recording. Also, they're interactive, half way through the record, you have to get up and flip it over. This makes a nice little break in your listening experience, and can add to the impression that the order of the songs on the record makes. If you listen to Abbey Road on vinyl, side one ends suddenly just as the moog "wind" on "I Want You (She's so Heavy)" climaxes, leaving the listener with only the slight purr of the electric motor turning the record. This is lost on the CD version, with the opening guitar part of "Here Comes The Sun" starting immediately after "I Want You (She's so Heavy)" ends.