DJ Format War: Vinyl v. Digital
Hello, sports fans. Thought I’d whip off a post while I sit here in front of the Netherlands-Brazil World Cup match. Among the many things that I love about soccer is that it does not demand one’s undivided attention and provides the perfect wallpaper for other activities. It is not entirely unlike baseball in this respect, and the tone of the crowd and the announcers lets one know when it is time to look up. The theme here is one that I spend some time contemplating, and one that comes up from time to time with people I meet when DJing. The question is: What are the advantages and disadvantages of the various formats available to music lovers these days, and what, ultimately, drives the choice of one over the others?
First, let’s enumerate the options. There may be others of which I am unaware, but the basic possibilities are vinyl, CD and mp3 or other digital recording. For the time being, I will use “mp3″ to refer to any of a variety of types of files for digital storage. In fact, there are many different ways of putting music on your hard drive which are importantly different from one another, but we’ll save that discussion for later. I am not giving too much away to say that I am of an age such that my first collecting was done on vinyl. In the 70′s, there were other choices, but none was close to being able to provide the fidelity and flexibility of pressed wax. Some real audiophiles that I knew at the time were committed to reel-to-reel for their high-end listening experience, but this was far too delicate and complicated for the average use. Eight tracks were a novelty in that they allowed us to listen to music of our choosing in the car, which had never been possible to that point, but the interface was clumsy and playback was like listening in a mud puddle with a head cold. Unless you were actually in the car, there was no good reason to put up with that nonsense. Not too much later, we saw the emergence of the cassette. For a great good while, cassettes were my format of choice. They provided the portability of eight-tracks (and then some), with much better sound quality (when treated properly) and the added benefit of being able record and re-record at will. Much of my collecting in the 80′s consisted of making copies of my friend’s libraries and looking for bootlegs of live shows by bands that tickled my fancy. Somewhere in cold storage I still have several crates of cassettes that are slowly degenerating into uselessness. There are more than a few that are irreplaceable, and I should really get around to transcribing them to digital, but what are the chances of that? (A little confession – my first DJ job in public was hard-wired in cassette format. I was prepared to do a live mix, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the CD players plugged in to the PA, so I just let my back-up tapes roll.) There was never any doubt in my mind that well-cared for vinyl provided a much purer quality of sound, but cassettes did some things that vinyl just couldn’t do.
It was roughly 1984 when my parents first got a CD player. They were new, rare and expensive at the time. As I recall, they didn’t work all that well at first either. The laser would often have trouble focusing on the disc, and the sound quality on the first discs to come out was frankly atrocious. Furthermore, I was personally offended by the manipulations of the industry to make obsolete the stacks and stacks of vinyl I had collected. By the time I got to college in the late 80′s, I saw the first retail outlet devoted strictly to CD’s, and I wanted to burn it down. Having invested thousands of dollars and as many hours into my record collection, I wanted no part of having to start at zero with a new format. It was clear to me from early days that the capitalistic momentum was to force me to replace all of the titles in my library. Had the original product been slightly more affordable and of a slightly higher quality, it might just have put the other formats down decisively. Luckily for all of us, that did not happen, because despite the fact that the digital realm has improved greatly in the last 30 years, the analog still has some advantages that computers just can’t match.
Fast forward to 2000. Vinyl has nearly died entirely and Napster is in full effect. My DJ career has become well-established and I am regularly working in clubs and private parties. Although mp3′s are a fascinating way to discover and share music, there is no realistic way to obtain them legally, and they were not useful for public use. Sound quality was sketchy at best, and tracks were often mislabeled, but the novelty of being to search and find virtually any tune was enchanting. Vinyl is still the standard for professional DJ’s and hip-hoppers deserve all credit for keeping the format alive for the rest of us. The only place a collector can find vinyl for sale is at small independent retailers who specialize in used merchandise and garage sales. There are a very few bands and labels releasing new vinyl, but it is widely viewed as a gimmick to appeal to a highly specialized geek crowd. It would be a few years yet before the format would start to make a significant comeback in the retail market. CD’s are the dominant player, but digital storage is not yet practical enough to rip one’s entire collection to hard drive. It doesn’t get a lot of attention, but the vast increases in storage capacity over the last ten years have had as much to do with the shift from CD’s to mp3 as almost any other factor. That, and the powers that be actually making the product legally available. What a concept.
All of which brings us to the present day. I still have a pile of vinyl in my office with a turntable ready to rip them to my hard drive. I love vinyl. I use my hard drive as my primary library. The convenience of having the entire collection at my fingertips at all times generally trumps any advantages that vinyl may have over the digital. Records are heavy. CD’s are heavy, too, when compared with a little old external hard drive. I used to carry a couple of hundred CD’s to any given DJ job. Many of these CD’s have several tracks that would never be of any use to me. As the computer became more functional to me, I would burn mix CD’s that helped me consolidate the collection. This was a tremendous advantage compared to actually lugging all the LP’s that had tracks that I might want, but still a time consuming and somewhat clumsy process. About 5 years ago I made the commitment to going fully digital with my DJing. Initially, I just ripped all of my CD’s to the hard drive, and used the computer as a way of increasing the convenience of my pre-existing recordings. I was very much not into using iTunes for a variety of reasons. Without going into the full scale anti-iTunes rant, the DRM copy-protection made the files useless to me. The way I was working, I would move tracks from one storage medium to another and burn copies all the time. Since iTunes made this impossible, I had no use for it. The exclusive nature of the marketing deals that Apple made with the artists was also repulsive to me, antithetical to the independent nature of the art and artists I was trying to support. Some time later, iTunes and other industry giants have backed off on their use of DRM, and there are more and more legitimate competitors in the mp3 retail marketplace. I now have a subscription to emusic.com and regularly use Amazon for major label acquisitions unavailable on the primarily indie-label emusic. I still buy CD’s, but at an extremely reduced rate. Mostly, I buy CD’s for rare and out-of-print titles that I can’t find through any of my standard digital retail outlets. I also buy a CD occasionally when I find myself in an independent retail outlet that I want to throw some money at. There are a couple of local stores that are fighting the good fight to stay in the retail music business such as Instant Karma in Orleans and Spinnakers in Hyannis, and I want to do what I can to maintain their viability, such as it is.
A lot of the music I play is from an era when there was really only one way to record and playback music. A lot of the music I play has been produced in a way that harkens back to that era. Many of the musicians and DJ’s that I look up to are seriously committed to the analog format in all that they do. Tube amps and turntables are quite common at some of my favorite shows. In many ways this is not a mere affectation or glamorization of a time gone by, but a genuine preference for the kind of sound that these tools create. If I had all of the time and money I needed, I would also convert entirely back to vinyl for my work. As it is, when I get in the thick of a DJ set, I do prefer to work with CD’s as opposed to mp3′s because I have more control over the interface and I think they sound better when pumped over a loud system. While it is true that vinyl is a bit more fragile than CD’s, making proper care and maintenance very important, I think that pristine vinyl sounds that much better again than CD’s. Given the practical limitations of carrying tons of vinyl around, switching to vinyl would require me to do a level of set-planning to which I am unaccustomed. If we forget about the practical world, maybe I would hire a roadie to lug around thousands of records so I could go on playing by the seat of my pants. I have always enjoyed making my sets up as I go along, and this is how I have done it from early days. In the end, I am willing to sacrifice a little fidelity in the name of convenience. I don’t think that the vast majority of listeners can actually hear the difference, and it allows me to share an incredibly wide variety of titles with anyone who cares to listen.
