Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Feb. 12 2004, 14:20 |
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Yes, it's a wonderful ritual...of course, if you don't enjoy the ritual, as some don't, you'll just find records irritating.
I quite like having the two sides when they're used well. I like the way with albums like Ommadawn, it gives a bit of time to breathe and take in what's just happened, before turning over to the other side. Also nice is the way things can be arranged - on Dire Straits' first album, for example, side one starts with 'Down to the Waterline' which is a song about Newcastle, and ends with 'Southbound Again' which is about travelling down south...which is continued on side two, where the songs are more London orientated. It's a very subtle thing, but I like it.
I'm sure that improvements can still be made in music distribution formats, but at the moment, the limiting factor is increasingly the playback equipment - loudspeakers can only reproduce signals with a certain fidelity, and once the recording contains more detail than they can reproduce, there's no point making the recording any better quality until the loudspeakers are improved (well, there is a case for making as good a master recording as possible, but perhaps not so much point in distributing it in such high quality, if nobody will hear the difference) - the same goes with all the rest of the components of the chain. But then comes the question of whether absolute fidelity is actually best - the fact that some people favour valve amplifiers and analogue recordings is a sign that people actually find the distortions which they introduce pleasing. Similar with speakers - I wandered into a hifi shop today where they had a fairly expensive pair of speakers on demo. They sounded very inaccurate to me, being more used to studio monitoring speakers, but the sound wasn't unpleasant - just it enhanced the music, rather than presenting what was on the recording as it really was.
At the same time, I saw a couple looking at a 5.1 speaker system. One said to the other "Hey look, there are five of those, we could put two behind one sofa, two behind the other, and one on top of the telly" - so much for fidelity!
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And they are so small. One of the best things about LPs was the art work. So much went into it. It was a big part of the music. I'm sure it helped to sell it. With CDs there's too much unfolding!
I have seen a record from 1966, and man, that one is one huge, thick vinyl cookie. It's almost scary, you know... 
i know i recently lost a treasured ella fitzgerald that way 
and it is just mindblowing. And the one constant throughout all of this 'progress' is being able to follow it with the same album. Feels kind of weird in a way. 