Really, despite my maniacal tirades during the Vinyl Me, Please craze of colored records and hip-hop vinyl plugging [1], I’ve always loved vinyl. I have this memory of a religious experience in my life, for instance, which was hearing my mom’s Neil Young – Decade LP, and its closeur, “Long May You Run”; on wax. The warm, vibrant sound was completely undeniable, catering perfectly to the homey, folky songwriting that, in truth, lends itself so well to turntable listening, as a general rule.
It’s interesting, then, that I find myself, today, in sort of the opposite position of what I was seven years ago — petulantly demanding analogue sounds on these machines, against the grain of the masses, who, apparently, consume these Bluetooth playing units like they’re Jack’s pizzas. It’s hard to believe, but only about a year ago, or even less, I searched the Internet for the scoop on these Bluetooth units. And everywhere I looked were these glib, poker-faced blips of reassurance that the Bluetooth units, which involve signals send to wireless speakers for primary playback, did indeed preserve the actual analogue quality of the original record, which involves, basically, the sound actually having a SHAPE, and a physical nature. The experience with listening to vinyl, ideally, should be akin to being at a concert, or being in the studio with the band — you’re supposed to experience physical sound waves hitting you, a purer and more primitive sensation than the anatomically flattened music-by-digital-equations we millennials are typically used to with CD’s and streaming.
Today, I looked online, and even the primary answer on Google to my question of “do bluetooth record players maintain analog sound” is answered by the following: “With a Bluetooth-only turntable, you’re… turning an inherently analog format into a digital one through wireless transmission” [2]. To me, it seemed insensible from the start to take this medium that prioritizes authentic, physical sound, and infiltrate it with a wireless speaker presence: it seemed obvious that the only way to transmit audio signals to those Bluetooth speakers would be a MIDI conversion, since there’s no, like, giant copper cone on the speakers, or whatever.
But, all the while, the only record players I could find, anywhere in retail stores or online, which didn’t feature built-in speakers (which I for now prefer, kind of, by default), were the Bluetooth units. Where was the uproar about this? This flaccid acceptance of Bluetooth as the primary record player speaker format irks me as much as Vinyl Me, Please did in 2018, with all their flashy, colored records and their glib insistence that this expensive format, from which they’d profit, were the only acceptable way to listen to music. Along with Rough Trade’s asinine inclusion of Is This it? as an “Essential” purchase, despite the fact that it was produced on Pro Tools and so sounds the exact same as the CD, makes me want to be real misanthropic. But I won’t. I’ll just go kill a bottle of Fireball instead.
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[1] My issue with this, of course, is that hip-hip is a digital genre of music, hence offering no advantage to the analog listening medium.
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[2] I’ve omitted the part of this statement about the sound quality ebb since I don’t think that’s actually true, irrespective of analog biases, and it’s also an impossible thing to prove. It’s like saying Miller Lite has more “taste” than Michelob Ultra, for instance.
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