How does ’80s vinyl compare to new releases?

Posted by Daniel Stout on Wed 1 Aug 2007 at 9:34 PM

In some respects, the past 10 or 15 years have been a golden age of vinyl. While the majority of mainstream artists no longer release their albums on vinyl, many of the artists I care about still release vinyl editions of their albums. This ranges from Stereolab to Smashing Pumpkins to Of Montreal to Interpol and many, many others. Also, the vinyl editions being released are lush. Often they are in gatefold sleeves with artwork not found in the CD version. Vinyl has turned into a cost-is-no-object format, and when the graphic designers are asked to produce for the vinyl edition, they go all out.

That said, I’ve got a couple of pet peeves with newly released vinyl. I came of age in the ’80s and early ’90s. It was a time when the CD was just gaining traction. Record labels are reissuing a lot of old albums on vinyl, and I must say I’m pleased as punch when I can go to the local record shop and pick up a bright, shiny, new copy of Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction on vinyl for $10.

The first pet peeve is price. Prices vary widely on new vinyl. There’s a lot of stuff that can be had for $14 or $15, but some record labels seem to think that vinyl being a niche product that they should charge for the privilege. So some new records run $24 or more. The $24+ vinyl doesn’t seem to be of any higher quality than the $15 vinyl, but for some reason they think they can charge more for it.

The other pet peeve about new vinyl is that because of the advent of CDs, recording sessions have lengthened. In the ’80s an album typically came in around 42-45 minutes long. That fit nicely onto two sides of vinyl. Now with CDs going as much as 80 minutes, there’s an opportunity to spread these things out a bit.

Unfortunately, the record companies have dealt with this since the early ’90s by releasing the vinyl edition on four sides of vinyl. There are a few occasions when this makes sense – when a CD nears the 80 minutes mark, it works perfectly to split the album up to two records. But most CDs are only slightly above what a single record will hold. A 50-minute CD split onto 4 sides of vinyl is painstaking. What you have is a record that has only two or three songs on each side. It’s hard to sit back and enjoy the music when you’re flipping records every 8 or 10 minutes.

The solution to this is simple: leave one side of the vinyl unprinted. That is, either split the album equally over three sides of vinyl, or alternatively, fit as much of the album on one record and leave the spillover to the third side. I know that might shake up some people in terms of the ordering of a record, but let’s face it: ordering a CD to fall over four sides of vinyl, when it’s only 50 or 60 minutes long, is an abysmal decision.

So those are my two pet peeves about new albums on vinyl: high pricing on random albums and spreading one album over four sides of two discs.

But I will be the first to admit that these don’t stop me from enjoying the fresh bounty of vinyl out there. Like I said, the vinyl being put out these days puts a lot of the ’80s vinyl to shame. The quality of new vinyl is the highest it’s ever been. These are records that will last decades.

Okay, and as a bonus for those of you still reading, I did have one pet peeve with vinyl in the late ’80s. At the time, record companies were trying to get people switched over from cassettes and records to CDs. So in some cases, they offered a bonus track on the CD that wasn’t available on the LP or cassette. Usually that missing track ended up on a 12” single from the album, so in only a few cases I went without that track because I was a fastidious record collector back in the day. Now it’s come back around the other way – for example, the recent Of Montreal album Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? on vinyl came with 4 (four!) extra songs. That was a great use of four sides of vinyl. Awesome!

Tags: 80s · lp · records · reissue · turntable · vinyl

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