I HAVE been in the habit of collecting vinyl records even before the so-called hipster fad that have made the plastic round discs fashionable again. Or it maybe the case that I could be the original hipster before the category was even invented. Before the careful and studied curation of pop culture artifacts was took over by the well-coifed and bearded set who had no use for their parents’ money save for the selective accumulation of cool nostalgia pieces from the past such as vinyl records for bragging rights and hipster cred, vinyl records used to be the dominion of fat social rejects who did not take a bath and listened to music as a profession. And they, god forbid, smoked too!
Admittedly, there is some degree of pretentiousness since record collecting for me came even before a decent audio setup was acquired. What I had then was just a brand new but terrible sounding turntable from Raon, Quiapo sold for peanuts. But the logic then was to have copies of releases in vinyl that were not available on CD, mp3, or any other digital formats and the turntable was just there to listen to these purchases. My first purchases was a warped copy of The Police’s Synchronicity album for less than a hundred pesos, an extended remix 12 inch copy of the The Dawn’s Enveloped Ideas, and Fra Lippo Lippi’s Songs album. Since then, trips abroad have added dozens more to the collection paired to a better sound system arrived at after years of hunting and saving for the right audio equipment.
About 15 years ago, there was already the recognition that vinyl records, because of their analog and physical nature, were to outlast CDs. That reality has come to pass with the digital media discovered to have a limited shelf-life decades after their mass production because the material used to store the binary code deteriorate over time. Vinyl records, on the other hand, as long as they are kept well, are nearing a century since they have proliferated and they sound just about the same as when they were made if cleaned from the dust and grime.
Original CDs, just like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, was the yuppie’s favorite item for their disposable income but these were terribly out of reach for students scrimping on their allowances like me. Meanwhile, the age of the internet and of peer-to-peer file sharing eventually sounded the death knell for the audio CD as a format even when online speeds were bounded by the limited capacity of the traditional phone line.
As fiber optic cables were laid out years later, the amount of digitized music in my collection also grew. It was the era of napster and limewire and what I used to have in cassette tape format, I looked for in mp3s that I burned onto CDRs which I then played in my Sony Discman which had very advanced anti-skip features. In fact, that Discman, purchased in 2003, still worked this year until I made the lousy mistake of plugging it to an adapter with higher voltage a few months ago.
Thus, while I was collecting vinyl records on the side, I was actually riding the digital wave and amassed audio files amounting to approximately 100 gigabytes, thanks to free internet access at the university. But while convenient and handy, I am the kind of person who likes to carry the complete discography of The Cure in my digital device in case I am in a dour mood and eager for melancholic company which is practically all the time, something must be said about the quality of music experience.
Ripped mostly from audio CDs, most mp3s amplified the limitations of the digital audio format. To save on limited digital space and facilitate transfer over limited bandwidth, they usually compressed the audio data losing out on important detail. Whether this detail that is lost in the process of digitizing diminishes the musical experience is the bone of contention in the great audio debate between the analog and the digital camps. Free lossless audio codec or FLAC tried to remedy this problem by offering digital music at higher sampling rates albeit with bigger file sizes. But digital is still different from analog, the other camp swears.
I am a religious user of both formats, to be honest and both have their moments of usefulness. Sometimes the convenience of using a file system or even a digital streaming service trumps whatever audio benefits there may be in listening to a vinyl record. If you want it quick and fast, sometimes an mp3 or better yet a FLAC file will do. But for those well-crafted classic records made by topnotch producers, the soundstage, stereo separation, and harmonic distortion of a long-playing album always will win provided that you have a decent amplifier, phono stage or phono preamplifier, and matching speakers attached to a decent turntable with a good stylus and cartridge. The search for audio equipment is a totally different but a new and exciting adventure altogether.