 This video was brought to you by Brilliant. Go to brilliant.org slash polyphonic to try it out with a free trial today. And if you like some of the visuals in this video, you can check out In-Print to get yourself some prints that I've made inspired by this video. There's a simple joy in tiny rituals. The act of setting a kettle is a promise of common comfort made to oneself with the turn of a dial. The crisp striking of a match is a moment of careful thought, a single-minded dedication to the age-old quest for heat. And light. The tactile joy in these rituals can't be matched by the myriad strands of haptic feedback that now plague our daily life. For all the ease that digital technology offers us, it can seldom deliver the brief dramas of tension and catharsis that play out with each of these rituals. It's those sensations that make dropping a needle on a vinyl record such an electric experience. The old cardboard smell wafting when you open the sleeve, the physical weight of music in your hand, the thousand stories contained in each bump and deformity of your collection. Vinyl records are magic. At least they are to me. I first got into vinyl in the early 2010s when the medium was just starting to inch toward its modern renaissance. My older brother was a huge fan of Jack White and started to follow third-man records, White's independent label that debuted with the motto, your turntable's not dead. So one summer our dad took his old turntable out of storage and set it up. I spent the next few months digging through old milk crates and sitting transfixed in front of speakers. I spun zeppelin loud enough to kickstart my tinnitus. I shut all the lights off and felt my heartbeat falling in sync with dark side of the moon. I blasted my dad's half-speed master of born-to-run and felt my soul escaping my body as Clarence Clemens wailed out the climax of Jungleland. The sheer quality and power of the sound floored me. The crisp and full middles and rich dynamic depth were like nothing I had ever heard before. In those days so much of the discourse around vinyl centered on the question of audio fidelity. As the argument went, the audio quality of vinyl records was far superior to that of digital files, which had to be compressed for size. And that's kind of true sometimes? The realities of audio fidelity are deeply complicated. As an artifact, a vinyl record does indeed contain more audio data than an MP3 and should give a higher fidelity sound. But that's also assuming that the record is in decent condition and that you've got a good needle to play it with, not to mention the many other things that can go wrong in a stereo system. But if you have a half decent setup and you're listening to something recorded in an analog studio, a vinyl record is about as good as you'll get short of playing the original master tapes. The only thing is that most vinyl releases these days are mastered digitally and then pressed to vinyl, which means that a lossless digital file is just as good. Unless, of course, you're playing that file through the fidelity bottleneck of Bluetooth. There's no simple answer to audio fidelity, and what floored me so much about spinning my dad's records was probably more of a reaction to the fact that I was used to listening to Pink Floyd through crappy $5 headphones. Fidelity is a great feature of vinyl records, but these days it's not even my main reason for spinning records. The joy of listening to vinyl stretches so much deeper than that. Almost all the music I listened to was either explicitly designed with vinyl records in mind, or was deeply influenced by something that was. That means the technical limitations of vinyl as a medium are baked into the very essence of what modern pop music is. In my opinion, almost all the best albums, whether created in the vinyl era or not, have a runtime of a little over 40 minutes. That number was originally created by the limits of how much sound could fit on a single vinyl record. These days there are no limitations to what an album really can be, but as Orson Welles said, the absence of limitations is the enemy of art. That 40 minute window forces artists to be cut through with their music and make tough decisions about what gets left on the floor. The result is leaner albums that center around singular themes or aesthetics, rather than sprawling outward endlessly. Of course, you can always stream these tight 40 minute albums and enjoy their mastery, but digital listening brushes over one essential aspect of an album's sequencing, the flip. Vinyl records at their best are sequenced as two chapters, each defined by a side that has its own rhythms and flows. You've got bringing it all back home's electric and acoustic divide, the side-spanning magnificence of Close to the Edge, or Abby Rhodes' legendary second side medley. When a record side ends, it forces you to sit with the music for a moment, to let the last notes linger as long as you want before diving into the second side. When you listen to Abby Rhodes without a flip, the apocalyptic tension of I Want You runs headfirst into the utopian optimism of Here Comes the Sun, without even giving you a moment to breathe. On vinyl, Fleetwood Max Rumors leaves side one with the ethereal beauty of Songbird. You've got a moment of calm and reflection before you flip and find yourself mired in the rage and tension of the chain. And there are a few flips that I've ever heard that are as powerful as dropping the needle on side two of Inner Visions, enjoying a moment of crackle and then getting hit face-first with the grooviest funk you've ever heard on higher ground. The limitations of vinyl force you to interact with the music in a richer way. As a medium, vinyl demands your attention. It encourages you to take note of the careful sequencing of songs. Listening to a record is an involved, active process. That interactive process is augmented by the sleeve. If you've watched my channel for a while now, you've probably noticed my deep and lasting love for the canvas that is Album Art. Ever since the brilliant designs of Reed Miles at Blue Note Records, album artwork has been an essential part of the music experience. It turns an album into a multimedia object, bringing artists together from different disciplines to create something that helps frame the album's themes and mood. Something that tells a story or something that gives you a window into the mind of the artist. Of course, you can always find album artwork online, but really, the experience of looking at J-Pag's just doesn't come close. Not only is the packaging of a vinyl bigger and easier to look at, there's just so much more of it. There's credits that tell you who's playing. Often there's lyrics to read along. Liner notes will give color and sometimes even narrative, and inserts can help make the record more interactive. One of my more frequent talking points lately is the way that so many digital covers fail to capture the depth of a record package. I've made entire videos on the packaging of albums like Thick as a Brick and Close to the Edge, and it's probably only a matter of time until I do something about all the riches contained in the designs of Andy Warhol or Hypnosis. Hell, even if you don't have a turntable to listen to, records are just incredibly interesting objects to own. You can personalize your covers, you can hang them on the wall as art, and there is of course an enormous collectors market around vinyl records. As far as record collectors go, I'm more on the casual end, but I still love the thrill of the hunt that comes every time you go out to expand your record collection. I will regularly walk into my local record store looking for one album that I really want and walk out with three records that I didn't even know I wanted. The content algorithms that drive our music listening today can't really capture the experience of buying a record just because you like the cover, or of pulling out a rare copy of a favorite record to show off when your friends are over. And labels like Third Man are incredible at further incentivizing this with novel approaches to record interaction. To this day, Lazaretto is still a conversation piece anytime I bring it out with its hologram animation and gimmicks like a lock groove and a double groove. That Lazaretto record was the first birthday present that my now wife ever gave to me. Every time that I break it out, it makes me think of those early days falling in love. So much of our record collection is full of stories like that. We've got plenty of records we've given each other, records we've inherited from family members, gifts given by friends. We've got records bought as keepsakes from shows and records that are paired with odd origin stories of discovery and garage sales and thrift shops. Each and every record has a life of its own, a unique story told in every hand that it has passed through. This is, of course, where I have to bring up one of my favorite art projects ever, We Buy White Albums. That collection of different copies of The Beatles' White Album shows off the myriad stories that a record sleeve can tell. These stories are made possible because physical media allows for ownership. Across all forms of media, the modern age has seen a worrying march away from the ownership of physical items. Everything has become a subscription service. And while it's fantastic to be able to listen to any song at the click of a button, that freedom could go away at any moment. And that freedom comes at the cost of genuinely supporting the artists that you love. Recording artists make fractions of a cent on each stream to play, with most of your money going to a middleman who is renting music out to you. And this model is completely collapsing creative industries. These days, musicians are forced to go on grueling tour schedules if they want any hope at making money off their music. That is, if they can even make money at all. When you're buying a record from a band you like, there's definitely still middlemen, but a much higher proportion of your money is going directly towards supporting somebody whose art has impacted your life. Of all the joys that my vinyl habit has delivered me, the richest has been simple. It's given me a unique way to share music with the people that I love. From the earliest days digging through my parents' collection to a romance told through traded records, all the way to the very night that I'm writing this video, when a good friend brought over some records as a birthday present, records have always been tied to people for me. They're the best way of experiencing the magic of music with others. I've spent many a late night reading liner notes out loud with good friends, spinning disc after disc as we talked into the wee hours of the morning. When you ask a friend to look through your record collection and pick something to put on, you're participating in a vulnerable exercise of connection and consensus. Looking through someone's collection is looking through a part of them. And when you choose what to put on from another person's collection, you've created a silent pact together in a way that is so much richer than passing an ox cable back and forth. It's a ritual that you undertake with anyone else in the room. The ceremonial dig through the shelf, the drama of the unveil, the tension as you drop the disc on the plate, and the profound release when that needle comes down. If it seems like I'm romanticizing a little bit, I probably am, but that's only because records are a deeply romantic kind of media. They are physical manifestations of the metaphysical experience that is music. Each stands as its own unique object, bearing irregularities just like its owner. As we find ourselves adrift in a sea of streaming content and choice paralysis, records can be a tether to shore. Sure, you won't always be able to find the perfect song at the perfect moment, but often you'll find yourself richer for having to search. The other night I had my sister and her kids over for dinner. My nephew has been really getting into music, discovering the same joy that I found in my adolescence, the same thirst to discover more music and to understand its stories and meanings. At one point in the evening, I turned on the turntable, pulled out my copy of Enduro, and put it on to spin. What I saw in my nephew's eyes was the same thing that I felt all those years ago when my dad first set up a turntable for me. My nephew is just one in a new generation that are coming of age with all the music in the world at their hands, but are thirsty for something more tangible. Once on the brink of extinction, records are rising from the ashes and returning to mainstream culture in ways that nobody could have predicted. In 2022, the Recording Industry Association of America reported that vinyl records sold more units than CDs. It was the first time that had happened since 1987. We are living in the vinyl renaissance, and if you're curious about it, there's never been a better time to jump in. I don't think records should be the only way you listen to music. They're certainly not the only way that I listen to music. And I don't think you have to get into records to enjoy music if you don't want to, but if it's something that you're curious about, now is the perfect time to try it out. And honestly, the more time you spend with records, the deeper your love will grow. Or at least, that's how it went for me. I've listened to music in a lot of ways over the years, but to this day, vinyl records just can't beat. A big part of the joy of vinyl records is that they harken back to a simpler time, but you're not going to get very far in the modern age, living entirely in the past. That's why I've been checking out Brilliant's course, How Technology Works. That course has been illuminating the science behind so many technologies that I've come to take for granted in my daily life. And it's all taught through simple, beautiful, interactive lessons. If you want to give it a shot, you can try it out at no cost to yourself today. 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