Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Arthur C. Clarke is credited with saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but when it comes to music, the older gear is more miraculous--and mysterious--to me. MP3 players are just special-purpose hard drives or memory sticks, Pandora and other online radio services are just twists on the streaming audio sites that first emerged in the early Web days, and every online tool for musicians simply takes an old task--recording, CD manufacturing, distribution--and moves it to the Web, gaining various efficiencies along the way. Even digital audio workstations like ProTools and Cubase are somewhat intuitive to a longtime computer user.

It's a miracle: the Goldring 1022GX.

But a turntable involves actual mechanical and electrical engineering, and, despite being a longtime vinyl buff, I find the technology remains an absolute mystery to me. A few weeks ago, the stylus on my 8-year-old turntable, a Music Hall MMF-5, was snapped off during a mad confabulation of 2 year olds. For the replacement, I upgraded from a Goldring 1012GX to a 1022GX. I also had the pretty nice folks at Hawthorne Stereo order a couple other replacement parts--an anti-skating weight that disappeared about two years ago, and the tiny metal handle used for moving the tone arm, which was snapped off by a belligerent stranger at a New Year's Party in 2003/4. (I still have a contract out on him.)

The new stylus seems to have fixed some records I thought were unplayable. The first, Do Make Say Think's "And Yet And Yet," had a persistent crackle in the left channel. The Hawthorne geniuses told me it was due to the fact that some idiot (me) played the record for the first time with the arm misaligned, which scratched out one side of the groove. I've played that record a bunch of times since, trying to adjust the weight and alignment of my old cartridge, and always got the same hiss. Not anymore. There's still the occasional crackle, but the sound quality is well within range of a typical used LP.

Then I went to play Roger Waters' "Amused to Death," a 1991 record that's too valuable to sell, but that I thought I had ruined with a water spill in 1993 or so. The first two sides have been filled with hiss and garbage noise ever since, on any turntable I've tried them on. Over the years, I've read and heard that the water probably loosened some fragments from the vinyl, which then got jammed into the grooves. I've cleaned it countless times, and gotten some relief from wet-playing, but the fundamental problem remained.

When I dropped the needle on it last night, my jaw almost hit the floor: it sounded fine, like a typical used record. No persistent hiss, just the very occasional crackle or pop. My guess is that the new 1022 has a much narrower or more precise point than the used 1012, so it's connecting with only the grooves in the record and not the residue lying slightly to either side of the groove.

The point: if you listen to vinyl on a quality turntable but are not perfectly satisfied with the sound you're getting, don't throw up your hands in frustration. Have it professionally set up and consider upgrading to a new stylus. And keep the drunks and 2 year olds away from it.

I don't consider myself a vinyl collector. Although most of my music is on vinyl--about 700 records, compared with less than 200 CDs and a smattering of digital-only files--I buy it because I like the sound, and pay little attention to original labels versus reissues, imports versus domestic, cover art, and all the other arcana that collectors concern themselves with. Still, like anybody else who haunts record shows, I've always hoped in the back of my mind that I'd stumble on the next Butcher Cover--that's the original cover of the Beatles album "Yesterday and Today," which the record company pulled almost immediately and can now fetch $1,000 or more (especially if it's one of the ones that the record company recalled and pasted the new cover over).

Would you pay $70 for this record?

This weekend at my local record store, I saw an LP I sold on Craigslist last year for five bucks. It was the 2001 Built to Spill album, "Ancient Melodies of the Future," used, in near-mint condition. (For all I know, it was the same copy I sold.) I listened to it twice, didn't like it, never got around to listening to it again, and finally cleared it out along with a bunch of other indie-rock vinyl I'd bought in the last decade but never liked. (Wolf Parade, The Rapture, The Walkmen, and other regrets.)

At first, I thought I had misread the price tag. $69.95? That had to be a mistake. I've never--never--been able to sell a used record to a record store for more than $5, and usually got a lot less, which is why I finally turned to Craigslist. I asked the guy at the counter how they came up with that price, and he said that there are various record guides, and that I should really do my research before selling anything.

I know I looked it up on eBay, but turned up blank, so I mistook the lack of supply for lack of demand. Perhaps I should have checked GEMM or the Discogs Marketplace (free registration required). If I had, I might have noticed that the only version of this LP available online was listed at more than $30, and that's for very good condition. ("Very good" means pretty bad, but not quite unlistenable...don't ask me, it's a collector thing, same as with coins). Another site, Music Price Guide, listed it for as much as $69, although this seems like a scam ad-link-farm--most of the items on sale link to long-expired eBay auctions. Still, it gives you an idea what people have been asking for a particular title.

Did it have the poster? I'm pretty sure it did. Oh well.

A quick followup to my post yesterday on the top ten vinyl sellers of 2008: I just called my local record (I do mean record) store, Sonic Boom, to reserve a copy of the new Animal Collective record, Merriweather Post Pavilion, on vinyl. It came out on Tuesday, January 6. The clerk laughed and said he'd never seen such a hot-selling LP. Not only were Sonic Boom's copies one by the end of the 6th, they can't order more because their distributor's out, and they can't find another distributor because the label's out. They're expecting a second shipment later this month.

Not in stock.

So while vinyl may only be 0.1% of total album sales, sales doubled from 2007 and 2008, and hot titles are obviously hard to keep in stock. Who knows, with CD sales plummeting, vinul could be up to 0.2% by the end of this year. And I bet MPP will be in the top ten.

From Nielsen Soundscan by way of the LA Weekly and Rolling Stone, here are the top 10 vinyl sellers in 2008. I've added the years they were originally released, and what I imagine was going through the mind of vinylphiles when they bought it.

I haven't seen that poster since high school.

10. Radiohead, OK Computer, 1997. Great production, trippy artwork looks great under the lava lamp.
9. Metallica, Death Magnetic, 2008. Maybe the vinyl version won't be overcompressed to death.
8. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes, 2008. Pitchfork likes it, it must be good.
7. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, 1973. Remember those posters?
6. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, 1998. With the LP, I can pretend I was hip to this record when it originally came out.
5. Portishead, Third, 2008. See number 8.
4. B-52s, Funplex, 2008. Remember that all-night dance party we had back in '82?
3. Guns 'n' Roses, Chinese Democracy, 2008. This will be a collectors' item someday.
2. The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969. Now I can replace the copy my daughter stole when she went off to college.
1. Radiohead, In Rainbows, 2008. I feel kind of guilty about paying one cent for the download.

Overall, vinyl accounted for a whopping 0.1 of all music sales last year! How long before preloaded microSD cards surpass vinyl to become the third-most-popular music format?

CNET has written several times over the years about Audacity, a free, general-purpose sound-editing tool. I've known people who have used it to manipulate sound for podcasts and the like. But I'd completely forgotten about it until today.

One of my colleagues been looking for a tool to split recorded audio presentations into portions to go with the corresponding individual PowerPoint slides. I thought Apple's GarageBand might work, but he found it too opaque, and our office (like most) is PC-heavy, which would have complicated efforts to train other folks on how to do this job.

Then he downloaded Audacity, and it fit the bill perfectly. It let him see audio waveforms to figure out where the speaker stopped talking between slides, easily split the recording at those points, and clean up other extraneous noise from the track. At the same time, it didn't burden him with features more geared toward budding musicians such as built-in instrument sounds or an on-screen keyboard.

Reading through the documentation, I realized Audacity might be the perfect solution to a problem I've been facing myself. Today, I use Microsoft's Digital Media Plus Pack to record my LP records to digital format. But Microsoft discontinued that XP-only product when it released Vista and doesn't support it anymore. Worse, it records only to Windows Media Audio, which means I have to convert the files to AAC or MP3 before I can play them on my iPod.

But Audacity lets me record directly to MP3 using the LAME encoder, which I've already got installed for another audio-conversion program. Although MP3 offers sound at the same bitrate as AAC and WMA, hard drive space is now plentiful enough to encode everything at 320kbps, which is perfectly adequate for on-the-go sound.

Screenshot of Audacity running on Windows

(Credit: Audacity)

My brother and I used to walk up to our local drug store and buy LP records from a rack next to the candy bars. One day he bought Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and I bought the live Rush album Exit Stage Left. When we opened them, I became jealous of the stickers and posters in Dark Side, so we arranged a trade, which seemed fair because the Rush record had two LPs in it. He became a Rush fan, I became a Floyd fan, and the rest of our lives followed from that fateful decision. (Not so much, but it makes a better story that way.)

This album is totally worth $30 on vinyl. But it'd be nice to get it for $15.

It's good to know that today's kids might have the same experience: Fred Meyer, a chain of drug stores in the Pacific Northwest, and Best Buy are both beginning to stock vinyl records again. John Paczkowski can scoff all he wants, but I still collect records and am therefore excited about this news for purely selfish reasons. Big box stores stocking vinyl means economies of scale for vinyl manufacturers, which hopefully means I'll never pay $30 again for a vinyl reissue of The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. (It was totally worth it.)

Similarly, John can joke about an iPod Phono, but I've suggested several times that Microsoft build an analog recorder into the Zune software to replace that function in the no-longer-offered Digital Media Plus Pack. What better way to cater to music fans than give them yet another way to get music onto their computers?

I have a theory about indie rock hipsters: you can tell how old they are by which R.E.M. album they say was "the last good one." Specifically, it was the last R.E.M. album that came out before they turned 22, the age at which most four-year college students graduate.

Will that be CD, CD+DVD, or CD+45 rpm double LP?

That puts me squarely in the Green camp. And in fact, while their next two albums made R.E.M. a household name, with songs like "Losing My Religion" (from Out of Time) and "Man on the Moon" (from Automatic for the People), I didn't like them. I don't really know why, except that Michael Stipe was no longer mumbling and his voice was mixed above the guitars, and MTV played them too much.

But I'm not a real hipster because I've bought and liked a few R.E.M. albums since then, and I love their 2001 studio album, Reveal, which places me in a very select group. (The album sold about 415,000 copies in the U.S. as of early 2007, according to Soundscan figures reported by U.S.A. Today--a great figure for most bands, but well off R.E.M.'s multiplatinum peak.) The trick was buying it on vinyl: when I heard the CD, I was lukewarm about it, but the record was on sale for $10 at a local Tower (remember those?) and so I bought it, figuring it would go nicely with all my other R.E.M. LPs. One night I couldn't sleep, so I played it for the first time at low volume at 4 a.m. It sounded completely different, with more solid bass and much better stereo separation, allowing to hear some interesting sounds buried in the mix.

This weekend, I went record shopping. I knew I was going to buy the new R.E.M. album, Accelerate. Being smart digital-age capitalists, the band (or Warner Bros.) is offering the new album in several formats, knowing that longtime fans might be willing to shell out a few bucks extra for something beyond the standard CD. The record store where I shop had the CD for $18--expensive for any new release, especially one I was buying mostly on spec. (I'd only heard the first song, and liked the loud guitars.) They also had a CD/DVD pack--the DVD includes a 46-minute film and extra music--for only $30. And, like Wilco and some other bands, they had a vinyl version with the entire CD included for downloading purposes, and this package also cost $30.

Remembering my past experience, I picked up the LP. Then I read the label closely and saw that it was to be played at 45 rpm, not 33 1/3 like most of the 12" LPs out there. According to a sticky label, the band did this "because sound quality matters." This was the first time I'd ever heard that 45 rpm LPs are supposed to sound better, but apparently it's old news in jazz, as record labels have re-released tons of classic jazz records on 45 rpm 180-gram vinyl. I haven't found a good technical explanation for why this is the case, but apparently spreading the same music over a longer curve makes the stylus track more accurately.

Unfortunately, my turntable has no button to switch speeds. Instead, I have to remove the platter, which is about 3/4" thick and made of heavy glass, and manually move the belt to a different setting. Then repeat the process before I play my other records, which are nearly all at 33 1/3 rpm. I'm too lazy--heck, I don't even like the fact that most LP sides are only two or three songs long nowadays, meaning that I have to bounce up and down every 10 minutes or so to flip the record. So I put it back and sprung for the CD instead.

Of course, if R.E.M. had been really finicky about sound, they should have released Accelerate as a 45 rpm LP with a blank underside, as apparently the flat surface adheres to the turntable better, eliminating certain unwanted vinyl resonances.

The album? So far, I've only listened to a few tracks, but I like what I've heard. It's loud and aggressive with lots of guitar, like 1994's Monster but more punk. But I haven't given it the 4 a.m. test.

The other day at a record store in Summit, N.J., my friend asked the owner how business had been. He said it's been extremely slow since the beginning of the year, with (as he put it) a bunch of releases from acts nobody had ever heard of, but that vinyl sales were very strong. He was particularly happy about the growing trend in which artists offer free downloads with LPs--fans get great sound and a nice collectible item with the vinyl, and portability with the digital files.

The quick path to piracy prevention: no CD release.

(Credit: ElvisCostello.com)

Elvis Costello understands this trend: his next album, Momofuku, will be released on April 22 on vinyl and digital download only, according to a Reuters report. Each record will come with a code redeemable for a free download, and the album will be sold online as well, but no CDs will be pressed.

The unusual name seems to be a reference to a trio of restaurants in New York City, or perhaps some offbeat attempt at Googlebombing.

Piracy may be the reason he's skipping the CD. ElvisCostello.com references piracy for his decision to release another album in a super-limited edition set--one copy for each state.

Over on the Audiophiliac blog, Steve Guttenberg is polling readers about how they get their music. Here are my answers to his questions.

Wilco's last album was available in double vinyl, with a full CD included in the package for easier ripping.

Do you buy CDs, LPs, MP3s, iTunes, or 8 track cartridges?
I purchase about 80% of my music on LP. For a few years in the early 1990s it was almost impossible to find new vinyl, but now it's reasonably common, especially for indie rock, electronic music, and hip hop. (Classical? Not so much. Jazz? Only re-releases.) In fact, vinyl availability sometimes convinces me to buy a record I otherwise might have skipped--Of Montreal'sGladiator Nightstick Collection and Wilco's Sky Blue Sky come to mind. (The Wilco was particularly nice because it came with a full CD, so I could more easily rip it to my computer to transfer to my iPod and Zune players.) About 1 in 20 brand new LPs have defects--most recently, Radiohead's In Rainbows was marred by a bunch of crud in the grooves on side 2. When that happens, I'll exchange it for a CD, reasoning that there might be some persistent manufacturing or storage problem. (A record store worker recently told me that every shipment they received of the $200 Sigur Ros box set contained warped records. They had to take a lot of returns.)

If so, do you buy them from Amazon or other online retailer, brick and mortar chain store, or local "record" shop?
Local record shops have the best selection of vinyl, so I usually buy from Sonic Boom in Seattle, and go out of my way to visit Amoeba whenever I'm in the Bay Area and Other Music in New York. If I really want a new release, I'll check the band's or label's Web site to see if they sell the LP. I also buy LPs at shows whenever they're sold--I'll buy an LP from a band whose set I liked in a heartbeat, but hardly ever a CD. I have not bought anything from iTunes because of DRM, although I've gotten plenty of free downloads as promotions. I've bought a handful of songs from the Zune Marketplace and other Windows Media-based stores for testing purposes.

Do you regularly buy used CDs or LPs? And rarely buy new CDs or LPs?
I regularly buy new and used LPs and occasionally buy new CDs. I never buy used CDs. For used LPs, the seller might have gotten rid of it as they replaced it on CD. For used CDs, the seller almost always got rid of it because (a.) it sucked (which means I'll seldom take a risk on a used CD) or (b.) it had a scratch or other mar that made it physically unplayable. Either way, I'm often too lazy to go back to the store to exchange it within the allotted time period, which means I'm stuck with a CD I don't want.

Do you subscribe to a subscription service, if so, which one? Rhapsody, Yahoo, Napster, etc?
No, but I might if it offered lossless downloads with no DRM.

Or do you get your tunes from a P2P like Morpheus or Blubster?
Only for tracks that I can't find easily, like unauthorized live recordings. Instead of suing me, why not sell them to me?

What about DRM, do you care?
I won't buy DRM-protected files because I want to play music I own on any device or player I own. CDs don't have DRM, analog sources don't have DRM, why should I pay the same price for less portability?

What percentage of your physical music collection did you get for free (ripped CDs, gifts, etc)?
Less than 10%. I have about 40 ripped CDs and a number of LPs and CDs I've received as gifts over the years. I also have a number of digital files that have been given to me on flash drives.

Is sound quality a factor, would you pay more for higher quality downloads or subscriptions?
Yes, I'd pay more than $0, which is what I pay for downloads today.

Do you buy CDs, burn 'em, and them sell them?
Luckily, I've always been able to find work, so I've never needed to do this.

How do you discover new music? Radio, friends, online, record stores?
Almost exclusively through friends and by going to shows, with about 10% through local radio station KEXP. Often, I'll hear about the same band or album several times from multiple friends who don't know one another, read a great live review in a local weekly, then hear a song on KEXP--that happened to me with Battles last year, and it turned out to be a good indicator that I'd like them.

What have I left out?
I'm most curious about where, when, and how people actually listen to music. Do you sit down and listen to an LP or CD start to finish? When you use an MP3 player, do you shuffle or listen to specific songs or albums? Do you listen with headphones, or connect your MP3 player to a home or car stereo? Personally, I listen to at least a few album sides per week with no distractions, but play a lot of background music through my iPod and Zune connected to various clock radio-stereo devices in my house.