A veneer of nostalgia envelops today's reborn interest in vinyl LPs. Pawing around used-record bins is downright therapeutic, an audio version of that utterly civilized pastime, book collecting. Beyond the basic relaxation that comes from that steady flip-flip through the jackets, one might find a rarity, become reacquainted with a loved childhood record, or snag a jewel at a bargain-bin price. It's a delightful whole made up of delectable parts.
Nevertheless, for Those of a Certain Age, records weren't nostalgic. They were brand new. They belonged to the here and now, just as much as a quart of milk or a bunch of fresh celery. They came encased in shrink wrap, the cardboard fresh and white, the jacket art crisp and clear and unsullied. The record inside was shiny and unmarked, fresh off the press and never played. For most of today's vinyl enthusiasts, newness isn't part of the equation. LPs are secondhand; LPs are links to the past; LPs are of indeterminate quality. No matter how pretty the surface might look in the reflections from Amoeba's embalming-room flourescent lighting, you can't be sure that those microscopic grooves haven't been visited with sustained abuse. Only a playing will tell if you have music or a scratch-and-click fest.
Happily, brand spanking new LPs are once more available. Nowadays they're produced by specialist outfits, by folks who bring a discerning audiophile sensibility to what used to be a mass-market product. More often than not new LPs will be pressed on 100% fresh, or "virgin" vinyl, as opposed to the 70/30 mix of fresh to repurposed vinyl that was the norm in the past. Not only that, but the 120 gram weights of yesteryear have been replaced by 180 gram weights. That extra mass may or may not improve the overall sound quality—personally I rather doubt that it does—but it stands witness to the fit 'n' finish that modern-day vinyl producers are bringing to their pressings. If nothing else, the extra thickness renders the LP that much more resistant to reciprocal vibrations, as the stylus in the groove imparts some of its jiggle right back into the record.
Many of today's heavyweight audiophile records dip into yesterday's catalogs. That makes perfect sense: vinyl LPs are analog rather than digital, after all, so it's in everybody's best interest to maintain a 100% analog chain throughout. Besides, there's a lot to be said for the stellar achievements of firms such as Decca, DGG, RCA, and Mercury back in the all-analog days. A lot of people today just don't know how glorious a brand-new Polydor pressing of a Deutsche Grammophon album could sound, before time and usage started taking its toll. That's not to say that you can't find a mint-condition original DGG that provides audio thrills galore, but most surviving specimens have seen better times.
That's where a new 180-gram pressing comes in handy. You can hear Ansermet's London blue-backs in all their pristine majesty, in all likelihood sounding better in their current incarnations than they ever did in the past. Disc noise is minimal; you hear mostly the tape hiss from the original masters. The surface is not only quiet, but clear; the strings sing out without the slightest ragged edge, the percussion transients glitter in the air, the soundstage is not only wide but deep. Mercury Living Presence LPs from the later 1950s and into the 1960s reveal all their startling clarity without the slight blare that seems to accompany a fair number of the digital remasterings—good though those are. The midrange-rich glide of an RCA Living Stereo is unmistakable whether on CD, SACD, or LP—but somehow it works better on an LP. Maybe it's the combination of the undercurrent of groove swoosh and that buttery RCA house sound.
Audiophile LPs are addictive. I treated myself to an even dozen lately, ranging from Ansermet on Decca to Fricsay on DGG, Klemperer on EMI, Dorati and Skrowaczewski in Minneapolis on Mercury, and even a delectable period piece—"The American Scene" from Mantovani and His Orchestra, perfectly recorded by Decca/London and given a ritzy gatefold album treatment, as befitted that most reliable of cash cows with his cascading strings and luminous orchestrations. Sophisticated it ain't, but it shoor is purty.
It isn't strictly necessary to pop the typically $30-plus purchase price for an audiophile-grade LP to get near-perfect analog sound. I have an original of the Mercury Dorati/LSO album of Copland's Rodeo and El Salon Mexico that plays as well as any 180-gram audiophile item in my collection. My Karajan/Berlin set of the Brahms symphonies on DGG sounds as if it came off the production line yesterday. Throughout my LP collection I find records that have sailed down fifty years or more with hardly an audio blip or stain. Some were high-class affairs when new, others were humble items from second-tier labels that were given first-tier pressings and have been kept safe & sound all these years. That's the thing about LPs: you never really know. Even when they're new problems can crop up, such as a mold that wasn't perfectly filled by the stamper, or poor-grade vinyl, or just a lousy original mastering and recording.
Audiophile LPs represent a kind of Honor Roll for fine recordings. A company such as Speakers Corner isn't about to release a 180-gram pressing of an album that wasn't much good to begin with, after all. As a rule, audiophile LPs will at least sound very good from a purely sonic point of view, no matter what you might wind up thinking of the performance. So they're fun to have around, and offer a lot of bang for their (considerable) buck.
At any rate, if you have a quality LP record player, you owe it to yourself to acquire at least a few modern-day audiophile LPs of grand classics. Consider the Kertesz/VPO of the Dvorak "New World" Symphony, on Decca—a stunning performance from the early 1960s captured by Decca's very best engineers. Originals in good condition demand a stiff price on the used-record marketplace, but for $35 you can get the Speakers Corner reissue, indistinguishable from the original except for the significantly higher quality vinyl itself. To be sure, the album is also available in a beautifully remastered CD for less than half the price. So maybe the LP is just nostalgic silliness. But perhaps it's nostalgia in a good cause, as it preserves a nearly-vanished pleasure of our collective past: the fun of buying a brand-new record, splitting open the shrink-wrap, and spinning that sucker for the very first time.
Kertesz/VPO in audiophile-grade vinyl: sonic heaven
