Quality control

A thread on the Isthmus Daily Page Forum praises vinyl records, and that got me to thinking: as I mentioned here, I recently was browsing some issues of Rolling Stone from about 1982, and I was struck by how extensively the magazine covered audio hardware then, including turntables and cartridges. But I also was struck by story after story about how poorly manufactured LPs were at the time. Record stores reported that more and more people were returning records in signficant numbers, because they skipped or otherwise sounded awful. This amazes me; I don't think I've ever returned a CD because of poor manufacturing. But some records I bought in the 1980s and early 1990s definitely had problems. My LP of Elvis Costello's Spike (1989) is all but unlistenable, for example. I think one reason the quality got so bad is that in the early 1980s, record companies began making LPs with as little plastic as possible. This was to save money, which was in dwindling supply what with the recession, the post-disco slump in record sales and the high cost of petroleum after the late 1970s energy crisis.

I wonder if the industry would have shifted to CDs as quickly and thoroughly as it did if consumers hadn't been fed up with shitty records. Audiophiles now hail records for their sonic warmth and attractive cover art, but Rolling Stone articles I read covering the very first CD players did not say: We must preserve this fabulous format, the LP. What they said was more along the lines of: Good riddance. The paranoiac in me also wonders if record companies deliberately made crappy LPs in order to get more people buying CDs. Consumers paid more for CDs than records, after all, and labels made pots of money when music lovers bought CDs of favorite titles they already had on LP.