The Real Deal...

The funny thing about getting vinyl (or CDs, for that matter) made is that it is essentially a long, boring process, punctuated with brief flashes of blind panic. My sister has told me that this is what being in Iraq is like, but I don’t think the parallel is very accurate, honestly. The mastering lab didn’t lob any mortars at me, for starters.

In any event, I got the test pressings today, and as I listened to ’em I had a couple of thoughts. The process for making CDs, while sharing the net result, is significantly different than that for making vinyl. When you have a CD made, you send off (or upload) a digital master and some Illustrator files with artwork, and in a couple weeks, FedEx Ground shows up at your doorstep with a couple dozen boxes. It’s a fairly simple workflow, without much in the way of things that can go wrong. One time, a friend of mine who owned a label had a CD pressed, and instead of whatever industrial band’s music, it had Tito Puente’s Greatest Hits on it. While I felt this was a sizable improvement, subjectively, obviously his customers wouldn’t have been too happy with that. That’s the worst problem I’ve ever heard of when pressing CDs, and easily remedied with a phone call and a couple more weeks of waiting. (After that, we always did what we called the Tito Check; that is to say that we made a point of listening to units from several different boxes to ensure they had the correct content.)

Where making CDs is a science, making vinyl is much more of an art. You have to make subjective choices along the way that are heavily informed by the process itself. The only real limiting facet of a CD is the total time; when manufacturing vinyl I have discovered that there are many interdependent factors, and the entire process is sort of an exercise in finding out how much fuck you’re willing to give about any particular aspect.

The main thing I noted is that receiving these test pressings made the whole thing much more real. A CD is, at its base level, fundamentally indistinguishable from a downloaded file or a USB thumb drive. It is simply a container for bits. With a vinyl record, however, the medium is part of the message. Yes, it is anachronistic. That much can’t be argued. Yes, the sonic quality is demonstrably different than the digital file from whence it came (and, on paper at least, worse, although there’s a subjective “better” in there as well.)

I hate to use the word “cooler,” but the simple fact of the matter is that it’s fucking cool to make a record. And I relish the fact that I can use the words “record” and “album” in their proper context, rather than as placeholders. It’s big. It’s black. It’s round. It fucking crackles. Drop that tonearm, yo.