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Vinyl

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Vinyl records are better than CDs, and this is being written by a man who was born in the cassette/CD age. My father's record collection has over 500 records, including rock, blues, and jazz. I loved listening to "Free Bird" and "Simple Man" on vinyl, listening to Rod Stewart and BB King sing the blues, then listening to old New Orleans jazz.

Music is art, and like art it should be about expression, about ambiance, NOT about technical superiority and being "cleaned up." One of the bragging points of CDs over vinyl is that there is no background noise, no pops, or in other words, no soul. Yes it's technically cleaned up, and that might be fine for certain types of music, but is Janis Joplin really better on CD than on vinyl?

My answer to that is an emphatic no! When you're talking about jazz, Southern rock, blues, blues-rock, these are songs that are meant to invoke a feeling, an ambiance of that smoky bar room or that country porch. The pops and crackles come through with that, and when I listen to "Simple Man" from Skynrd or "Maggie" from Rod Stewart on CD, it just feels like a soulless studio. Those songs are far better on vinyl on the original records than they are on CD.

Besides, while you have to maintain records to avoid damage, I don't buy at all that CDs are better. CDs get scratched from playing just like records, and I've had CDs that start skipping within a year or two of work. For example, my Best of Supertramp CD is garbage. It skips almost every track because it was scratched from "over playing." My dad's "Breakfast in America" vinyl record is still playing 30 years after he bought it.

Music should be seen as art, not as technical proficiency. The argument has been made for many forms of art, from painting to writing to sculpting that the "perfect" works were perfect because of that one tiny imperfection that set it apart and gave it a life, a soul, that its competitors never found.

For that reason, although CDs are more convenient for travel on the road, vinyl rules in my mind. The imperfections are what the music hit home, the cracks and pops help bring you into the right state to hear the music, and that's the way I want to listen to my blues and jazz off the old record player, because I want to hear my music with soul.

Learn more about this author, Shane Dayton.
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