Vinyl vs Digital – Well, Kind of, but Not Really
Regular readers will be aware that I like a bit of a mix on the old Technics. I’ve been DJing with vinyl for nigh on 40 years now, although these days it is done entirely at home and purely for my own amusement, though I have a cunning plan on that front. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, vinyl was pretty much the only option, which meant lugging boxes of records to and from gigs, often on public transport given my fee was around 50 quid and all the “little fellas” I could work my way through in an evening. Records weigh a lot en masse, and a young bloke jealously guarding several extremely heavy boxes of twelve-inch singles on the bus was always bound to attract a few odd looks.
When computers started becoming more mainstream, I bought an Atari 1040 ST, largely because it had MIDI built in and I was convinced this represented the future in some way. At some point, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. The computer would listen to the record playing, work out its BPM in real time and then automatically adjust the turntable being cued so the beats matched. It would have been revolutionary. I had the idea, but I lacked the technical ability and motivation to pursue it, so the world was denied my contribution to the development of digital DJing – maybe not a bad thing!
Then CDJs arrived. Initially, they actually played CDs – the clue was in the name – but by then I had largely moved away from DJing. A proper job and a young family had intervened, and staying out all night at clubs and after-parties no longer fitted particularly well with either. Coming home in a bit of a state was never all that popular, anyway. The records remained (well, they did after I started buying them again after a stupid (but financially much needed) decision to sell all my tunes), as did my interest in dance music, but that particular part of my life gradually slipped into the background. I guess a lot of folk did exactly the same.
When I returned to DJing a few years ago, buying another pair of Technics was the obvious thing to do. Vinyl was what I knew, and much of the pleasure came from doing things in the same way I always had. Obviously, sound quality matters enormously to me, and the Technics, fitted with rather posh Ortofon cartridges and playing through a very nice-sounding Union Audio rotary mixer into our reference HiFi system, sounded properly excellent. It was a DJ set-up, but it was also a very serious system in its own right.
Whenever I tried adding CDJs to that system, however, I was overwhelmingly disappointed. It wasn’t really the experience of using them that bothered me, even though the models I tried didn’t have sync. It was the sound. They sounded plasticky, hollow and strangely insubstantial, rather like a small loudspeaker playing inside a tin can. This might have been less obvious through a big club system in a room full of people, but through a revealing HiFi system at home it was impossible to ignore and, frankly, a bit shit. I wanted the convenience offered by digital DJing, but I wasn’t prepared to accept a significant reduction in sound quality to get it. I flirted with computers and controllers but that never lasted long.
With my 59th birthday looming, I decided to investigate digital DJing properly. I didn’t want anything that depended on a computer being connected while I played, which ruled out controller-based systems, and I wasn’t especially keen on an all-in-one unit. I wanted separate players that felt like proper bits of kit, and this time I definitely wanted sync. That desire went all the way back to the Atari idea and the machine I had imagined nearly 40 years earlier. Above all, though, whatever I bought had to sound good.
After a great deal of research, I ended up buying a used pair of Denon SC6000s. They aren’t the industry-standard choice, but I have never been particularly interested in following the herd and have generally preferred things that sit slightly left of centre. The Denons do sound excellent and are great fun to use, so in that respect the decision was absolutely the right one. In fact, since buying them, I’ve barely mixed with vinyl at all.
That doesn’t mean the Technics have been permanently retired. When we move home, the plan is to buy a four-channel rotary mixer and bring the record decks back into the DJ set-up alongside the Denons – add to that that I’ve spent thousands on 12″ singles over the last few years. For now, though, the convenience of having my music available on a drive, without having to search through boxes for the next record, has proved impossible to resist. The fact that the Denons also sound really, really good means I no longer feel that I am giving something up whenever I use them.
I love sync, too, and I make no apology for saying so – awaits an onslaught of angry emails. I don’t do tricks or DJ stunts, and I can’t afford to throw cakes around the house as Lin would have my guts for garters. What interests me is being in the mix: concentrating on transitions, bringing elements of one tune in and out beneath another and allowing tracks to overlap for longer than I might have attempted when all my attention was focused on keeping the beats together. Sync frees up a bit of mental space and lets me concentrate on the parts of mixing that I actually find most enjoyable. Truth is, I do miss a bit of that mental “in-the-zone” feel that manual beat matching gives you – when it clicks, there is a feeling of your brain coming into sync. Being able to (mostly) concentrate on the mix undoubtedly results in a much better experience for my hordes of devoted listeners – Clio the cat and Lin, for the record.
Of course, sync doesn’t always work particularly well. It relies on the Engine software correctly identifying the beats and placing a grid over them, and the software doesn’t always get that right. On a good number of tracks, I still find myself beat-matching by ear because the allegedly clever technology has become confused. I can do that, having spent decades learning how, but it does rather undermine the promise that the machines will take care of all this for me. The SC6000s can analyse tracks themselves, but doing this on the fly interrupts the process of playing. In practice, I’m generally forced to use a computer to analyse the music beforehand, which introduces another collection of tasks. There is software to learn, tracks to import, beat grids to check and the occasional bit of digital filing to perform. I’m too old for all that shit, frankly, although I am persevering.
This is where my wonderful vision of the future, conceived on an Atari nearly 40 years ago, begins to look slightly less wonderful. I imagined the computer listening to two records and quietly taking care of the mechanical business of matching their speeds. I didn’t imagine myself sitting in front of it preparing the music in advance, correcting its mistakes and trying to understand why something that worked perfectly well yesterday has decided to go tits up today.
All of this got me thinking about the vinyl-versus-digital argument that continues to rumble through audiophile circles. It has been going on for decades, although admittedly not quite as long as the Thousand-Year Cyclic Cable War that continues to plague audiophiles across the globe. The two sides have taken up their traditional positions, and the same arguments are wheeled out with such regularity that everyone could probably swap sides without needing to alter the battle plan very much.
I use both vinyl and digital sources in our reference system, and both can sound truly excellent. Digital playback has improved enormously, and there are now some genuinely spectacular digital systems available. More importantly, excellent digital sound can also be achieved for remarkably little money. In that respect, digital has helped democratise good-quality audio by making impressive performance available without the cost and complexity of a serious turntable, arm and cartridge combination. Digital also offers undeniable convenience. There are no pops, scratches or jumps, and no records needing regular and meticulous cleaning before they can be played. You can have a massive collection of tunes available almost instantly, search it in seconds and move between tracks without leaving your chair. Compared with getting up, finding a record, taking it from its sleeve, cleaning it and lowering a stylus into the groove, it appears almost entirely effortless – First World problems, I know!
Except, of course, it isn’t all that simple. If you own your digital music, it has to be downloaded or ripped, named, stored, organised and backed up. Depending on what you want to do with it, it may also need to be imported into a particular piece of software and analysed before your equipment can make full use of it – more on the DJ side than the audiophile side, to be fair. We may no longer need to sit beside a computer simply to play a music file, as we did in the olden days of ten years ago, but the computer hasn’t disappeared completely. It has merely moved backstage or within the ready-to-go box that you bought.
Vinyl is hardly free of faffing about either. A turntable has to be set up properly, cartridges have to be aligned, records need cleaning, and styli eventually wear out. Anyone who has spent an afternoon trying to work out whether a cartridge sounds slightly better a gnats crotchet further forward will know that analogue audio can absorb a daft amount of time and energy. However, most of that process remains under your direct control. You can see the cartridge, clean the record, and adjust the tracking force. There is a clear connection between what you do and what happens when the stylus reaches the groove. Digital faff feels different because the process is partly hidden and partly controlled by software. Your experience depends upon the system you choose, how that system expects your music to be organised and whether it happens to interpret a track correctly. When something goes wrong, the solution might involve changing a setting, updating a database, or correcting information displayed on a screen. You are still doing the work, but you’re doing it according to rules created by somebody else.
That may be why analogue inconvenience can feel like part of the hobby while digital inconvenience feels more like admin. Cleaning a record is a physical act directly connected to playing it. Correcting a beat grid feels like preparing a spreadsheet so that a machine can do the thing it promised to do automatically. Neither activity is especially glamorous, but one leaves you feeling involved in the process while the other can make you feel as though you are working for the equipment, or, worse still, fighting against it.
Then again, perhaps faffing about is simply what hobbies are all about. We tell ourselves that we want everything to be effortless, but if it truly were, we might quickly lose interest. Audiophiles spend enormous amounts of time adjusting, comparing, cleaning, organising and generally interfering with systems that were already playing music perfectly well. DJs do much the same. The process is part of the pleasure, even when we’re swearing at it and threatening to throw it out the window.
The old battle between vinyl and digital now seems increasingly pointless to me. Both can sound superb, both can be enormously enjoyable, and both can waste far more of your time than you have. The important distinction is no longer between analogue warmth and digital precision, assuming it ever was; it is between two different kinds of involvement and two different varieties of faffing about.
With vinyl, I understand the process and remain in control of nearly all of it. With digital, I give up part of that control to software in exchange for convenience, flexibility and possibilities that vinyl cannot easily offer. That exchange has allowed me to spend less time concentrating on whether two beats are drifting apart and more time actually shaping a mix. When the technology works, it delivers almost exactly what I imagined all those years ago. When it doesn’t, I reach for the pitch control and do it myself.
Perhaps that is the ideal arrangement after all. The machines can help when they know what they’re doing, and nearly 40 years of mixing records means I can take over when they don’t. Clio has yet to lodge a formal complaint, Lin hasn’t had to scrape any cake off the walls, and I’m enjoying mixing music more than I have done in years. As measures of technological progress go, that will do for me.
Stu
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