How did classical vinyl make an improbable return? Part 2 technology, different, recording, something, digital

Quest

Of course, plenty of stalwart classical collectors have held onto their LPs straight through it all, tending the vinyl flame as others snuffed it out. But this newest phenomenon is something different: a return to active production for a recording technology that seemed to have been consigned to the dustbin. At a time when digital triumphalism reigns supreme, the thought conjures feelings of charmed incredulity — as if next we will be told that South Station has been forced by popular demand to open a new gate for those who, fed up with the indignities of modern travel, have begun arriving by stagecoach.

But the vinyl renaissance is real — if also in economic terms still a very small slice of the music market. As Barry Holden of Universal Music recently explained to me, the company’s first return to classical vinyl came three years ago with a Decca box set, and this year, Deutsche Grammophon will release dozens of single LPs. Holden expects the upward tick of classical vinyl to continue, both from its back catalog and in its new releases.

And classical music is obviously late to the vinyl party. The Guardian reports that at the Optima plant in the former East Germany, where Universal presses many of its new releases (as do many non-classical labels), production more than doubled between 2011 and 2014, straining capacity of the aging legacy equipment. Many of the factory’s presses were purchased in disrepair from territories of the former Soviet Union, then gutted and retooled by German engineers. This year the plant will produce 18 million records.

With numbers like this, it’s hard not to wonder what, on a deeper level, is driving this broader return. My personal theory is that the vinyl revival may have exposed a flawed set of premises underpinning the digital music revolution from the outset: that sound can be reduced to just another form of data, that it is indifferent to its own container, that the medium has no message, and that music can be accessed through increasingly frictionless and ephemeral modes of delivery without influencing the way we hear. More likely, it has always seemed to me, technologies for listening frame and mediate the act itself. They contain their own relevant histories. And each technology, in its own way, shapes the ritual and practice — simply put, the experience — of listening.

There was just one way to prove my idea, and with unimpeachable scientific rigor. I had last owned a phonograph some two decades ago. It was time to give vinyl another spin.

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Building my new turntable turned out to be considerably more than a quick plug-and-play affair, though I confess that I relished the hands-on contact, real or imagined, with the machine’s underbelly. As I hesitantly stretched the drive belt into place, a passage came to mind from Milan Kundera’s novel “Immortality,” in which the author wistfully summons a golden, prelapsarian moment from the era of Goethe — a time in which modern inventions had made life more comfortable, but, as Kundera puts it, “an educated person could still understand all the devices he used.” Such a person still grasped how his home was built, how oil lamps produced light, what principles informed a telescope. “The world of technical objects,” Kundera writes, “was completely open and intelligible to him.”

Here already was perhaps one element of vinyl’s current appeal: This technology is more transparent. It has not been shorn of visuality. You can understand the principles, and watch the sound being produced. Compare this with music that mysteriously arrives through ear buds attached to opaque slabs of glass and aluminum after a button has been pressed or a person has intoned the word “Siri” to no one in particular.