LP Records: Analog Warmth in a Digital World

Columbia records introduced the LP records on June 21st, 1948. Can digital ever erase the old world charm of analog?

I see you’ve sent my letters back/and my LP records and they’re all scratched
– ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ – The Police

In a minor irony, I first heard these lyrics on a CD, one of the first I bought when I was tentatively upgrading from cassette tapes to the shiny new digital format of the future, one of many futures that are already receding into a possible past. I hadn’t heard an actual LP record since the early ‘80s, before my parents stopped using their old turntable and switched to tapes.

I did remember the way the Rolling Stones’ first album sounded on that player with its small built-in speakers. The sound was slightly muffled but rich, alive. The guitars sounded frantic, and Jagger’s voice was a primal yowl. Still, I was convinced that tape was superior, somehow, and when CDs came along theywere clearly better than tapes. By the time the 2000s rolled around I thought of vinyl as a dead format, if I thought about it all.

But something happened on the way to digital heaven.

Word started to spread among music lovers that there was still something to vinyl. Those black, grooved discs started gaining a certain mystique, and of course there were people then (and still, now) alive who had never lost their love for the format. It brings back memories or impressions of a time gone by. So how much of the resurgence of vinyl is a reaction to the flattening clarity of digital and how much is nostalgia, consumerist fetishism?

I don’t know for sure. What I am certain of is that most music from the ‘LP era’ – roughly from 1958, when Columbia commercially introduced the 33 1/3 RPM Long Player – to the late ‘70s, when vinyl didn’t die out but started to lose ground to tape – seems to sound best on vinyl. Maybe it was the kind of music. Maybe analog is still the best way to reproduce analog. Maybe some slight distortion created when you play an LP record is the source of that elusive warmth vinyl devotees speak of.

Maybe it’s all in the mind. Maybe it’s in the ears.

But there’s something else, something more tangible. An LP record is big. It comes housed in a large sleeve with room for spectacular art. Think of classic albums from back then – Bitches Brew, Abraxas, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Deep Purple In Rock. That cover art comes to life on an LP cover. If it’s a gatefold sleeve, like Bitches Brew, you can open it out, stand it up and gaze at a panoramic spread of imagery while spinning the disc. And LPs can’t just be tossed onto an incidental table or left behind in the glove compartment of your car. They have to be cleaned, housed carefully back in their sleeves, stacked vertically to avoid warping, shelved in long, enticing rows, taken down carefully, eased out of their covers, placed gently on the turntable, listened to intently, with time taken to change the side.

An LP record is a tangible, delicate object. Whether it sounds better or just plays to our penchant for romanticizing the past, it has a physicality that makes the experience more real in some way. It reminds us that music is something we are fortunate to have in our daily lives, at our command.

Maybe that’s why, more than six decades since the format was debuted, people still crave a measure of analog warmth in a world of cool digital precision.

(Jayaprakash Satyamurthy is a Bangalore-based writer and musician.)