Vinyl

[StaggerLee]

Putting down the lights and listening to Thelonious Monk on vinyl is an incredible, drug like experience. In the best way, naturally.

[gary_s]

Rian, you are correct that the current model of downloading singles breaks up the coherence of "albums", but remember that back in the 40's - 60's, the most common practice was to buy single 45's with a song on each side. I and all my friends had scores of them. We seldom had enough cash to buy a whole album. So we've kind of come full circle. And only a minority of artists write/record albums with a holistic theme. Most of them just scrum together enough songs to call it an album and go with it. I was always very annoyed by artists who produced maybe 2 or 3 quality songs with the rest just covers/fillers that weren't as good.

Regarding the quality issue of CD's versus vinyl, I've read bookoos of research on this and the format is not the source of any differences you hear on recordings. The way the music is transferred from the master to the final product is, and there are a lot of ways that process can get messed up. A common practice nowdays is for everything to be over driven, which creates a recording where each track is near 100% instead of various levels. It sounds like mushed up noise to me and there are no high/low dynamics. I've read that this is done to improve the quality of recordings while listening to them through earbuds but I don't know if this is accurate. What I do know is that I hate it. Anything recorded before 2000 sounds far better than anything after 2000 to me. I've heard albums recorded in 1985 that have been re-mastered that sounded wonderful then, but the re-masters sound like crap, like a stereo with the volume at 11 all the time.

[JustJim]

Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends vinyl album has a really amazing left-to-right transition of a match being struck, a cigarette being lit, and the smoke being inhaled and exhaled (between the songs America and Overs) that is so lifelike, clear, sweet, and smooth on the vinyl version and just isn't the same on any digital version of it I've heard. But as I get older and my hearing sucks more and more, it's hard to tell if the shortcomings are in the media or in my ears... <<sigh>>

Jim

[Moonwood the Hare]

I have a theory that on old recordings you got bass feedback through the needle that made everything rock more. But I can never tell if it was all to do with mindset. Records were recorded with side one and two and you very rarely played an album all through both sides unless it was a story album. In fact I realised after buying the CD that as far as I was concerned the second side of Led Zep 4 may as well have been left blank. And I have the original remaster which is supposed to be less good than the one Page was involved with, at least according to Page. Oh and modern albums are all too long.

Here's a thing about singles and Albums. 1969. What was the best selling album in the US and what was the best single single? No one really remembers the album even though it was seen as a work of art that would live for ever and everyone remembers the single which was seen as disposable trash.

[Brad]

OK, I'll bite on this.
From a quick google, I get In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly and Sugar Sugar by the immortal Archies.
Is that what you have, MTH?

Thinking of either, but especially the latter, brings to mind the Austin Lounge Lizards song, Put the Oak Ridge Boys in the Slammer.
CALL, CALL, CALL, THE MUSIC POLICE!

In any event, I don't understand your point. 'Splain for me?

[Moonwood the Hare]

Yup Iron Butterfly and the Archies. This was pointed out to me years ago by a Nietzschean philosophy student and future novelist called Ian Marchant. His point was that pop music is really about singles which seem ephemeral but have that power to carry you back to the time when they first came out. Albums are stodgy and a less satisfying.

It ties into the point of singles versus albums. There was a phase in the sixties through to the nineties when albums were seen as works of art. Singles were there first and we have gone full circle and we mourn the loss of the album but the album was not the great art form it was made out to be. Personally I was a teenager in the seventies and loved albums and I find from my daughter there are still some great ones being made.

[humanguy]

Putting down the lights and listening to Thelonious Monk on vinyl is an incredible, drug like experience. In the best way, naturally.

Thelonious Monk is the universe to me, the greatest jazz musician who ever lived. This collection of Riverside albums looks like an excellent bet for vinyl folks:

http://store.acousticsounds.com/d/3018/ ... l_Box_Sets

Scott? Are you there, sir?

[Brad]

About albums vs. singles, "great art forms," and so forth:
When it comes to popular music, no doubt lots of albums were marketed as things that held together as coherent pieces of art when they were in fact just collections of songs that had little to do with one another and were pumped out of publishing houses like McDonalds hamburgers, right?
I guess a downside of a free market economy is its tendency to sell a lot of sewage. Maybe that's why we have tents and national parks...

But then there are lots of examples where albums really were held together with good themes of one sort or another (I guess my favorite example in rock is The Wall), and that's just in the pop world, not to mention genres where music tends to be longer, to require more attention, and to be intended for people who really love music.

I love Monk, too, but don't have as deep an experience with his music as Stagger and humanguy do. It's cool that people here would recommend him!
I'd guess a lot of his stuff might be a bit of an acquired taste? But his stark, relatively simple and angular melodies (and often the improv off them) are really refreshing sometimes after listening to other music that might be a bit unnecessarily busy or pretentious or too-thickly produced.
Or you could skip the latter in the first place...

[gary_s]

I have a theory that on old recordings you got bass feedback through the needle that made everything rock more.

I can't tell if you are being serious here or if that's supposed to be a joke. Acoustically, of course, it's nonsense.