VMP Magazine

If the effortless scheduling of the Vinyl Me, Please Magazine works as it should, this piece should pop up roughly three months after Christmas (although I concede, thanks to the curious flow of time at the top of the year for many of us, it might seem much more or indeed less time since the big day). This piece is for those of you who have come over to vinyl either on the big day or at some point recently. It is both a belated welcome and a nod to see how you’re getting on.

The musical world around vinyl has changed beyond recognition in 20 years and, with it, the reasons for people buying it. What keeps it going?

For my sins, I am 41. Born in 1980, there are niche but keenly contested arguments as to whether I’m a tail-end Gen X, early Millennial or part of a cohort that doesn’t belong to either larger group. I start this piece with this information so that you may contextualie my efforts to talk about people rather younger than myself with the appropriate amount of patience, condescension or derision; the choice is yours. In an effort to minimize the latter, I will be limiting myself to talking about vinyl.

The upcoming release of Forever On My Mind represents the first time that this Son House performance has been commercially available anywhere. The process by which an almost-forgotten collection of amateur recordings has been turned into a record is a fascinating one, and I spoke to Ryan Smith, the Senior Mastering Engineer at Sterling Sound and the individual responsible for the process. Smith kindly made some time for a Zoom call with me, which he took from the control desk of one of the studios in Nashville.

According to the computer I'm typing this on, it is 11.03am. This is grossly at odds with the time bits of my nervous system are absolutely convinced it is the small hours of the morning. I'm back from CES 2017 and in many senses of the word, I have a Vegas hangover.

CES should be a celebration. It's still the largest gathering of manufacturers of audio and related industries anywhere on the planet as part of an even larger gathering of companies that make pretty much everything that has a plug attached to it. Neither was the tone of the event in any way depressing. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, CES was in a bullish mood with an air of confidence that I'm told has been lacking in recent years. Companies seemed assured enough to release some serious products too. If you happen to be sitting on a huge pile of cash currently doing nothing at the moment, the industry has some minor works of art at your disposal.

Something drummed into fans of analogue from the outset is that as well as the superb selection of new pressings hitting the market—both of new material and of well-mastered and engineered versions of older recordings—there is a vast used back catalogue to fall back on. The idea is that for a number of strong selling albums of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, you can pick up a copy in good order and add it to your collection for less than the cost of a new copy either on vinyl or on CD. For those of you that have musical tastes that lean toward artists and albums that are unlikely to benefit from a repressing, this takes on a greater importance still.

Below, you can see a picture of an Ortofon SPU moving coil cartridge. This was one of the very first moving coil cartridges ever released for sale to the public and has been in production for nearly fifty years becoming something of an industry legend. It is also a device that is actively sought out by fans of jazz music. SPUs are regarded as the perfect partners for jazz and early stereo recordings—so much so that Ortofon even markets them this way.

Here is a question that may or may not be greeted by a roll of eyes from a few of you but is a question worth asking: When was the last time you listened to an album? By this I don’t mean when did you last put an album on and proceed to have it play in the background while you performed other tasks. I mean when was the last time you put music on for the sole purpose of sitting down and giving it your undivided attention? For some readers, that will be very recently but for others this is process alien to the means by which they usually consume music.

A subtle but consistent Hollywood narrative is that when audio equipment does appear in a shot-- particularly when it is owned by the villain of the piece-- it will be a substantial system that is usually produced by a single manufacturer. What better way to establish an element of good taste than a sleek tower of uniform gear? While some audio companies dedicate themselves to producing a single product category, others are proficient in very wide range of disciplines. These companies will argue that with everything designed by the same people, to the same requirements will result in a better performance than mixing and matching from companies with different approaches.

Some aspects of modern life are a constant. The phrase “for your convenience” will generally not pertain to something convenient, two items cooked from frozen and generally eaten together will not have the same required temperature to cook in an oven and Korn will be making “good progress” on new material. More specific to our little corner of the world is an observable phenomenon when somebody asks for an equipment recommendation for a given price. As sure as night follows day, within the first five posts will be an endorsement for buying something used instead of new.

There are, of course, some immediately identifiable arguments why this would make sense. Almost all equipment bought new will immediately suffer some level of depreciation because it is no longer new—the box has been opened, the packaging moved about and the item used. In some cases, this can result in a substantial reduction in cost, even if the equipment in question has barely been used. The older the item gets (up to a point, as we shall cover), the price will continue to drop. If you can buy something that once cost $1,000 for $300, why would you do anything else?

The moment that your music system is comprised of different components, the business of changing and improving it takes on a slightly different dynamic. Instead of chopping everything in and looking to buy a better unit, you instead can choose to try and improve a specific area of the system to address issues you may feel it has. This process is somewhat different to one we apply to almost anything else we own—where the general process is one of complete overhaul.

My most significant event of the summer (I hesitate to use the word “highlight”) was undoubtedly breaking my leg and ankle in four places. Quite apart from the considerable discomfort, the realization that I might be the most incompetent user of crutches that has ever lived and the daily discovery of previously easy tasks rendered ridiculously hard, it has been an eye-opening experience trying to make use of my record collection. Simply put, vinyl is not a terribly friendly format under these conditions. Shuffle over to your player, balance yourself while you get a record on… and repeat the performance about 20 minutes later.

Some of this unfriendliness doesn’t have to be an issue though. For almost as long as the 33 1/3RPM LP has been a recognized format, there has been a subset of turntables that can do at least some of the heavy lifting themselves. Put the record on the platter, press a button and the arm will place itself on the record and start playing while you concern yourself with staggering back to your chair. Come the end of the side, they’ll lift the arm off and return it to the resting position. These are fully automatic turntables and they are fairly widely available. So why aren’t all turntables automatic?

Some years ago when my wife was expecting our son, the editor of one of the publications I write for noted that I had been entered on a list of contributors who could no longer be 100 percent guaranteed to return review equipment in the condition it had been dispatched in. He also noted (with the slightly sadistic smile of someone who had suffered it themselves) that my record collection would presently find itself consigned to storage “for a few years anyway.” Rather than tempt fate, I kept my mouth shut and mentally vowed not to lose a territorial battle to a being as yet unborn.

As I write this, my son is on the cusp of his fourth birthday and the reckoning so far hasn’t been too bad. I have continued to test and review equipment for magazines and websites, the overwhelming majority of sample equipment has returned to the manufacturer in the condition it arrived in and I have continued to use and enjoy vinyl throughout. I now find myself at the point where my son recently expressed an interesting in using a turntable himself, taking us to the next phase of his relationship with my records and equipment. As such, I am relaying some of my experiences up to this point. This is not an authoritative guide. I make no claim toward greatness as a parent and every child is different. We’ll start with protection and cover usage later on.

One of the stated advantages of separate audio components is that they give you the choice of exactly the component you think is right for you at every point of sound reproduction. This is a fine ideal… but just because you can do this doesn’t necessarily mean that the results are going to be brilliant. Nowhere is this more of an issue than it is with amplifiers and speakers. While it is possible to combine many different amps with many different speakers, not all of these combinations are going to work as well as you might hope. Surely there has to be a better way?

One way around this is to combine the amplifier and the speaker into a single unit. If the same designer has been involved in the creation of both components, they should have the right qualities to work together. At the same time, the idea is appealing on a cosmetic and design level because it allows for two boxes to be combined into one, saving space and very often some money too. The results of doing this are generally referred to as powered speakers and active speakers. While some manufacturers are a little naughty and interchange those terms, they are not the same. So what are the differences?

A question that crops up frequently on our forums (and if you have yet to check out our happy community, I would urge you to do so) pertains to assembling a system. When discussing amplifiers—and pretty much regardless of how you construct a system, there is going to be an amplifier somewhere in it—a perfectly logical question is, “How much power do I need?” Taken at face value, this should not be a complicated question to answer. Amplifier manufacturers supply power outputs for their products so it ought to be a simple business of saying “You need x” and putting the question to bed.

The very fact that amplifier power varies wildly should be a clue that this question isn’t as straightforward as it might appear. If you can buy amplifiers that can produce 200 watts at about the same price as you can buy ones that will just about summon 10, it stands to reason that the “correct” amount of power probably isn’t going to be a single easily citable number. The right amount of power for your system is going to come down to a three-way calculation that is specific to your circumstances. If this sounds alarming—don’t worry. The figure you are going to wind up with is an approximate rather than an exact one, but it will help you work out what you need.

If you decide to pass a slow moment by looking at a cartridge manufacturer’s website (and while you are free to judge me any way you see fit for doing this, your own browser history is likely to tell its own story of less than dynamic moments in your lives), you might notice something odd. Many companies will make what appears to be two (or sometimes even more) cartridges that are identical in every way except for the shape of the stylus—the tiny diamond that sits in the groove of the record and begins the process of turning that groove into an audio signal, and with that, the price being asked for them. These aren’t small price differences either. Changing the stylus profile can often nearly double the price of the cartridge.

So why are these differences so significant? The answer to this is—by the standards of vinyl anyway—pretty straightforward, but it makes the most sense with some context. First, what is the stylus? At the most basic level it is a piece of industrial diamond that has been shaped to a point and sits at the end of the cantilever—the object that transmits the signal it creates back to the cartridge. In essence, almost every cartridge (there are of course a tiny number of exceptions but they are sufficiently rare that we can ignore them for now) works on these principles. In very basic cartridges, the stylus attaches to the cantilever by means of a metal shank which slots into the end of the cantilever. This works well enough but increases the weight and mass of the assembly in the cartridge, which isn’t ideal. More sophisticated designs will use what is referred to as a “nude” stylus that affixes directly to the cantilever and reduces this mass.

During times of high stress in the original Star Trek, Montgomery Scott would often remark that he couldn’t change the laws of physics (a slightly pessimistic tone to take from a man who routinely stuck two fingers up at the theory of special relativity it has to be said). In truth, Scotty missed his calling as an acoustics engineer because here his protestations might have been received with more sympathy. A speaker is something that must follow the basic laws of physics pretty closely. The most keenly felt of all of these laws is that a small speaker will be limited in the depth and level of low frequency energy it can produce.

What this boils down to is that a small speaker will be limited in the absolute bass extension that it can offer. Work with porting, transmission lines and other trickery can squeeze a little more bass out of a speaker of a given size but as a general rule of thumb, the larger the driver and cabinet, the lower a speaker can go. For many of us, though, it simply isn’t practical to have a pair of large, full-range speakers in our listening rooms. This being the case, what are the options for people looking for a bit more low end shove?

If you take a look at a given category of manufactured products—be it ballpoint pens, ovens or half a million other devices, it is generally possible to find a level of consensus employed in their design that goes beyond that demanded by consumer laws or simple budget constraints. This isn’t too surprising—I don’t know about you but when looking for a pen, I want a device that I can easily hold that deploys ink out of one end rather than, say, the entire length of the pen—but it does suggest that in many categories, the notion of design is pretty settled.

Many of these implied consensuses apply to record player design too. This is why your turntable, regardless of its age and origin, is likely to place the record on a platter, use an arm to hold the cartridge and be rotated by electricity. After this though, record players are intriguingly diverse devices which frequently reject any sense of implied consensus. We’ve covered many of these differences in pieces before, but there is one that is so fundamental to the nature of how record players work that it can escape your attention until you sit back and take notice of the turntable as a whole. I am referring to the amount a turntable weighs and where that weight is deployed.

In the last 10 years, many audio systems have become extremely clever devices, indeed. Where once we were perfectly content to have music in one room that largely came from physical media, we now have the choice of equipment that can effortlessly support multiple rooms of audio and draw from any kind of source. By borrowing technology from other categories, multiroom has evolved from a bulky and usually expensive mass of wires and perplexing-looking control boxes into something that is slick, elegant and just as importantly, much more affordable.

Many genres of music are inexorably bound up in a specific social movement or event. They provide a running commentary to the thoughts, hopes and dreams of their creators as much as they do something to be entertained by. There are, however, other categories that exist unencumbered by the weight of such significance being attached to them—music for the joy of being music. Big beat is indisputably part of the latter category—but on reflection this might be considered a strength rather than a weakness. This disparate spread of artists defies easy classification because it became a catch all term for material that couldn’t be reliably placed anywhere else. At its heart was a solid 120-140 bpm tempo, heavy synth line—usually courtesy of a Roland TB-303—and samples that came from just about anything. These were combined into sets that could just as easily feature material that wasn’t as specifically big beat but just happened to work well in that place and time.

Like a number of genres and in dance music especially, the meaningful life of big beat was short but unquestionably influential in terms of the places artists who had been active within it went next. It has also proved to be curiously durable in terms of the continued use of big beat tracks in film and television—even if you aren’t familiar with the genre, you’ll have likely heard some of it already. Perhaps more importantly, as well as innumerable 12-inch singles it also left behind a stack of great albums that stand up as a good listen years later.

There’s a subtle but consistent undercurrent in discussions about vinyl and vinyl replay that for some commentators there is nothing new under the sun. There’s no point to new pressings, equipment and technology because we as a group apparently got it all right at some set point in the past. This view is understandable to an extent—vinyl replay has been with us for nearly a century and stereo playback over 60 years. Given we’ve achieved some other minor technical milestones in that time, it’d be reasonable to believe that peak performance was achieved some time ago.

The days that follow a major audio show visit are a very telling indicator as to how well you actually feel a show has gone. At the show itself, you busy yourself with getting around the thing, studiously making notes on new product, arranging possible reviews and generally acting in a way that at least partially resembles industry professionals being gathered together, albeit with the less regularly encountered phenomena like those professionals taking time out to play Kraftwerk at the sort of levels that makes your vision wobble.

Electronic music can legitimately claim many different points of origin — something so diverse could hardly be otherwise — but France has been at the forefront of a huge amount of the developments that have made electronic music what it is. What’s more, the French have done more than almost anyone else to make electronica fun. While the Germans busied themselves with experimental soundscapes and the British absorbed their early electronic work into prog, the French mission statement was to make the results danceable. In this they succeeded absolutely and continue to do so to this day. Beyond the widely known big hitters from Daft Punk — Justice et al is massive swath of brilliant material that deserves more attention — here are some edited highlights.

Many of us at one time or another will have used or paraphrased John Peel’s “life has surface noise” quote when talking about vinyl replay. If you are a measurement junkie (and there’s no shame in that), it is an indisputable fact that vinyl has higher levels of noise when most digital rivals. This does not mean however that the default state of a record player is one of high levels of background hum and unwanted background noise. Done right, vinyl playback can be startlingly quiet, so what are the steps you take to achieve this?

As a proportion of the total mass of a record player, the cartridge is a tiny percentage. Even the largest and heaviest examples of the breed will rarely tip the scales at much more than twenty grams and will be no larger than the end of an adult thumb. Despite their tiny size, cartridges perform a vital task, turning the groove of a record into an electrical signal. As this role is so crucial to the overall actions of the player, they have an enormous influence on the sound that your turntable will produce.

If you have had need to look at buying a cartridge for a new turntable or are looking for a replacement one- or indeed you’ve simply made killing time at work an art form--you will know that cartridges start at around $30 but from there, prices climb steadily, ultimately heading into figures that can secure you a brand new, warrantied and well specified car. If you’ve dug down further into this information, you’ll also note that the more expensive cartridges are generally listed as moving coil designs. More terrestrially priced cartridges tend to be moving magnet type designs-- so what is a moving coil cartridge and why should you even consider shelling out for one?

Here’s an interesting and seldom asked question. When was the last time you were out in a bar, club or similar venue and the audio system sounded better than the one you have at home? Not louder, not objectively more enjoyable due to it hosting an artist you rate highly, but qualitatively better than your domestic listening experience? In my own experience, it doesn’t take a huge amount of money spent on a home system to create something that can convincingly outperform a public system.

If you pay any attention to the mechanics of playing a record, you will quickly discover that some of the physics involved will induce a migraine (and I’m not even referring to the immortal Calvin and Hobbes strip discussing the different speeds on the same record). The pressure exerted by a stylus on the groove of a record is in excess of 300lbs per square inch and during dynamic passages, the lateral forces from the groove wall on the stylus are staggeringly high. What looks calm and sedate from your listening position is anything but.

One force that your turntable has to deal with is a simple function of how a record works. As the stylus tracks the groove of the record towards the centre, the force on the outer edge of the stylus increases as it is ‘steered’ toward the centre of the record. Over the lifetime of the stylus, this will produce uneven wear on the diamond. In some cases, the force being applied will cause the arm to jump and fail to follow the record correctly.

An accusation leveled at free market capitalism (or 'consumerism' for the truly disdainful) is that it compels us to buy things we don't need by impressing on us the obsolescence of the equipment we already own. The promise of more features, more speed or simply more glitz lures into forking out money on the latest and greatest version. I'm not so stupid as to pretend that the audio industry is not so affected—there's always something new being offered that promises to be the next best thing—but there are some interesting variations on the theme.

At various points in my writings for Viny Me, Please I have tried to explain the role and function of different parts of the replay chain that forms a turntable. One area that has gone uncovered up until now is the tonearm. Every record player from the gramophone onwards has been fitted with an arm and the role it performs has been pretty much established from day one. Perhaps because the requirements are so fixed, the basics of most arms have been decided for about the same length of time.

Within this however is a huge variety of design approaches and an even wider selection of pricing. If you've started looking through the inventories of some manufacturers and retailers, it won't have escaped your notice that the price of some tonearms- not the turntable as a whole, just the arm- can sail into five figure territory. To understand why, we need to get a handle on what a tonearm is being called upon to do and the challenges tied in with that.

No part of the business of listening to records might realistically be described as cutting edge. The 33rpm stereo LP is bordering on sixty years old, and while we've tweaked, prodded and refined the playback process, it still involves dragging a needle through a groove like the devil's own trench run. Despite this, there are some older aspects of vinyl that represent an interesting additional world of great music—the subset of mono and 78rpm pressings.

These two formats relate to one another—78rpm records are only ever mono—but need to be treated separately from mono recordings that play at 33 or 45rpm. As such, we'll start with mono and move into the world of 78s once we're comfortable with the basics. There is no better time to be looking at the fundamentals of mono playback- there has been a spate of re-releases of material in mono and many industry legends have appeared in the public eye saying that mono mastered versions of some very famous albums represent the best way to hear them.

If you wanted an indicator of just how dramatic the resurgence in vinyl has been in recent years, the choice of new turntables at pretty much any price point you can imagine is larger that it has been since the early '80s when vinyl was the default format for home use. The variety is bewildering and this alone would be enough to keep many people poring over the choice available without wanting to consider other options. There are other options though and they can be excellent value.

I am of course referring to the second hand market. The nature of this has changed in recent years—the golden age of extremely good quality turntables being sold off as end of life scrap has come to an end- but in its place has come a much more consistent arrangement where owners upgrading to new models will seek to offset some of the costs of doing so by selling their old turntable. The models on the market will be as variable as their owners but some models are a little more likely to crop up than others.

We've already talked about some holy grail devices but these are some more commonly encountered models that might work out as being useful alternatives to a new turntable. So without further ado, here are some second hand heroes that are worth seeking out.