Sitting in my favorite chair, drinking a beer and listening to The Band’s Music from Big Pink on vinyl. Life couldn’t get any better than this (…maybe). It’s during times like these that I get to thinking about how rarely people sit back, relax, and enjoy the finer things in life. More specifically, people seem to have forgotten how to enjoy music correctly.
I’m sick of the stupid people all over the world today, running around with their 120 gig iPods that contain 2 gigs of [Insert shitty modern artist/group] and a ripped version of The Chronicles of Narnia. People don’t seem to care that they are listening to sub-standard music that is nowhere near how the artist intended for it to be heard. I honestly don’t give a shit if you’re listening to Jonas Brothers or fucking Taylor Swift or some other shitty music, that’s your choice I guess. What I care about is the quality of the music itself.
I praise all that is music, therefore it kills me to hear good music degraded by crappy sound quality. I collect vinyl records for this specific purpose. I can already hear everyone whining about how it’s crackly and outdated. SHUT THE FUCK UP. If you take care of vinyl, it sounds more pristine than any CD or MP3 ever will. (And it’s so much more fulfilling than downloading an artist’s entire discography from The Pirate Bay)
The fact is, vinyl is the closest thing to listening to the master tapes of an album in the studio. It’s analog, so it is continuous sound and not staggered samples of the original song (i.e. mp3 or wav files, see graph below). The smaller the file, the less samples per-second, leading to degraded sound quality and a more “empty” sound. This push for more music in a smaller space is causing the music to lose its dynamic and the subtle nuances that are only audible on the original LPs. Vinyl actually goes beyond the boundaries of human hearing, so what you can’t hear you can feel. (Check here for a good and simple explanation about the whole sound quality thing)
It doesn’t take a whole lot of money to begin collecting vinyl and experiencing the beauty of music the way it is supposed to be heard. People think you need to be a millionaire to be an audiophile, but that is because of B.S. like this being on the market. In reality, all you need is a quality set-up comprised of vintage equipment, like this and this, that will set you back little more than the cost of an iPod touch.
But I think one of the best parts of collecting vinyl is the album art. There’s nothing cooler than laying down, listening to a record and zoning out staring at the album artwork. Try doing that with your faggy 2″ x 2″ iPod screen Steve Jobs.
I guess I should stop complaining though, cause it looks like people are starting to catch on.
So today I finally got a chance to check out the new Chris Cornell album Scream, and that is exactly what it made me want to do, in 
