Music Technology

I was born in the 70’s so I grew up listening to my parent’s vinyl record collection; Some ABBA here, some Simon & Garfunkel there, and The Carpenters, Louise Tucker and a few greatest hits albums from pop artists in-between. But most of their collection comprised of opera, trumpet music, and classic recordings from Beethoven, Mozart, Albinoni, and Dvorak, which is probably why I tend to lean towards vinyl for those genres.

By the time I was buying music on my own in the late ’80s, I bought 45s and cassettes, the latter being more convenient for me when it comes to albums.

They were portable and you could compile your favorite 45’s to cassette. But I rarely bought full-length albums on vinyl because the high fidelity equipment was just too expensive in the sparsely populated area of New Brunswick I grew up in. And although compact discs were available, they were $25 or more so most of my collection ended up on cassette, which sounded comparable to vinyl to me.

Years later when I moved to Ottawa, I continued to purchase both cassettes and vinyl. And when compact discs started becoming available at reasonable prices the only reason I purchased vinyl was that the album wasn’t released on compact disc at the time, like Eye Eye’s “Just In Time To Be Late” and One To One’s “Forward Your Emotions“

I had stopped buying full-length albums on cassette, buying only a few cassette singles on the side, and preferred compiling my favorite recordings off LP not only because it was cheaper but sounded better on cassette, CD-R, and higher bit rate WAV and MP3.

Coincidentally, one of my very last cassette purchases was Metallica’s self-titled “Black Album“, which was released 30 years ago today. And with that purchase I paused my vinyl collection, other than the rare backup recording, and having upgraded to compact disc and DVD audio, this collection pretty much remained in my basement and gathered dust until 2010 when I finally dusted off the record player and started to make copies of my rarer recordings to play on my Sony mp3 player, which had better bass than most of the other players I had tried.

I am now back to collecting vinyl reissues of my very favorite albums, like Fleetwood Mac’s “Tango In The Night” and Talk Talk’s “Natural History” because these have yet to be released in high fidelity formats like DVD audio or Blu-ray audio. And are not likely to be because streaming is what the industry appears to be interested in now.

The remastered 180 gram vinyl of the Black Album will be released in September and I’m still eyeing the 30th Anniversary remastered vinyl of Def Leppard’s “Hysteria“, both of which are clearly not going to be re-released on the aforementioned digital formats, regardless of their popularity, although quite frankly, I would have probably purchased the LPs had they been available on those formats anyway.

I’m probably going to bring a few home when I eventually go out and shop in the fall, when everything calms down.

Would any of you have a copy of the Japanese pressing of Platinum Blonde’s “Standing In The Dark” LP? 🙂