Abnormal Grooves - why vinyl is better than CDs and MP3s

I'm trolling a little with that title obviously everyone agrees that CDs and

mp3s

have

better

audio quality than

vinyl

that's not controversial but there is a way in which

vinyl

is superior to CDs and

mp3s

and that's why I still have a record collection. See, with a CD you just have a continuous track of ones and zeros, those ones and zeros are encoded as divisions on the CD and you just play with the order of the ones and zeros to create different CDs, but ultimately we have a little more freedom. a record literally starts out as a blank slate or at least a blank polyvinyl chloride plastic record or vinyl for short and you press patents on it and you can press a continuous spiral on the record like with a CD or it could be a little bit more . creative and that's why I love vinyl.

There is a rich history of people breaking away from the conventional physical form of a vinyl record, taking that blank slate and doing something different with it. Probably the most famous example has to do with the lock slot. the final resting place of the needles so you know how the record works the turntable needle rests inside the groove of the record and the record spins so the needle travels around the groove the groove spirals towards the center and the groove Locking is at the end of that spiral and I can illustrate how it works using this.

It's kind of a toy book hybrid that we bought for our daughter. It's called a wind-up ladybug, presumably because the ladybug is really annoying. I don't know and inside the book. you have these tracks and they spiral towards the center of the book, like the

grooves

on a record, so the ladybug follows the track like a needle following a groove, but look, you'll notice that the track spins and plays itself. forming a closed loop and then the ladybug just goes around and around and around at that end point and it's the same thing with a lot of groove and it's designed to protect the needle of the record because otherwise it might slide onto the sticker in the middle of the record and damage traditionally the locking slot is silent there is no audio encoded in it it's just there to hold the needle but as is known on the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper there is some audio encoded in there it's kind of a confusing loop of cacophonous sound, so if you listen to the whole album and leave it running, then that's what you fall asleep to if that's what you've done, so it's a bit, I mean, it's a bit creepy, it's actually a little bad. do it to listen if you ask me I'd play that sound for you except because it's the Beatles it's a bit complicated I think it's almost certainly fair use but it's just copyright with Beatles stuff, It's really a pain to deal with. so instead I have an album called Evol by Sonic Youth and the side has a lock beat with scrambled audio.

I never thought that, shame, you can hear a repeated sound. I'm sure it's a disk scratch or something else. The interesting thing is that the locking slot here is actually tucked against the body of the music instead of down here where you would normally find it and there's a reason for that and it's because turntables often have a feature to again protect the needle, which is that if you put it too close to the center the turntable recognizes that you've reached the end and will stop the record from spinning or lift the needle or in fact do both, so if you want someone to experience your cool lock slot , you have to keep it here.

To prevent the turntable from ending, I'll show you how it works, so on the other side you have just a normal lock slot, so it will travel towards the middle and stop before it gets there, the next icon in the collection is a little matching Monty Python handkerchief, the presumption is that you're buying a cheaper matching nangka tie and the record comes as a free gift with that, yay, it says free registration gift with anchor two and side two of the matching Monty Python tiles. combining tie nangka chief is really interesting if someone talks to you about the rhythms on a record, you can smugly correct them and say it's not a disgusting plural, its rhythms are singular, it's a single rhythm that goes around in every way, except in the case of side two of the matching Tank Chief album because it has two tracks intertwined and it doesn't say anywhere on the package that they never talked about it in their advertising or anything like that, so if you want one of the first people to get their hands on this record, It would have been very confusing because every time you lower the needle it's random which track you're going to get on that side, so let's see if we can make it work, it's actually surprisingly hard to find because, while both sides are sides to do it, it makes it a little more difficult, but if you look at the engravings, I think that's what it is, one of the codes has a B and that's the one that's a deep story that growls, backstory, let's try again, it's total possibility, so background. story ok a sketch that starts with good night mother mother and then the backstory again so it gets very confusing for people who bought this record this one has 8 on 8 woven tracks and they all contain comments fake horse racing games, naturally, so the idea is it's a game where you pick what you hope will be the winning horse before the needle drops and then each of the eight different tracks has a different winning horse, so that you expect the clue that joseon is your horse, so there's no way to know.

What tracker are they on? The interesting thing about this is that you will notice how quickly the stylus moves towards the center of the record and that is because each turn moves you eight beats forward, so all that lasted a minute or two is basically, a really tedious way to roll a dice, my favorite example of open clues actually comes from this, this is a toy from my childhood, it's a talking robot, so the idea is that it has all these cards on the back, you roll one and put it in front and there are questions on the card so the question here is where do they live and there is a picture of some pigs, then it will actually ask the question which was actually where do they live.

I know it is not the clearest and then there are multiple. choice, then the pigs live in a cot a spaceship or a pigsty, obviously a spaceship. I tried again okay so look at the pigsty and the way you're supposed to play with this toy is you're supposed to work on all the cards trying to answer the right questions but that's not how I played with the. The way I played was to try to figure out how it works. How can this toy talk like that? It predates the microchip. It's amazing so I took it apart and I said I'm not going to take this apart it's too valuable don't break it it's okay because I recently bought another one on eBay so I can show you the inside and you have all these levers and things that cause different buttons that need to be pressed on this voice box here you have these six different buttons and those different buttons choose which of the six tracks plays on a little vinyl record inside, so the toy is completely mechanical, the only thing electric it's really the motor that spins the record and even the speaker is just a cone attached to the pin like a really awesome gramophone record and since I figured out how this works I was able to make my own question cars to test my parents and they weren't questions easy. like where the pigs live, they were tough questions like where did I hide your keys and because I figured out how it works, I realized that if you change the cable, you can rewire it to talk backwards, so one thing that's really funny is that when it says "try again" if you play it backwards it sounds to me at least like it's saying murder followed by the sound of gunshots so let me see if I can get that to work for you so the first thing you need to do is play it forward, I chose the spaceship that time.

I waited, let me try again. I'm not okay and you ripped the batch right before the cycle ends and then we should put it backwards when we change the battery so that's my collection. By no means exhaustive, there is a link to a Wikipedia article in the description with a more complete list of examples of unusual groups like the record that plays inside out, with good reason having to do with the way the Classical music tends to be organized that way. read that article one last thing before you go, our radio show has received a second series, the first two episodes have already aired and are available at the link in the description if you want to listen to those two more episodes.

To go live they leave at 11:00 p.m. on Wednesdays on Radio 4, so give them a listen, one of the episodes even includes the description of unusual rhythms like the ones I've just shown you, so that's it. I hope you enjoyed this video, if you did, don't forget to listen to it. Subscribe and see you next time