Ahead of Behind the Times

So I get rid of most of my vinyl records just before they hit a really big comeback in sales. Figures.

As the story notes, though, some of the reason people are buying new vinyl these days is not to play, but to have the look. Some of the big albums come with download codes allowing the purchaser to get the digital version of the album as well, and as long as most music gets played through iPod earbuds, the vinyl market is likely to remain the province of the specialist.

Several of the commenters make the often-repeated claim that vinyl retains its advantage of superior sound quality over CDs. That may very well be true -- as I've mentioned before, one too many concerts at a younger age leave me without the ability to distinguish precise differences in sound quality. But even so, the listeners who are able to detect the difference are rare.

In his book How Music Works, physicist and musician John Powell refers to a 1993 study that asked 160 music enthusiasts to listen to the same piece of music played from a vinyl record and from a CD. The pair of music psychologists, Klaus-Ernst Behne and Johannes Barkowsky, selected people who ran stereo shops, musicians, regular concertgoers as well as casual fans. They played six sound sequences apiece for each person and asked them to identify which came from a CD and which came from vinyl. Four of the 160 picked the correct source every time. Another 17 were right five out of six times, meaning that less than one percent of the people in the test could identify the differences between CDs and vinyl at least five times out of six even though nearly all of the people in the test strongly believed before they started that vinyl sounded better (A link to some more information about the study can be found here. Most of the others I could find online were in German, since Behne and Barkowsky were working for the Hanover Conservatory when they conducted their tests).

The difference between vinyl, or CDs for that matter, and digital files like MP3s is obvious even to my ears. Most digital files are compressed to save space and because they will most likely be played on those tiny earbuds, they don't have to have very good sonic reproduction. Files with lower compression rates, of course, sound better and can be played on larger speakers like one's bookshelf stereo.

As I mentioned before, I kept some vinyl because I do like the sound -- not the quality, but the little bit of pop and hiss that happens in between songs that helps re-create an experience from an earlier point in my life. But the total collection was huge and bulky and I move too often to keep it all around, so I was happy to send the records off to new homes. It'll be interesting to see if vinyl sales continue to increase, if they level out, or if this is just one of the many trends in modern society that come and go in between eyeblinks.