Let’s start on a positive note. This post marks the debut of a new logo inspired by the spine of cassette j-cards. If you’re curious about why I called my Substack Stars After Stars After Stars, you can read the story of J&H Productions in my first post “Sounds of Today.”
Design came from the very talented and meticulous Anna Barber, who convinced me to use a font that echoed handwriting instead of using an inconsistent hand-drawn scrawl. She manipulated the font and added the stars and border. The thing that sort of looks like an LP was generated by Substack’s AI tool after a “vintage vinyl” prompt.
I love the logo. Free lifetime subscription for everyone who gets a SaSaS tattoo.
The Unbearable Heaviness of Vinyl
TechHive published my guide to ripping vinyl to digital files last week. It’s meant to be an introduction for a mainstream readership, so it necessarily just scratches the surface of all the complicated issues involved.
The best way to make digital versions of your favorite vinyl is to find a CD copy and rip that if you’ve still got access to a DVD drive. Seriously, every step that follows is going to be a gigantic pain in the ass and probably won’t sound as good as a CD conversion until you’ve had a lot of practice.
Of course, not everything got released on compact disc during the CD boom. If you’ve got never-on-digital titles like obscure 45s from local bands or private-press LPs from your high school chorus, you can probably buy the $29 Behringer U-Control UCA222 USB interface to handle your analog-to-digital conversion and be happy with the files it generates.
Of course, you’ll have a learning curve with whatever recording software you use. Go for the free Audacity application and you’ll be able to create files you can burn to CD or add to your digital music library. Unless you’ve had some experience editing digital audio or video, prepare yourself for some frustration as you get a handle on the workflow.
If you’ve got a bit more money to spend and are willing to upgrade your phono preamp, the $279 NAD PP 4 is my favorite, mostly because the USB connection is on the front of the unit and you don’t have to reach around to plug in a cable when you’re ready to rip.
The Archivist’s Dilemma (Audiophile Division)
If you’re sourcing masters for a reissue project from an old vinyl copy, you’re already screwed, at least from the audiophile angle. Vinyl is a deeply flawed format, susceptible to pops and clicks, and limited to a relatively narrow audio band.
During the stereo era when recording engineers were focused on those limitations and adjusted their techniques accordingly, everyone made some incredible records that both allowed for and took advantages of those sonic limits. Let’s say that’s from around 1966-67 until 1983-84 when all the leading recordists got excited about the extra dynamic range they could capture with a compact disc and abandoned all their recording tricks that helped make vinyl sound good.
For almost everyone who’s looking to casually rip some vinyl, a good cartridge and a device that will convert to 16-bit/44.1 kHz (or 48 kHz) is going to capture everything you’re going to hear from your vinyl.
The ‘80s underground psych box set I’m working on will involve more than a few independently-released 45s with missing master tapes and no previous digital conversion for CD release. We’re going to have to master from vinyl, and that’s a frustrating situation.
Getting archive-quality results will mean deep-cleaning the vinyl and using the best cartridge and turntable I can find. I’m also going to capture everything at the best quality I can, plus making a file ripped at 16-bit/88.2 kHz (because: math) to sent to the mastering engineer who will be creating 16-bit/44.1 kHz files for CD pressing.
I’ll be using the Pro-Ject Phono Box DS2 USB to get those higher-resolution files, but I’ve got my doubts about just how much difference it’ll make. There’s only so much audio that anyone can squeeze out of vinyl. Increasing the bitrate and resolution may just be improving the quality of the ambient noise generated by the turntable and cartridge rather than finding new depths to the music.
Over the course of this project, I’ve talked to several mastering engineers and most of them are uneasy with making any definitive statements about the best way to do digital captures of vinyl playback. Not all of them are convinced that higher resolution yields any audible improvement in results.
This attitude will be heresy to the audiophiles who believe that $10,000 moving coil cartridges and $100,000 turntables have the ability to unlock previously unheard depths in their LP collection. I’m not saying that it’s impossible that those people hear something better, just that the inherent limitations of vinyl mean the law of diminishing returns kicks in a lot earlier than most people would expect. Pay 40 times as much money for a 2% improvement in sound if you want.
I’m not going to argue with who thinks they can hear the difference and can afford to spend $250,000 on an audio system. Stereo systems are much better for the environment than Lamborghinis or yachts.
Dirty Secrets of iTunes
Back when the iTunes Store first launched in 2003, the selection was limited and there were thousands of popular (or at least notable) albums missing from the site. Many of those bands were friends of mine, and some of them asked me to help figure out how to get their music up on iTunes.
What I found out was that the majors weren’t willing to spend the money to go back into the vaults to make fresh digital copies from the original master tapes for the iTunes release. Either that, or several generations of mergers meant that they didn’t really know where those master tapes were now stored. No one really knew if this digital store thing would work, so resources were limited.
I made a friend in the Universal Music catalog division who devised a workaround with me. I won’t mention his or her name, but this person no longer works there. Because of all that label consolidation, there was no longer an archive that included physical copies of each individual company’s releases.
Anyone who ever saw the incredible archive of everything ever released (including photos and press releases) at the A&M Records lot should be incredibly depressed to think about this. I know I have nightmares wondering where it all went when they cleared out the lot on North LaBrea. I know that Geffen Records looked like something out of The Road Warrior in January 1999 after everyone had cleared out for good and the remains of the label were strewn around the building at 9130 Sunset.
So, the workaround. I made 1:1 clones of CDs in my collection and made hi-res (or at least the 2003 version of hi-res) scans of the booklets and sent them to Santa Monica. A few weeks later, those albums appeared in the iTunes Store ripped from my CD copies and using my scans for the artwork.
Of course, back then Apple was selling music as 128kbps AAC files with anti-copying Digital Rights Management embedded in each file. Sourcing music from a CD created a file that was far better quality than what Apple was selling. That remained true once iTunes upgraded their files, dropping the DRM and bumping up to 256kbps AAC.
Now that Apple Music is streaming ALAC Lossless 16-bit/44.1 kHz (or better), I’d rather see everything properly remastered for streaming at higher bitrates. I’m reasonably sure those albums I sent to Universal are still streaming with upgraded files made from my cloned CDs. It’s not awful, but listeners deserve better.
Also, I can’t imagine that I was the only person involved in something like this. No one seemed to have a coherent digital strategy and anything that sounded better than the dubiously sourced tracks on LimeWire was an improvement, so customers weren’t complaining. Archival work is expensive and no one really wants to spend the money to do it right.
Goodbye, Bill
News arrived last week that record dealer Bill Allerton died at his home in London. From the early ‘90s until late in the ‘00s, Bill’s Stand Out! Records shop and Bill Forsyth’s Minus Zero Records were my favorite record buying location in the world.
Located in London just off Portobello Road on Blenheim Crescent, the tiny space had been split into two shops when the Bills decided they no longer wanted to be partners in Plastic Passion, the original store they opened in that location. They continued to operate individual stores in the tiny space, with each Bill getting his own side of the room.
I heard about the shop(s) from Geoffrey Weiss, and the two Bills always treated me like a visiting dignitary when I brought them American power pop records. Bill Forsyth always wanted anything with the vaguest connection to R.E.M. I cared far more about the obscure ‘60s psychedelic and folk records they had hiding in the back room, and they turned me on to a long list of records that I might have never known about back in those pre-internet days.
Chris Von Sneidern, who played with Flying Color in San Francisco in the ‘80s before releasing a series of solo LPs in the ‘90s, just lost his biggest fan in Bill. I never visited the store without Bill Allerton quizzing me about what I thought about Chris’ latest record and asking me incredibly specific questions about one track or another.
If you live in Europe and own an Adam Schmitt CD, it’s because Geoffrey and I brought over boxes of them and gave them to Mssrs. Allerton and Forsyth. I’m guessing they sold 100% of the copies in the EU out of their space.
As I’ve been working on this U.S. ‘80s underground psych CD box set for Cherry Red, Bill Allerton’s is one of the voices I’ve been hearing in my head as I make choices about bands to include and which songs best represent the era. I’m sorry I won’t be able to give him a copy once it’s done, but he’s going to be a huge influence on whatever it turns out to be.
Now listening
The Baseball Project - “Stuff” (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify)
This song has been rattling around in my brain since The Baseball Project headlined AthFest back in 2015. Mike Mills has given us what’s the likely to be best R.E.M. song we’re going to get at this point, and it’s a great one. Drone in the verse, stacked harmonies in the chorus, and a breathtaking resolution for the hook. Seven stars out of five.
The band finally released Grand Salami Time!, a new LP and CD that features “Stuff,” via Omnivore on June 30th. It’s the expanded version of the band, with Mike Mills and Peter Buck alongside Scott McCaughey (The Young Fresh Fellows), Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate, Gutterball, The Miracle 3), and Linda Pitmon (Zuzu’s Petals, The Miracle 3).
If you’re not into baseball, you might wonder why anyone needs a fourth album from a band that only writes songs about the history of the sport. I can testify that at least one member of the band probably knows less about baseball that you do and that he shows up every night because the songs are so good.
How the AthFest video that’s embedded above has only 612 views in eight years is a mystery to me. Are the R.E.M. message boards so dead that no one shared this song? Are there even such a thing as message boards anymore?
All five members are going on tour in August, opening with the increasingly rare Birmingham/Atlanta/Athens trifecta weekend and two runs where they play six days in a row and one that’s a full week without a break. That’s terrifying. I know we all did that back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but that seems pretty hectic for 2023.
Now reading
Andrew Cartmel - The Paperback Sleuth: Death in Fine Condition
Cartmel has written six novels in his Vinyl Detective series, which chronicles the adventures of an unnamed record dealer who develops a side business investigating murders once he dubs himself a vinyl detective, a dealer who can track down any title you might require.
The new book is about Cordelia Stanmer, a woman who deals in vintage paperback crime novels and lives in the Vinyl Detective universe, being the sister of the record dealer’s nemesis and sharing a weed dealer with one of the main characters in the previous series. She’s got some criminal tendencies, which inspire the theft that drives this book’s plot.
Cartmel is into the kind of low-stakes conflict that makes up the “cosy” genre of British mysteries. I’m more into cynical Los Angeles noir (all eras), but Cartmel has more than a passing understanding of thrift shopping and the collector compulsion.
Either a series of murder mysteries about record and book collecting immediately appeals or it doesn’t. If people killing each other over rare books and vinyl sounds interesting, Cartmel has you covered.
8-Track of the Day
Somehow, I thought 8-track tapes were solely an American thing, probably because of cars and the open road. I was wrong. Here’s an Italian copy of Some Girls with a beautiful blue shell, an adapted version of the faces included on the original die-cut LP jacket, and the amazing band across the top of the artwork.
I really want someone to write the history of 8-tracks so I can read it.