| Nevertheless--well, the only thing I really care about is my new stack of vinyl, and most of it is classical. The LPs themselves are tickling every last one of my LP-fetishist nerves: they are so beautiful! All of them have nice liner notes on the back, and all of them trumpet the superiority of their vinyl’s quality over that of their competitors. (From the sleeve of Gliere’s Symphony No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 42: “Starting with the taping of the performance, through strategically placed wide-range microphones, every step in the manufacturing process is checked for peak efficiency--including an actual laboratory-calibrated playback of each disc before it is released. Not only original masters, but stamper test-pressing are required to match, in A-B tests, the tapes from which they were derived.” To which one can only say, “Dude: bitchin’.”) | |
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Their covers are triumphs of
design. Their sloganeering is simply wonderful (“Records always sound
best on COLUMBIA phonographs”). They rule like ruthless tyrants over
all the CDs around here, which don’t get me wrong are quite nice,
but which cannot hope to measure up against such a stack of goodness.
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