Discover the Analog Collection, celebrating technology and objects from a pre-digital world. From media to everyday tools, these items reflect how people connected and created in a more tactile era.
In recent years, there has been a noticeable trend of people rediscovering and embracing analog recordings and equipment, such as vinyl records, cassette tapes, reel-to-reel and movie film. What are the reasons behind this resurgence of analog sound?
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion that can influence people’s preferences and choices. Many people who grew up listening to analog recordings have fond memories of the music and the devices that played it. They may associate analog sound with a simpler and happier time in their lives, or with a particular genre or artist that they love. For these people, analog recordings and equipment offer a way to reconnect with their past and relive their experiences.
Aesthetics is another factor that attracts people to analog sound. Analog recordings and equipment have a distinctive look and feel that appeal to many people’s senses and tastes. For example, vinyl records have a physical presence and weight that digital files lack. They also have unique artwork and packaging that can be displayed and collected. Similarly, analog equipment has a retro and elegant design that can enhance the appearance of one’s home or studio. Some people also enjoy the ritual and process of playing analog sound, such as flipping or rewinding the tapes, or adjusting the knobs and dials.
Quality is the third factor that motivates people to choose analog sound over digital sound. While digital sound has many advantages in terms of convenience, storage, and accessibility, some people argue that it cannot match the warmth, richness, and depth of analog sound. Analog sound is said to capture the nuances and details of the original performance more faithfully and naturally than digital sound, which can be compressed, distorted, or filtered. Unfortunately this is completely false.
Digital recordings, contrary to the myth of producing a ‘stair-stepped’ waveform due to sampling, actually capture and reproduce sound with greater precision and clarity. Modern digital technology can accurately represent continuous waveforms, debunking the idea that it inherently leads to quality loss. Digital formats also offer better consistency, dynamic range, and frequency response, making them technically superior in accurately preserving audio quality.
Silver Faced Stereo
I discovered that much of what I liked in the early 80’s is now considered vintage and collectible. Engineering excellence disappeared from the mainstream of hi-fi equipment about the time that everything changed from silver to black in the mid 1980’s. The silver era was defined by large heavy boxes with knobs and switches for every imaginable feature. The marketplace evolved into slimmer boxes that you threw away when they stopped working.
Large boxes, heavy transformers, and big handles made this the high point of the silver era. Components were very feature heavy and had knobs and switches for every possible feature that the engineers could think of. It was also the high-water mark for processors, boxes such as expanders and equalizers that helped restore the live experience that recorded music was missing.
Equipment
Records
My brother and I tried several turntables settling on direct drive units from Pioneer with Ortofon moving coil pickups. These turntables don’t exhibit any rumbling from being driven by a belt looped around a high speed motor. The motor is directly connected to the platter with its speed being easily and precisely adjusted using a built-in gyroscope for calibration. You could also stop and reverse the rotation with a finger to cue the beginning of a cut (song) releasing it at the precise moment desired. This didn’t require the use of a slip disc commonly used at the time. The premium cost came from the pickup (AKA: cartridge). The best fidelity is achieved by using a small coil of wire rather than a magnet to sense the vibrations from the record. The coil of wire has virtually no mass so that it reproduces all the subtleties or the original recording. There are three downsides: cost, fragility and the extremely weak signal that it produces. Ortofon cartridges use a diamond stylus and an outboard transformer to condition the signal.
Records are pressed from master disks. The fidelity of records is limited by the number of intermediate generations between the original recording and the final pressed vinyl. Individual records are further compromised by the number of times the master was used prior to pressing a particular copy. Both of these can be minimized by purchasing a direct to vinyl recording. The recording is created using a lathe to cut the grooves into raw vinyl directly from the source – usually the master tape – thereby eliminating the manufacturing process of using masters to press copies. I have a couple of these records but quite frankly even with an Ortofon moving coil pickup it was difficult to detect any appreciable improvement in fidelity – especially for the ridiculous cost of such recordings. Back in the day it would be blasphemous to make such a statement, but today it speaks loudly about how robust the manufacturing process for pressing records really was.