Sound investment

Listen closely, among the shelves of the last remaining music shops, in student dorm rooms and amid the flat whites and reclaimed wood of certain coffee shops, and you’ll hear a sound that many thought long banished. Check out the steadily rising sales figures of the past few years and there’s little doubt: the vinyl record is making a comeback. With it comes the return of another sound, like some po-faced, bearded handmaiden: the whine of the vinyl bore.

It is three decades since 12-inch PVC discs were the dominant means of access to music, but for some the format never died and analogue will always offer a purer, more true-to-life audio reproduction. Listen up and you’ll hear them jabbering insistently about ‘warmth’, ‘punch’ and ‘high fidelity’.

The analogue-digital debate is as old as digital recording itself. But few then — and fewer now — recognise that since its inception, the terms of that debate have echoed a much earlier one. As Greg Milner recognised, in his 2009 history of sound recording, Perfecting Sound Forever, the disputes between acoustic recording and electric were the analogue vs digital of the Edison era. It pitched the supposedly more direct, unmediated presence of the phonograph’s mechanical recording process against the electric microphones and amplification that produced what some — including Edison himself — would decry as a mere ‘volume fad’.

But the electrification of sound proved to be no fad. And listening to two different recordings of the same symphony, through a set of headphones slung from a hook near the start of the British Library’s current exhibition, it’s easy to see why. More ‘real’, more ‘direct’ it may be, but the acoustic process on display in a recording of the Großes Odeon-Streich-Orchester in 1911 clearly lacks the tonal depth and dynamic range of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Felix Weingartner recorded electrically 15 years later.