Hello RC,
As a reader and subscriber for many years, I can’t help thinking that other formats other than the current craze over vinyl, are being forgotten about. I bought my first CD player in 1984 because it was becoming rare to actually buy an LP without some form of fault or blemish spoiling the sound of the album. I returned quite a few in the early 80s and those frustrations drove me, I’m glad to say, towards the shiny little disc that is derided by many today.
Having stuck with the shiny format all of these years, I am now slowly growing my collection of SACD’s, DVD-A’s and BluRay audio discs for wondrous surround sound experiences.
I appreciate the nostalgia for the old LPs and admittedly their superior sleeves can be real pieces of art, but some of the CD booklets are very worthy of the “product” they are attached to.
There will always be the argument of the warmth of the LP verses the sound of the CD. However, from years of listening to all formats,
I believe the “warmth” is the middle band of the sound emitted from the recording, rather than the whole highs and lows that the original recording, which CDs tend to lend their bandwidth to. This may not be true of state-of-the-art turntables, which may be as good as anything, subject to the LP pressing.
Another thing that makes me laugh with regards the buyers of today’s vinyl, especially that of old original pressings, is that they often talk about LPs still being in their original shrink-wrapping. I can only ever remember buying one LP that was shrink-wrapped and that was Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Very impressive it was, too, but I had to open it to play it! Just as well I did, because the first pressings turned out to be faulty and I had to return it to my HMV shop in Holloway Road, London.
I guess there are still a number of genuine black shrink-wrapped copies that remain unopened but they may well be from that first dodgy batch! It may look nice but the LP is not worth playing, if that was ever the intention.
On Facebook, even this morning, I read that someone bought Roxy Music’s Country Life LP from a charity shop and that was still shrink-wrapped and the way it was spoken about, that won’t get played either. Great cover, though!
Essentially, I believe music is for listening to, not collecting to look at in a pristine shrink-wrapped state. More than that, I would like RC to actually promote the likes of the Surround Sound discs. They are limited in numbers and in themselves are probably quite collectible but that’s not the point. Please review and talk about these discs more than you do. Finally, record companies also get my goat with their vinyl and 5.1 combined packages. Surely the purchaser would rather have the choice to buy one or the other – Roxy Music’s first album recent re-release being a prime example. A Blu-ray could include bonus tracks and a Surround version of the original remixed album and likewise a separate vinyl LP for the new breed of “purists”! To me these packages don’t work. If they were split out, I’m sure the record companies would actually sell more “product”. Maybe RC could do an article on the Surround Sound discs, first on the quality of the sound and mix, then value, as that appears to be the main selling point behind RC.
By the way, I do enjoy the articles and record reviews, believe it or not.
