Vinyl LPs Make You a Better Parent?

[Mandolin Picker]

To my surprise, this article was found on the web site of a local radio station (a news only station) here in the Washington DC area.

 

"If you’ve ever debated getting rid of your record collection because the music is available online, you may want to consider this: That collection could make you a better parent. Even music fans who haven’t had a working turntable in decades can benefit by holding onto their vinyl. Most of us remember flipping through our parents’ LPs and singles and asking questions about music we liked, or album jackets or 45 sleeves that caught our attention."

 

 

The idea behind the article is that by looking at the album covers and all of the 'stuff' that LPs have with them (besides just the music) can spark conversations between parents and their children. The rest of the article (its not long) is at http://wtop.com/music/2016/04/keeping-record-collection-make-better-parent/. The comments are also interesting.

 

So what do you think? Is this another piece of the puzzle as to why there has been a surge in the interest in vinyl over recent years?

 

[blue2blue]

So what do you think? Is this another piece of the puzzle as to why there has been a surge in the interest in vinyl over recent years?

 

Sure.

 

If there's been one thing a wide variety of people have said they miss about the LP paradigm it's the big jackets with cover art and (sometimes) liner notes and or other photos (and even more in gatefold albums).

 

 

I get the tea ceremony angle (and I was someone who was pretty religious about always cleaning disks and the stylus) but I don't miss that. I certainly don't miss the sonic limitations (or the expense one had to go to to milk a little extra fidelity out of an extraordinarily compromised format and not grind one's records to a scratchy noise bed).

 

And I do love the excellent convenience of having all the music I like to listen to (including my own uploads from my own collection that aren't in streaming) available in one reasonably well-featured application with a reasonably good search engine (that search engine was kinda crappy when I first joined the service, which surprised me, since it's Google Music -- but it got a lot better; that said, they still need to fix up their classical taxonomy -- but that's an industry-wide problem.)

 

 

 

But, oh, yeah, I do miss big art, proper credits, and info about the music and the artist.

 

And, for sure, as more classic albums get re-released by third party licensers, much or all of that is typically lost. (It was often that way with budget vinyl re-releases, too, of course.

 

But as it's become easier to license past work as well as get it into online distro, we've seen an explosion of truly shabby release packages.

 

 

For instance, BOTH volumes of the Swingles' Jazz Sebastian Bach I find in streaming are, rather bizarrely, misspelled as Jazz Sebastien Bach! (A release of one on a different label gets it right -- but also for some reason, used ham-fisted restoration software that mangled the sound. The same tracks on the other release sound fine. The original tapes were hissy because they did a lot of ping-ponging. But nothing that would require wiping out the high end completely.)

 

Anyhow, the titles are correct on the album graphics but the titles they entered when uploading the files were just wrong. And that's on both Google Play Music as well as Spotify -- it is the LABEL that couldn't even spell the title of the album correctly!

 

(They even spelled the ARTIST name correctly right under misspelling 'Sebastien' in the titles! A lot of these labels just don't seem to care enough to get stuff right. It's only music after all, right? Most of these projects cost the equivalent of tens of thousands -- sometimes hundreds of thousands -- of dollars -- but now they are at the mercy of tin-eared, can't-type record label drones.)

 

 

Of course, with no industry standard for 'liner' info (yet), there's no way for stream providers to do much more than link to info from Wikipedia (AllMusic seems to be collapsing but it was once a reasonable-enough-if-highly-uneven resource). And that's a drag.

 

But beyond that, many of these labels manifest their utter disregard for the music and the listener by releasing albums with gross errors (like identifying a track by Ella Fitzgerald as by Billie Holiday -- on a 'compilation' album that only contained those two singers -- in other words, the people putting it together didn't even LISTEN to it or pay attention as they were typing in the artist names.

 

Or by releasing HIDEOUS remasters. I've notice a really disturbing tendency for the release of classic tracks from the 30s and 40s with ham-fisted noise reduction that makes everything sound muffled and underwater. A couple days ago I played a version of "September Song" by Django Reinhardt that was so clumsily 'fixed' that they'd scraped away virtually all the HF content -- taking Django's guitar right with it. It sounded like a 5" speaker under a few layers of horse blanket. Fortunately, there were a number of other versions of the same recording and the next one I tried sounded like a scratchy old 78. While I've heard some excellent and technically amazing restorations, it appears most of these tin-eared drones just use some crap single-ended noise reduction software like you might have bought in the $20 bin at the old CompUSA.

 

 

All that said, I think if parents just talk about the music they like, what they like about it, if it's an older work, how it fits into recent history, from cultural to political, I think that can go a long way.

 

I mean, by and large, the old records sitting around my house were 78's...

 

And, with only rare exceptions of boxed albums (78's, of course, were essentially singles), those 78s had little more info on them that comes up in Spotify -- artist name, title of the work.

 

But after I stepped on one of my dad's favorite 78s -- I was surprised to find something so heavy was so easily breakable -- I was restricted to the vinyl LPs for a few years.

[MikeRivers]

I have a friend with a pretty decent vinyl collection. When his kids were about 8 and 10 years old, he decided that digitizing his records would be a good father-and-son project. So he'd let them pick out a few albums and for a couple of hours on a weekend afternoon, they'd sit down and listen to the albums together while he recorded them to a hard drive. That lasted a couple of years. Now his kids are 16 and 18 and he barely made a dent in the digitizing project, but he and the kinds enjoyed listening to "Daddy's music" together. I'd say that was being a good parent.

[Anderton]

I think if you're have so little communication with your kids you have to invent reasons to have communication, you have bigger problems that what to do with your vinyl collection.

[MikeRivers]

I think if you're have so little communication with your kids you have to invent reasons to have communication' date=' you have bigger problems that what to do with your vinyl collection.[/quote']

 

Sorry you didn't get my point. Or were you referring to something else?

[Phil O'Keefe]

I think he was just giving his thoughts about the topic in general and wasn't referring to your story specifically Mike.

 

I do think that being able to share music and have discussions about it across generations is a good family activity, but I'm not convinced it requires vinyl. I had tons of talks with my parents and grandparents about music and various artists over the years, and while some were based on vinyl, as many, or more were prompted by stuff we heard on the radio / stereo in the car.

 

Music is rather unusual in that it can be both very personal and very social. With the demise of commercial radio and advent of the personal player that is limited to single individuals at a time (earbuds) the social aspect of it has taken a few hits in recent years IMO. The vinyl experience can maybe give some of that back, but so can any speaker-based playback system, at least to some degree. You may not have the large artwork and so forth that vinyl gives you, but the shared musical experience is the main thing that matters IMHO, not the packaging or even the playback medium / format.