This is why analogue music on vinyl sounds better than anything digital

I’ve just spent over £1,000 on a new turntable. £1,299 on a Pro-ject 6 Perspex. And it is a thing of both physical and aural beauty. Here’s some blurb from a brochure,

Based on its iconic forebear, the Perspective, the Pro-ject 6 Perspex is a high-end and incredibly stylish turntable with a top-quality build and superb performance.

Everything about the 6 Perspex oozes precision and accuracy. The transparent acrylic plinth, which sits on three Sorbothane-damped aluminium cones, magnetically supports a floating sub-chassis for the platter and tone-arm. This provides a stable and anti-vibration platform and ensures smooth and detailed playback.

Fitted with a superb Pro-ject 9cc Evolution tone arm, the 6 Perspex employs top-notch components and precision engineering to deliver the very best from your vinyl collection.

Give yourself a vinyl treat with the brilliant Project 6 Perspex turntable.

Digital music, on any equipment, really does pale into pathetic insignificance when faced down by analogue perfection like this. Achingly beautiful to look at (photographs cannot hope to do it justice) and even better to listen to I couldn’t be happier with my new purchase. Next stop, new amplifier and speakers.

Crazy? Maybe, but at least I know I’m not alone in my analogue obsession.

The irony of productivity blogs

I am guilty of spending far too much time reading blogs about productivity. Most of these blogs are written by people whose only intention is to get traffic, in the form of people like me, and to sell that traffic on to advertisers. I suppose it’s a reasonably understandable pattern of behaviour and, I must admit, some of these blogs are well written and interesting, but it does annoy my slightly that my time is being wasted by the very people who are claiming to be able to help be.

GTD blogs are the worst offenders, but I’ll leave that particular frustration for another day.

Of course, I could just stop reading the blasted things but I find them strangely addictive. And therein lies the irony. Reading productivity blogs makes me less productive because it saps my time and attention when I should be working.

Other distractions are not so frustrating since they are, at the very least, honest about their intention to waste my time. If, for instance, I decide to run an Atari emulator and play Scott Adams text adventures while, in another window, I attempt to get some work done, I can’t really complain when the clock ticks five and yet another day has slipped past far too quickly.

Productivity blogs. Probably the most ironic thing the internet has delivered.

Jazz musician Ashley Morgan destroys digital music

Digital music is a bit of joke. Anyone with a pair of reasonably good ears will tell you that. But it’s always refreshing to hear a musician, in this case jazz musician Ashley Morgan, come out and stand up for analogue music but also to actively set out to smash a hole in the seemingly endless mass of digital evangelists who know everything about computers and digital junk but nothing about what is really important. Music.

Ashley Morgan has recently announced that he is destroying all of his digital music and becoming an exclusively analogue musician from this point forward. Bragging on twitter that he was nuking a series of external hard drives and removing any digital recordings, downloads, mp3s and anything else that he considered no longer worthy of his respect, permanently.

In his own words,

Analogue is real. From this point forward all Ashley Morgan music and recordings will be exclusively analogue and available on analogue formats. Vinyl and cassette only.

Well done Mr. Morgan. I applaud your attempt at making the whole world turn around and move in a different direction just because you think you are right and everyone else is wrong. I agree with you in so much as your facts are correct when you say that analogue music is real and digital music is fake. However, there is a pretty big hurdle that needs to be overcome before any real progress is going to be made here. The world has changed and the great British public have fallen in love with digital because the great British public will fall in love with whatever the marketing men tell them to fall in love with.

Ashley Morgan’s plan is to sell his music only through independent record shops. No digital music, no mp3 files, no file sharing, no digital distribution whatsoever. His argument is pretty simple, if I follow it correctly; analogue music is bought by real music lovers who are happy to pay for a superior product while digital music is synonymous with freeloading and is, partly, responsible for many of the music industries woes in recent years.

But what if you just want to listen to some Ashley Morgan music without paying first? Ashley’s answer to this is again pretty simple; go to an independent record shop and ask to listen to it.

Cynics might argue that Ashley is just playing to a willing crowd, a captive audience of analogue mavens who hang around record shops and only buy vinyl, in order to generate music sales for himself in what must be, I presume, an ever more aggressive and hard to survive in music industry.

Do I think it’s just a ploy to sell records? Maybe. But I don’t really care since I am one of those analogue mavens who things that digital music is a nasty, shabby medium that pleases no one but those hell bent on modernisation and computerisation for commercial reasons. I just wish more music, real music by real musicians, was made available on vinyl so that I could actually spend the money I have on the things that I want.

Visit Ashley Morgan and find his music at ashleymorgan.co.uk. Follow him on Twitter @B2GS3.

A saturday afternoon in 1975

A saturday afternoon in 1975

This is how it all started. An ordinary Saturday afternoon in 1975. Wrestling on Grandstand, some tea and then Doctor Who. A perfect afternoon in a perfect decade. If my memory serves me correctly my first experience of Doctor Who was Revenge Of The Cybermen, the first episode of which was broadcast on Saturday the 19th of April 1975.

It was a good day. And it marked the start of some very happy memories of some very happy times.

 Scroll to top