Many of us take it for granted that we can listen to music wherever and whenever we choose but have you ever considered what it was like before this was possible? The only way to hear music before we found a way to capture and replay sound was to make someone else play it or to play it yourself.
You may or may not be associated with old-school vinyl albums in today’s modern era. They seem to be on their way out as music is just a click away with all the applications providing you with all genres of music on your devices waiting for you to stream.
Imagine how much of a paradigm shift recorded music would have been for people if they were able to enjoy music at their leisure without having to wait for anyone to show it in front of them for the first time. To truly appreciate the genius of vinyl, you must first consider the roots and tradition of sound capture and reproduction.
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History of Vinyl
The history of sound recording and reproduction spans more than a century. For the first time in 1877, Thomas Edison patented a system that could capture and reproduce sound on a metal cylinder rather than a disc. Emile Berliner invented the term “gramophone” to describe a device that played lateral-cut disc recordings, which were first sold in Europe in 1889.
The golden age of vinyl albums, as we know them, lasted from 1948 to 1988, when CDs finally outsold vinyl for the first time. However, vinyl got its first taste of competition in 1962, when the Phillips Cassette was released.
The vinyl took a comeback in the 2017’s, their sales were hyped by 53% and still seem good. Like music, lovers like to listen and uniquely feel their music.
How Does Vinyl Work?
Sound is the acceleration of ions in the form of waves through a medium – such as air or water. Thomas Edison was the first to establish a method of imprinting this detail onto tinfoil by etching the electrical pulse of a sound wave with a needle in 1877. The registered knowledge was then played, very faintly, through a horn by reversing the process.
Emile Berliner used the same ideas a decade back, recording to a rubber disc and then shellac – the precursor to the vinyl used today.
Although Edison intended for the phonograph to be used for dictation and instruction, Berliner’s gramophone ushered in the age of the digital musical album, allowing for the mass production of records for individuals to listen to on their systems. The procedure is close to how we listen to music nowadays.
Vinyl produces authentic music
People who listen to vinyl tend to be more picky and classic. They aren’t fans of airy, mass-produced pop. They listen to artistically frank artists, and they write and perform their songs and instruments. They have a good ear for production and listen to amazing songwriters. Bands that satisfy those requirements can be found in record stores.
Warmth is felt in vinyl music
Warmth is a material consisting of sound that occurs when actual instruments are played, and it appears in recordings simply because they are analog. Since the album is an observational entity being played on a turntable and channeled into other equipment, this happens.
The movement of turntablism, which is simply the practice of scraping and combining records, demonstrates that turntables are instruments in and of themselves. Almost all analog instruments have a general warmth about them. And as analog photography and video have distinct visual warmth that is more noticeable when compared to modern equivalents, vinyl albums have a distinct visual warmth that is often more noticeable when compared to digital formats.
To be sure, while vinyl is captured using analog rather than digital media, the sound has more warmth.
Purchasing records is a unique experience.
Purchasing documents has a certain allure. The iTunes, SoundCloud and Spotify era has been at a bloom for sometime it made us ignore the pure joy of buying records. It’s the kind of thing where you might lose track of time looking for songs. You get to connect with different people through the shared love of music and vinyl that leads to discovering some more good music and good friendships
Why Does Vinyl Sound Better
Another reason why does vinyl sound better is Vinyl has always sounded better than MP3s.
The majority of music is streamed as compressed files which makes the music lose its originality , which means that data are lost and the overall content suffers. It occurs when audio songs are shrinked down to a small size so that it can fit into your phones and online music applications. We can’t get the whole view of the track if we listen to it on our phones or streaming it online like Spotify, even if you prefer listening it on MP3s or even the radio. Vinyl is much superior in terms of consistency. When you press a record, no audio evidence is lost. It sounds exactly as the producer or band meant it to.
There’s another, much more compelling argument to prefer vinyl to online or downloaded music. Mostly vinyl stayed out of the ‘loudness battle.’ It’s now an easy peasy job to make music sound louder than it ought to be thanks to the advent of streaming music (CDs included).
The issue appears to be that it has a significant impact on the sound quality. It made music sound warped and unpleasant, and it took away its depth and texture. Since vinyl is an analog medium, it is susceptible to the same issues.
Conclusion
I’ve attempted to demonstrate that vinyl records and related instruments have aspects of appreciation and assessment that are not present in digital media. There are tactile, visual, and epistemic features that extend the artistic forum and deepen the aesthetic experience, as well as auditory features that are colder, richer, and fuller.
People choose vinyl for these and other purposes, not just to be snobby, antique, or trendy for the sake of being snobby, vintage, or hip, or to avoid modern technology. Rather, fans love spinning and being spun by vinyl, as though it were a song, round and round.
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