Swedish hardcore band - check. The most influential hardcore album ever made - likely. Visceral, vein-popping energy and focus - yup. Best served on a spinning platter - but of course. Few albums so completely sum up a genre of music as Exile On Main St.
Rebellion, check. On the run from the taxman the band wrote and recorded a large portion of the album in the basement of rented villa in southern France. Drugs, check. Lots of heroine. Love, check. Mick Jagger got married during the making of the album. An album best viewed as a piece of art and an example of a band going in a completely different direction than anyone at the time and succeeding…you need this album.
In the lukewarm bathwater of the early s music scene, The Strokes came in and lit a fire. Their debut album pulls all the right energy from 70s and 80s garage rock, while feeling at home in the modern NYC. With the above album cover deemed too racy for America, the band switched up the domestic version prior to release the rest of the world got the good stuff. It contains people, places, and events relative to the title. The songs are not about the state explicitly; they just make a reference to the state in one way sometimes direct, often indirect or another.
Written and recorded after a move to rural New York with his wife, Moondance is the album that put the Northern Irish singer-songwriter on the map. Blending jazz, soul, rock, and blues, the album contains a nostalgia that is easier to feel than describe. Some may scoff at the notion of putting such a young album on a list of this caliber…scoff on, we stand by it. Drawing on bouts of paranoia and depression following their Slave Ambient tour, lead singer Adam Granduciel wrote his way through it.
The result is a more personal, razor-sharp style that serves as the backbone of an album that feels equally at home in any decade in the past 40 years…in other words, timeless.
No pretense, just real music with a humanness that jumps off the vinyl. If listening to music on vinyl is a mild rebellion against the digital age, then Elephant , the fourth studio album by The White Stripes, is the French Revolution. Jack and Meg White chose to intentionally avoid modern recording technology or computers in the production process using an eight-track tape machine and decades-old gear while laying down the album in just two weeks.
The story of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the classic tale of the artist triumphing over an increasingly bureaucratic and money-hungry record label. After a grueling year in the studio they handed the album over to Reprise Records only to have them refuse to release it without major changes.
This put the label in an awkward and soon very public position that eventually led to the album rights being transferred back to Wilco, who were then free to take it elsewhere. This is an album to own not just because of its musical beauty and integrity, but because of what it represents — artistic conviction in an era too often marked by compromise and apathy. Fed by the canned goods stolen by Ghostface from the local corner store, this was the Clan when they were still young and hungry, promising world takeover and believing it was possible.
To love rap means to have 36 Chambers in your collection. To love 36 Chambers means to know a time in rap history when many of the players had no certainty of fame and riches, but knew that they loved the game. Below is a list of 52 albums we consider essential to own on vinyl due to a variety of factors to include: sound, production, mastering, album artwork, special features, etc. There was a track on our album with this exact problem — loud drums with a constant high frequency distortion running all the way through.
Beau went in an extra mile and we were quite surprised to be able to salvage the situation and achieve a good cut in the end. We were in luck though as it could have gone either way.
We were already considering our options in case we had to drop that track. A valuable lesson learned there. As we know the record plays at a fixed speed. What does this mean? It means that the outside grooves of a record can store more information per second and thus sound better. In digital terms you could think of this as gradually losing resolution as the record plays on.
You will start to lose treble and definition as the needle progresses towards the inside of the record. The inside is also more prone to distortion.
This is why most engineers prefer to keep the grooves as narrow as possible, allowing to cut on the outside of the record only, leaving the poorer quality inside untouched. With really long tracks or records with several tracks on the same side this may not be possible of course.
If you are putting several tracks on the same side, you should consider the sequence. If you want maximum sound quality, you should put the hottest and loudest tracks on the outer side and leave the inner grooves for the tracks with less high end. Keep the track lenght reasonable. The shorter the track, the louder it can be pressed and the better it will sound. Make the bass mono when mixing for vinyl.
Always and absolutely. I mean all low frequencies — the bassline, the low end of your drums, percussion, any bassy effects, etc. No panning, no stereo effects. Make it mono. With stereo bass content the needle has to do big vertical movements which easily results in skips. Also the record will have to be cut quieter. Put special attention to any percussive sounds, bass stabs, bass guitar and such. Arrangement wise, the place where a record is most likely to skip is the drop.
The needle is put to a test as the record quickly switches from a soft part to full mayhem. Watch out for any stereo percussions and such in the drop. This step is by no means necessary, but if you want to further check that the weight of your tracking force is correct, you can buy a digital gram scale.
With one of these you can just lower the stylus onto its platform and a digital readout will tell you exactly how much force is being applied. You can then check this against the dial on your counterweight and adjust accordingly. In either of those circumstances, just set the counterweight to zero again and use the above steps to set it back to the right tracking force.
Your record player is now set up with the correct tracking force. The only thing left to do is stick on your favourite record and enjoy! Editor and Founder of Vinyl Chapters.
Always bothering people to tell a story about a record in their vinyl collection. I was hoping you would give a link to a list of Tracking weights for all existing carts that certainly must have been compiled by some obsessive cartridge-o-phile.
Gotta keep questing.. This article succinctly explains how you can go about adjusting the tracking force of your record […]. If done repeatedly, alcohol will deteriorate the outer protective layer of the record and will make the record more fragile to wear and tear when played. If records are stored horizontally on top of each other in a stack, they can get warped and damaged. Vinyl is heavy and the records in the bottom of a pile will be put under more pressure than they can handle.
This is especially true if the records are piled up in a hot room or in direct sunlight. As vinyl gets softer with higher temperatures. To avoid this, make sure to always store your records vertically.
A record crate or a bookshelf is perfect for this. Even an old wine case will work fine. If you are interested, you can read my full article on record storage here. To really take your record cleaning to the next level enthusiast level , a record cleaning machine might be a worthwhile investment. These machines are known to give an even better cleaning than the standard wet cleaning with a velvet brush mentioned in an earlier tip. They are also known for being effective at removing static electricity from records, which is a nice bonus.
It seems to be really popular and well reviewed. The paper inner sleeves that normally come standard with most albums are not absolutely ideal for your records. When a record is static, it will attract dust and particles, so keeping the build-up of static electricity in our records to a minimum is important.
There is a whole category on how to deal with static electricity below, but for this tip, the essence is that good quality inner sleeves will reduce static which again will reduce dust and particles on our records. There are many good quality inner sleeves to choose from, but the ones that get the most praise seem to be the ones from Mobile Fidelity. In the section above, the focus was on how to take care of our records so that they always are clean and in top notch condition.
But being passionate about sound quality and HiFi for most of my life, I have learned over and over again how important good acoustics is for a HiFi stereo setup to sound good. Some of the measures in this category are really simple and free.
And some of them are a bit more advanced. If you use headphones for your vinyl listening, then of course none the tips in this section will be too relevant for you…. Speakers need to have some room around them to sound their best.
If you place your speakers too close to the back wall, the bass will get very bloated. As you move the speakers farther from the back wall the bass will tighten up. With small speakers, like mine, we can get away with around two feet. But with bigger speakers, with larger bass drive units in , more space will usually be necessary to make the bass sound tight and punchy.
Placing the speakers at the ideal distance from the back wall can have a huge effect on how your stereo setup sounds. Especially for the bass. To achieve the optimal soundstage width and depth, the listening position and the speakers should form a triangle as shown in the illustration above. The listening position shall ideally be in the center line between the speakers. And the distance from the listening position your ears to each speaker should be equal to the distance between the speakers.
Or a tiny bit longer. To really achieve an accurate soundstage, both the recording quality of the record and your stereo must be of at least decent quality. So this is a probably a tip for the slightly more advanced vinyl listener. Like when you are moving into a new house etc. Even when speaking on the phone, the person on the other end can easily pick up if the room on your end is totally empty. The sound characteristics will be very different from a room that is filled with furniture.
So just by adding basic furniture to an empty room, the sound will become much warmer and more dampened. If your turntable and stereo is placed in a room with little furniture and a lot of naked wall area, your records will probably never sound ideal.
There will be a lot of sound reflections and standing sound waves that will make the music sound cold and harsh. So the most basic tip on improving room acoustics is to fill the room with normal basic furniture. If your turntable is set up in your living room, this is probably not an issue. But if you have a more or less dedicated room for music listening, make sure the room is not too empty. Large green plants are good for improving acoustics. They work as both absorbers and diffusors.
They also look good, clean the air and provide a little bit of humidity to the air. Which, as we will get more into in a bit, reduces static electricity.
0コメント