“Just Good Enough”

A friend who is desperate to get back to making live music has, almost unwillingly, become interested in dealing with the sound of the live shows he’s trying to promote. He is a drummer and not in any way technically inclined. [I know. That does sound like the perfect candidate for a front of house technician.] A few nights ago, we had an hour telephone conversation about his last gig, which I attended for a few moments, and his questions about what went wrong with the sound.

The short answer was “everything.”

First, there was no sound check because, as usual, the musicians spent so much time fiddling with the usual unimportant crap. There was no time to do anything more than jabber “test, test, one, two, three” into each of the four microphones to ensure they made noise before the small audience got bored (which they did anyway) and started yelling at each other (aka “bar talk”). Two, one of the three players, the keyboard player, has a very high opinion of himself and is absolutely certain the audience would rather hear him pound on his keyboard than hear the vocalist or any other sound in the room. Three, there were as many as five guys who felt the need to mindlessly tweak the EQ on the mic channels, boosting the bass and low-mids 6-12dB to add “power” to their weak performances and mediocre tone. [Yeah, I’m being a bitch. Bring it on.] The end result was a booming mess filling the room with volume and no music and an audience that paid as much attention to the musicians and music as they did the ceiling fans.

In the process of describing what should have happened, my friend and I ended up recounting the few decent musical performances we’ve experienced in our cumulative 80 years as musicians and audience members and (in my case) production experiences. As a member of the audience, I can count them on the fingers of my two hands and, it’s possible, I might have some change left over. As a musician, I am probably being egotistical in saying I might have participated in twice that many decent sounding shows (out of several hundred shows that went off of the rails). As a technician, I’m back to the 10-fingers-with-change. The problem with live music is that almost everyone settles for “good enough” because doing it right takes “too much effort.” It does take a lot of effort and, based on popular music history and trends, it might not be worth it. If only a miniscule portion of the audience cares, why bother?

Of course, that argument pretty much drives everything to be mediocre. If that is your goal, you have set a highly achievable target for yourself.

50 years ago and beyond, the only people who had an amplification system for anything other than electric guitar or bass were professionals working major venues. You did not often see or hear PA systems in night clubs, bars, restaurants, or small concert venues. You didn’t need to, either. There were two reasons for that: 1) musicians were less arrogant, they didn’t need the ego reinforcement that demanding attention by being the loudest noise in the room and 2) audiences hadn’t been exposed this this kind of abuse so they were less hearing-impaired. And, more importantly, everyone from the musicians to the audience to the bar tenders and service staff were more polite.

More than 40 years ago, my studio partner and I were asked to record a local Lincoln, Nebraska “world/jazz/folk” band, The Spencer Ward Quintet, at a local nightclub. It was going to be the band’s last performance before the band members not only left the group but they left the area in five very different directions. That put some unusual pressure on getting it right the first time. The club had an oversized pa system and my partner had designed a very high fidelity sound system that he had been developing over the past several years, but I wanted as little interference from the sound system as possible which meant minimal sound pressure and maximum directionality from that system. I decided to go with my JBL 4311 studio monitors as the FOH system and nothing but the room acoustics and stage volume from the mostly acoustic instruments for ‘”monitoring.” The band was mostly willing to try my approach and other than the bass player the instruments on stage were all acoustic: guitar, vibes, percussion, violin, and electric bass. Naturally, keeping the bass volume under control proved to be the most difficult problem through out the evening.

The audience and club more than cooperated, too. Throughout the concert, the audience (which was mostly area musicians) were almost dead quiet. During the first break, as the band members were shedding their instruments and leaving the stage, I was almost injured by a jet engine sound in my phones. I pulled the phones off and looked around, assuming something somewhere in my signal path had self-destructed, but the noise was in the room and lots of people were laughing. Turned out, the bar tenders had decided not to make any blended mixed drinks while the band was on stage and had collected every blender they could get their hands on, prepared the drinks in the blenders, and the moment the music and applause stopped hit the power switches on at least a dozen blenders. They kept refilling and emptying the blenders until the band walked back on to the stage. Then, the club went silent for the next set. Considering the limits of our technology and the fact that the only remaining copy I had of the recording was a cassette (dubbed to CD more than a decade later), I am not ashamed of this recording.

After the concert was concluded, Dan and I must have had a dozen local musicians ask how we got “that amazing sound” from the house sound system? The house system had been stacked along a wall on the stage behind the band. I used it as a rough bass trap, but it was never powered up during the concert. Everyone who asked about the system walked right past the 4311s sitting on box newel posts at each front corner of the stage. Looking back, I was lucky no one knocked them off of the posts since they were clearly invisible.

What that proved to me was that volume is more of a problem than helpful and audiences will respond to what you expect from them. I have preached that lesson dozens of times over the last 40 years and, occasionally, someone listens and the result is always better than their previous practice.

Missing the Analog Point

For the last couple of days, I’ve been enjoying Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, by Timothy Egan. It is a story about the most famous photographer of the American Indian in our history. But it is also a story about a man and his art, photography, at the beginning of that technology. When I was a kid, for a little while I was a photography geek in school. I had a few cameras, stuff that I’d found in pawn shops, from 120/620 Kodak film and a huge and beat-up Kodak Vollenda expandable camera to assorted low cost 35mm cameras. I wasn’t particularly good with the cameras (no change from today), but I was fascinated with the developing process and was fairly competent at that for a while. Music drug me away from photography pretty quickly and until digital cameras made taking pictures easy and cheap I pretty much gave up the habit.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher has a lot of detailed descriptions of the chemistry and experimental quality of the developing process that reminded me of the analog recording processes and equipment that I grew up working with and wrestled with for more than 40 years. The book made me wonder if modern analog camera fans are as clueless about the technology they use as are modern analog recording freaks? Edward Curtis was a wizard in the darkroom, creating his own developing emulsions, processes, and creating effects with chemicals, development time and temperatures, and other techniques. His gallery in McCloud, California is a national treasure as was his art. Most modern analog photographers bypass the darkroom, for good reason. The chemicals are often toxic, at best, and the processes are tedious, hazardous, and unpredictable. Sending your roll of film into a company that owns and maintains the automated processing equipment is the surest, easiest, safest way to get pictures developed. It also eliminates at least half of the art of being a photographer.

The analog recording process, at its best, is a similar mess of technologies, lots of subjective judgement, experience, tedious technologies that require constant (expensive) maintenance, and ridiculous quantities of patience. Like analog photography, the results of all of those qualities can be emulated relatively simply and predictably with digital technologies with little-to-no downside. I am not saying that those emulations are perfect and I am absolutely not arguing that an analog master can not do things in that format that might be impossible to duplicate in the digital world. I am saying that if you aren’t a master of the technology, you’re probably bullshitting yourself if you think plowing money into obsolete equipment and media is going to magically buy you something you couldn’t do better with digital equipment.

It Is Not A Victimless Crime

At the moment where the US Congresscritters are contemplating decriminalizing marijuana use and establishing “procedures for expunging previous convictions from people’s records,” I’m thinking about ways to refill the nation’s for-profit prisons with real criminals. [We can’t ask those prison-owning billionaires to suffer just because the country has decided to be slightly more just and rational.] For years, I’ve advocated several punishment for lousy live sound reinforcement. In “What I Have Learned about Live Sound” I pretty much wrapped up a lifetime experiences and suffering with amplified . . . music? (For lack of a more accurate term.) In 2013, I wrote “Weapons of Mass Destruction – Live Sound” when someone I know butchered a Robert Randolph and the Family Band’s live show so badly I haven’t bothered to listen to or buy an RR record since. “Snarky Puppy in St. Paul” described one of the most embarrassing, awful, and disappointing anti-musical experiences I’ve suffered and one that was a turning point for me in that my response was “never again” regarding all things related to that band. “Isolation from the Audience,” “Where Did the Audience Go?,” back in 2004 I wrote an article for FOH Magazine that disappeared after my friend Mark Amundson died “Loud Noises,” and way back in 1991 one of my first Wirebender Audio website essays was “Loudly Killing Live Music.” I think I have sufficiently documented my case for prosecuting the “the moron behind the sound board.” Back in 1991 I said, “The solution is simple. When you think the sound clown is wreaking your favorite national or local band, he probably is. Walk up behind him and broom his line of coke into the crowd. Smack him in the back of the head with a mid-sized brick. Kick his chair over and spill him, head first, into the mosh pit. Unplug his effects rack. Narc him to the cops. Do whatever you have to do to make his life miserable. Scare him into going back to his boombox pickup truck and out of the wonderful world of music. No punishment is too severe.”

This moment in history presents us, the members of the civilized world and music lovers world wide, an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. As the nation and even the world considers relaxing penalties for victimless crimes, we could turn to prosecuting criminals with thousands of victims who to get our punishment ya-ya’s out. Obviously, the thousands of big bank financial scammers, government officials who advocate the overthrow the government, corporate executives who have profited from decimating the environment or harming citizens with dangerous products, and anyone who betrays the public trust should be on that list. Beside that, though, what about the many “morons behind the sound board?” These violent criminals have deafened thousands of unsuspecting music lovers without suffering even civil prosecution since the early 1960s; 60 years of blatant negligent criminal behavior without even minor financial penalties.

If it were up to me, I’d just put the bastards against the wall and shoot them. Your mileage may vary, but at the last I think doing the kind of violence to music and a musical audience that I witnessed at the St. Paul Palace Theater in 2019 deserves as much jail time as a minor marijuana possession used to earn: back in the 60s, someone caught with practically any quantity of grass might expect a life sentence in toothless hillbilly states like Texas and much of the Midwest. Today, there are still parts of the country, like Minnesota  where possession of as little as 42.5g (1.5oz) gets a 5 year, $10,000 sentence. And if you don’t think those nutty laws are still being applied, you’re nuts. I especially like the idea of applying the three-strikes “mandatory 25-years imprisonment for repeated serious crimes” to live sound goobers. Like I said, in 1991, what’s the worst that happens if idiots suddenly don’t want to do the job because of the risk? If no one ever touched a live sound board again, music would be the primary beneficiary.

This Is How Stage Monitors Are Supposed to Work

Back in 2015, I was a regular volunteer back stage at the Red Wing Sheldon Theater. Initially, I did volunteer work pretty much the same way I’d worked paying gigs for the previous 40-some years. I’d show up for the unloading and setup and stand around back stage out of the way until the show was over and be there for the tear-down and load-out, staying until all of the cables were wrapped and put away and the stage and theater were swept up and ready for the next show. Almost like a theater employee, except without a paycheck. I don’t have any idea how many shows I worked, but it was a lot for the first 2-3 years we lived in Red Wing.

One of the weird things about volunteering is that most of the people who get paid to do these things are often way too impressed with themselves and they act as if they are granting you a favor in letting you do the grunt work. I’d run into that often long before I retired and was pretty much on a hair-trigger, ready to escape quickly on the first signs of that attitude when we moved to Red Wing. My tolerance for bullshit from “kids” (anyone 20 years younger than me or more) has slowly vanished with experience over the last 20 years. Lucky for me, the Sheldon’s Production manager, Russell Johnson, is not that kind of manager. As a professional lighting guy and stage manager, Russell actually appreciated my audio experience and as a result I got to do some really fun shows and escape the stuff I usually don’t like about live music: often that includes the actual live performances. My habit, after a few months of establishing myself as useful, was to stick around through setup and the sound check and if the sound check was a typical noise-producing disaster, I’d sneak out the back stage door and call it a night. Live music rarely gets better as the evening proceeds and if the band and/or sound goober are deaf at the beginning they will only be much worse a few minutes into the show. Been there, done that for decades. Don’t have any reason to suffer through it again. And Russell was fine with that.

I’ve been an Arlo Guthrie fan since the Alice’s Restaurant days, the record and the movie. So, when the Sheldon booked Arlo in 2015 I signed up to be part of that crew. The initial setup was pretty straight forward with the band bringing most of the gear they needed flushed out with some of the Sheldon’s backline and stage equipment. The sound check started off with the band, which included his kids—Abe and at least one of his daughters—doing what bands usually do with a sound check: making individual monitors and mixes as loud as possible. I’d pretty much decided not to stay for the show at that point.

After a bit of the usual musical ego-pumping, Arlo came out, moving to his mic at the front of the stage and listening for a bit. A few moments of that and he asked to have all of the monitor sends cut so he could hear the FOH mix. He had some suggestions for Russell about the house mix and asked for a bit of his voice and guitar added to his stage monitors. After he was satisfied, he turned to the band and said, “That’s good for me. You can do anything you want with your monitors as long as I don’t have to hear it.” And that is the way you manage stage volume. After Arlo’s sound-check moment, I decided to see if I could stay for the show and Russell let me find a SRO spot on the 2nd balcony where I could hear and see the show. It was terrific, musically and sonically.

After that, I had a spectacular experience with Leo Kottke at the Sheldon, a terrific evening hanging out with Buckwheat Zydeco, an excellent Ladysmith Black Mambazo show,  and a couple of weirdly fun experiences with the Southeast Tech “Strings, Winds & Brass” shows in 2016 & 2017. Eventually, general disappointment in amplified live music plus some conflicting opportunities working with Hobgoblin Music and the Crossings in 2016 and 2017, ending with a show with one of my all-time favorite live performers, Peter Mayer at the Crossings, convinced me it was time to hang up my live music tech shoes.

My days of lugging heavy equipment are in the past. I don’t need to injure myself doing stuff I would just as soon avoid (I’m talking to you, Elvy. I don’t need to rupture anything lugging giant pots full of weeds around the yard and house, either.) and 99% of amplified live music is at lest 50% distortion, 40% crappy mix, and rarely more than 10% music. I’ve seen everyone I have ever wanted to see and a few of them were even worth seeing. Almost nobody is worth what it costs to see them in concert today. Snarky Puppy put the last nail in that coffin in 2019. A lifetime of seeing most of the big name bands when labels were subsidizing tours and tickets were rarely more than $10, working shows and getting paid for being there, getting free concert tickets as an industry perk, and being invited backstage by someone in the band or the touring company has probably given me a severely devalued outlook on what live music is worth. But I’m glad I was there on those few occasions when everyone involved was more concerned with the music and the audience. Those are the shows I remember best.

A Sign of Either Obsolescence or Irrelevancy

Gibson’s ad for their “new” (to them) “Player Port” design is freakin’ hilarious. "The Player Port is an original Gibson concept from the early 1960s that has been refined by our acoustic luthier team to deliver a truly revolutionary sonic improvement that adds a new dimension to the sound. The Gibson Player Port allows you to hear the guitar as you're playing it as you've never heard it before—the same way your audience hears it—maximizing the sonic impact for an immersive playing and listening experience." There are so many things wrong with the claims in this ad, I’m not even going to bother starting ticking them off.

There are almost an infinite number of luthiers and many guitar manufacturers who have been advocating side ports for decades. Almost all of them do it better and with more science, style, and art than Gibson. Some examples:

Do a Google search on “acoustic guitars with a side port” and you’ll be overwhelmed at the number of guitar designers who have been working with this design for decades while Gibson just kept craping out the same old junk.

A Bad Fit?

In 2014, I wrote about my search for a decent sounding, reliable acoustic travel guitar in “Proof in Pudding.” The guitar I settled on was the Composite Acoustics Cargo with the LR Baggs pickup. At the time, I wrote “I am more than satisfied with my Composite Acoustics Cargo electric and expect to be playing this guitar for years.” and a few years later, when I swapped my Black Sunburst Cargo for a friend’s red Cargo, I wrote the “Cargo is so much my go-to guitar” that it mostly lives at a spot in our home where I can immediately grab it on any inspiration. If I were forced to keep just one of my guitars, it would be the Cargo. I love playing it, it sounds wonderful, and it is durable in all of the best ways: it is practically weather-proof, stays in tune, and has (unfortunately) taken a bit of beating and survived unblemished. 

Peavey stills displays the CA line on its website. But if you try to look at any of the CA guitars, you’ll see that every model is tagged “item is discontinued.” A couple of years ago there were a few demonstrators and seconds still on the CA website, but they are long gone now. The consensus is that Peavey over-estimated their ability to sell a premier instrument and has abandoned the Composite Acoustics guitars. I can’t find any official notice of that, but dealers don’t have new stock and their big dealers like Sweetwater and Guitar Center no longer list CA instruments in their online catalogs. Used CA instruments sellers have been slowly raising their prices and expectations for the past 3-4 years until asking prices for those instruments are in the collectors’ territory: $3,500-8,000.

The original vision for Composite Acoustics was ahead of its time. The pre-Peavey instruments were, at their best, some of the most amazing custom instruments every built by anyone. The technology invested in that manufacturing process and the training and skills demonstrated by CA employees is just incredible. There might not ever be another instrument maker as advanced and quality oriented as was that original California company. It’s worth your time, if you are interested in guitar construction, to watch the CA manufacturing videos from the early 2000s: “Updating the CA Story.”

I hate that this incredible experiment is over, but I am glad I slithered in while the window was still open and I own two of their incredible instruments—an electric Cargo and an early-edition OX—and I love ‘em both.

Is It Still A Record?

The other day I was talking to a friend about the recording process I’ve experienced in the past and what I’m doing today (mostly with Logic X as my DAW and composition tool).  We talked about recordings I liked and I went to my laptop where all of my CDs have been ripped to MP3s and played a few “records” for him to demonstrated some of our points in the conversation. I also   I kept calling them “records” throughout the conversation and realized, every time I used the word, that I was not being accurate calling these things “records” if every one was once a CD and is now an MP3 file on my computer. Vinyl, most of these songs never were in any noticeable quantity.

Then, I thought, “It is a record.”

One of the several definitions Webster’s finds for the word is, “a piece or collection of music reproduced on a phonographic record or on another medium, such as compact disc.” While the objects I’m referring to are definitely not “a thin plastic disk carrying recorded sound, especially music, in grooves on each surface, for reproduction by a record player,” one of the other definitions Webster’s lists for the word, they are certainly a record of a moment in time while also being a recording of a moment (or many moments) in time. Music recorded, played back, and stored in any format, sequence, or packaging (or not) is a recording and a digital or analog “record.”

Obviously, this was nothing more than a minor verbal skirmish with myself and an innocent bystanders (who was not harmed in any way) about words and their context and meaning. Justifying the word in my own mind just makes conversations about music a little less complicated.

What Do We Own?

On a Facebook group I occasionally follow, a high school music production teacher wrote, “high school kids... they don’t buy music...they stream it. They don’t watch TV... they stream it... they don’t own anything... it’s $4.95 a month for this...and $9.99 a month for that... they are consumer nomads...” And some other stuff about what young people don’t care about, like in-depth synth programming, spending big money on a traditional DAW, music sales, and some aspects of traditional songwriting that may or may not be history. Without making any comments on this “teacher’s” literacy and familiarity with punctuation, it was food for thought.

At the opposite end of that kind of “consumer nomad,” is an old friend of mine who is so tied to his possessions that they are drowning him economically, socially, spiritually, and psychologically. Like a lot of the late-Boomers, he has some spare residual of the 60’s ethic but he has also clung to a lot of the 80’s materialist garbage and that creates a serious internal dichotomy. He has “collections” of everything from microphones to CDs (which he anally duplicates on to a huge hard drive system) to weird furniture to Eurotrash cars to tools he never uses to godknowswhatelse. Listening to him talk about his inability to clean up his act is one of the most painful things I have ever suffered. [And I have busted some large and small bones and had a collection of ailments and injuries that most people would qualify as “really painful.”] If he were moderately rational about his hoarding, he would at least build himself a House on the Rock in which to store it all. Of course, that would be a fairly outright admission of total insanity.

At this juncture in our semi-capitalist society, owning stuff seems more risky than worthwhile. Maybe owning a home (I mean owning a home, not renting one from a bank with a mortgage.) might be a fair gamble, but even that is risky depending on climate disasters, economic and political instability, and other hard-to-assess or foresee risks. Owning things like a CD or DVD collection makes no sense. Just look at the vast piles of cheap CDs and DVDs found in a 2nd hand store in practically every city in the world. They resell by the pound, or ton, in most places. Music is fungible, at best. Popular music is absolutely a commodity in every sense of the word. So much so that even the experience of a major concert holds about as much permanent space in your memory as does a business trip to

I admit that I am an unreformed hippy. For most of my life, one of my economic goals was to never own more than I could cram into a Ford E150 van and move cross country in one trip. Ideally, there would be room for me to sleep in that packed van, too. The fact that “the farm owns the farmer” holds true for most of the crap the rest of us collect and cling to. Possessions we don’t use are still there, taking up room, requiring some kind of maintenance, reminding us of our lost dreams, and taking their toll.

Owning stuff has a price. Having visited a few Millennial apartments I’d have to question their actual commitment to some kind of anti-consumer ideal. Four out of five of those apartments were crammed with crap from floor to ceiling and barely managed a narrow path from one necessary apartment function to another. Just because the stuff you collect is worthless doesn’t mean you aren’t materialistic. It just means you have bad taste.

But I totally get the few who realize that experiences are more valuable than stuff. Looking back over my own life, I can remember all sorts of things I once owned and thought were important that I lost, sold, or gave away. I don’t miss any of them and I’m still trying to figure out how little of what I own I can keep and still be satisfied. I have a poor memory, which might be a blessing, but the things I clearly remember are the experiences I had with people, some of those things, and places. Places more than anything, it turns out.

I can almost forget the nearly total misery of owning a Volkswagen Eurovan while remembering the smallest details of stepping out of my Winnebago Rialta into a cool, dry, clear New Mexico morning. I can look at a picture I took of myself several miles off-pavement in Utah with a flat tire on my motorcycle and no centerstand and fondly remember using rocks to prop up the bike while I pulled the wheel, repaired the tire, and backtracked to the highway. I know there was a lot of misery in that episode, but I mostly remember the feeling of independence when I rescued myself. I remember a few of the failures when I was learning guitar construction techniques, but I can instantly recall the pleasure of making an unplayable instrument into something a friend still plays fondly. Stuff (“your shit, my stuff”), including recorded music in any format, is easily replaceable. Today’s stars are tomorrow’s “where are they now?” stories. Maybe the music of your childhood brings back wonderful or terrible memories, but the memories are there with or without the music. Or, like me, you condense 73 years into about 40 minutes of stories and carry on.

Confusing the Facts and Confusing Facts

 In my never-ending drive to eliminate unused bullshit from my life, I’ve been trying to sell an old, unused Sony turntable for the last month. Today, a buyer came and took it away. A super-nice guy who has taken up hobby electronics as a COVID distraction and who has an intimidating “collection” of 1960-1970s audio equipment. What he calls “warm” sounding is what audio techs and producers called solid state “harsh” and what electronic engineers know is “slew and IM distortion.” His description of post-70s consumer audio gear was “clinical” or “transparent.” (Who knew transparent amplification was a bad thing?) Of course I’ve heard these arguments from guitar players and equally weird and undefined stuff from audiophiles for decades. I would have never thought 70s Japanese audio equipment would become desirable. I am not making a claim for any sort of audio clairvoyance, though. Similarly, I didn’t think 50’s juke boxes would ever be worth anything, so I probably tore apart at least 100 of ‘em for the tube power amps and tossed the rest of the bits into my local garbage dump.

Then my buyer dumped a bit of marketing information on me that I had to look up later, “Last year [2020], vinyl outsold CDs. You know what? That is true. “Vinyl has emerged triumphant in the physical format war, overtaking CD sales [on a monetary basis] for the first time in over 30 years.” The key phrase here is “physical format,” which are CDs, vinyl, cassettes (yep, they still exist), and a tiny portion of other assorted formats like reel-to-reel tape. Vinyl sales have doubled from $333.4M (2015) to $619.6M (2020). That might seem impressive, except total physical music sales fell by $413M in that same period and the RIAA reports that music industry revenues went from $6.7B (2015) to $12.2B (2020) in the same period. For instance, CDs sales went from 1.4B in 2015 to 483M in 2020. Another way of looking at that data is to say total physical media revenue fell from 5% to about 4% in that 5 year period.

Even more interesting is that the industry’s peak physical revenue year was 1999 when total physical revenues were $31.8B; or 513 times the 2020 physical media revenue, CDs produced 13.2B in revenue in 2000 and declined rapidly from that point to today with a string of billion-dollar declines per year until the sales were close to what they are today. So, this is a kind of “triumph” that most industries would like to avoid. Inflation-adjusted (see the above graph), you can get an even more dramatic view of how far the mighty CD and LP have fallen since their peak years of 1977 (for the LP) and 1999 (CD).

So, the increase in vinyl album sales is only impressive if you focus on physical media sales, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea for independent music producers. Sometimes clinging to a chunk of a vanishing niche that still has customers with money is a good idea. Since the top 1% of music entertainment earners are raking in about 80% of the total revenue, the scraps that are left to the 99% are going to be very slim pickin’s and that is when niche marketing is most effective.

A problem with this focus is that this kind of revenue isn’t going to inspire manufacturers to build turntables or phono cartridges, which means NOS (new old stock) is going to become more valuable and the replacement parts and products will come from more dubious sources (low end Chinese manufacturing, for example). That might cause NOS turntables and cartridges to temporarily increase in price,

Non-technical audiophiles, like Tony Villar, claim “Vinyl, on the other hand, is a lossless format. The pressings are made directly from the masters and contain all the detail artists intended. This is why vinyl sounds better than digital and the main argument to why the vinyl format has the better sound quality.” That sort of stuff makes old school folks like me chuckle. Every step of the analog recording process is a loss-filled mess. Tape decks, pro or not, have substantial low and high frequency distortion components and frequency and phase compromises. Tape playback requires high gain, moderate distortion amplification and the older (1960-80’s) solid state tape electronics was a gross collection of slew distortion, intermodulation, and harmonic distortion errors that only the mostly-deaf could call “warm.” Tube electronics are even more distorted. Vinyl records are a freakin’ train wreck of compromise. Because the needle can’t track large excursions or move quickly (to reproduce high frequencies, for example), the 1954 RIAA equalization standard provides “emphasis” on recording/printing/stamping (analog compression) which requires “de-emphasis” (de-compression of sorts) on playback (by your phono preamp). There is nothing about that process that could be described as “accurate” or “warm” or or any other positive value.

The one thing LPs definitely have over CDs and virtual media is the “tactical experience.” You get a decent sized piece of art with a 12” LP. Turns out, that is a major part of the attraction to younger people. Once they have experienced the hassle and crackle-and-pop disappointment of listening to a record, the records go back into the sleeve and the package becomes the thing. Since they don’t have a lot of records, what they have becomes wall art. That means the buyers are buying another $20-50 mounting device for their $20-50 LP. That sort of makes sense, but with cheap high quality color printers I’m hard-pressed to understand why you wouldn’t just download the album art and print that? In Villar’s article, he even explains how to use a shareware program to digitize your vinyl. WtF? So, it’s obviously not about the listening experience. If I didn’t know how inconsistent humans are, I’d be confused.

My buyer admitted that COVID boredom was a big driver in his very recent interest in analog music reproduction. In fact, it sounded like he had collected more stereo equipment than records. One of his big self-selling points was that older stuff is “repairable.” He had a very specifically oriented bias against the “throwaway products” of modern electronics. Yet, he tested the accuracy of my turntable’s drive system with the most expensive, newest iPhone; the ultimate throwaway product in modern history. Again, humans are never bothered by contradiction.

How Much Music Do We Need?

I admit that I am old and, maybe, my life and generation (and the generations I’m most familiar with) might not be relevant to our offspring. However, this is my observation, buying music seems to be an overt act of conspicuous consumption and, often, pretty much a pity purchase. The existence of oldies radio stations and radio playlists indicates that our appetite for new music is pretty small. The fact that anyone can argue that there was or is a “golden age of pop” simply because that music coincided when that person was entering puberty, first got laid, or experienced some other childish moment that the music commemorates in their mind is a pretty good indication that it doesn’t take much for most of us to get a belly full of all the music we will ever need to hear.

The only people that sometimes isn’t true for are musicians. And I do mean sometimes. There certainly are a lot of musicians, especially old guys, who are still playing the same damn Beatles’ songs they played when they were 15 and there are similar characters in every generation from before Boomers to Gen-Zs. Some people are just tied to the moment when they discovered their genitals, musically and otherwise. But many musicians “collect” all sorts of music over a broad band of periods because of a variety of good reasons.

All of that, though, mostly proves my point and explains why so many unheard musicians and songwriters are likely to remain unheard. According to Music Business Worldwide, 60,000 tracks are added to Spotify alone EVERY DAY. Or one-song-per-second, approximately. The chances that a measurable fraction of that output will ever be heard by 5 people at the same time are next-to-nil. This is nothing like the early FM radio days when odd, original, non-mainstream, inventive music was played late at night when most everyone was fast asleep. This is a brave new world of tossing your pearls into the ocean and hoping to not just hit a scuba diver but to hit Bill Gates scuba diving and have the pearl be large enough that he notices it.

Musicians regularly pat themselves on the head claiming that “music is not a luxury,” and while that might be true for the musician it is clearly in the commodity territory for everyone else. We don’t need the latest, newest, most trendy version of what we’ve had our whole lives. Mostly, we want (not need) to hear the same old songs, sung the same old way. That means whatever you might hope, as a musician, nobody needs what you’re doing right now . . . except you.