Beyond the Music Format Wars: Learning How To Listen

The debate goes back even further than most current turntable owners realize. Fifty years ago, collectors of 78s were denouncing LPs as ‘imitation records.’

Via pexels.com
'The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience.' Via pexels.com

In 1999, Abbey Lincoln, one of jazz’s greatest singer-songwriters — an admittedly measured compliment, as there are relatively few singer-songwriters in jazz, and considerably fewer who are any good — introduced one of her most poignant works, “Learning How to Listen,” on her classic album “Wholly Earth.”

The late Ms. Lincoln was an all-time master at looking at a very basic concept that most took for granted and finding something deep and profound to sing about it. “Learning how to listen, how to hear a melody / How to hear the song I’m singing, how to feel and let it be.”  

We all think we know how to listen, but lately the medium through which we hear music is a subject of much debate.

The vinyl LP format has made a dramatic comeback, of course, after most of us long-time listeners had written it off as dead and buried, thinking the 33 had been 86’d. Streams, sound files, and the various internet platforms (Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube) are still the dominant way most people listen to music, but LPs are currently generating more revenue than compact discs. 

There are some who believe LPs sound better than all the other formats, especially the digital ones. I do not agree, but I have my own reasons for avoiding the argument.

I grew up in the last great era of vinyl. When I wore a younger man’s clothes, in the 1970s and ’80s, I bought everything I wanted to hear on LPs. Then I re-acquired as much as I could on CDs in the 1980s and ’90s. In the 2000s, I gradually ripped all those CDs into high-quality sound files of various formats. Since 2010 or so, most new music comes to me in the form of digital files, not physical media, though I still receive CDs. (At different times I have also owned thousands of 78s, 45s, open reel tapes, cassettes, you name it.)

With each new platform and generation, there was an exponentially increasing superabundance of material. When I stopped collecting vinyl, I possessed roughly 14,000 LPs: An entire three-bedroom apartment on East 116th Street was required to house them all. Most of my current CD collection resides in a storage room in Jersey City; I would estimate, based on box capacity and lower mathematics, there are about 50,000 CDs. Still another few thousand discs, mostly from the last five years, are at this moment taking up space in my swinging one-bedroom bachelor pad. As for sound files, I couldn’t even estimate — it would have to be in the millions, housed on a series of hard drives.  

This is a long way to justify saying that I think I’ve earned the right to sit out the recently revived LP vs. CD wars. Said debate goes back even further than most current turntable owners realize. Fifty years ago, collectors of 78s were denouncing LPs as “imitation records” (a favorite phrase of the late Mike Sambach) and charging that those of us who listened to vintage (pre-1950) jazz and pop on LPs were denying ourselves the full experience of glorious 78 RPM sounds. Yes, I know that sounds familiar; in fact, it’s exactly what 21st century “vinyl retentive” types say about CDs and sound files.

At various points in this evolution, I sought counsel from two experts and professional listeners: a saxophonist, clarinetist, and bandleader, Dan Levinson, and a Grammy-nominated engineer, Doug Pomeroy. These two audio avatars have ears much better than mine, and to me their judgment regarding these matters is sacred.

There were of course many terrible LPs back in the day, followed by lousy CDs and, today, by many poorly prepared, mediocre sound files — especially on YouTube. According to Messrs. Levinson and Pomeroy, though, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the digital medium, either CDs or MP3s. A well-produced compact disc — which uses good source material to start with and is prepared by a knowledgeable engineer (often with help from a musician like Mr. Levinson or the drummer-historian Kenny Washington in terms of making sure each track is playing at the proper speed and in the proper key) — is by no means inherently inferior to an original 78 or 33⅓ RPM LP.

Yet I don’t want to discourage the vinyl enthusiasts: Their love for the medium is undeniably making things better for the musicians themselves, even if I can’t bring myself to agree with the underlying basis of that enthusiasm. Speaking personally, I wholeheartedly agree with the New Yorker cartoonist Alex Gregory, who depicted a couple of guys standing next to a turntable, a tube amplifier, and a shelf of LPs while one of them says, “The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience.” To me, that says it all.  

The expense he refers to has nothing to do with the cost of the LPs themselves or even the equipment. Next time someone wants to try to recruit me to the vinyl side of the ongoing format wars, tell them not only to send me a turntable (I haven’t owned one since 2009) they better throw in the deed to a goodly-sized house as well.


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