Let me make this clear from the start: I have not been caught in a sex scandal, my taxes are all paid up, and I’m not embezzling money from anybody. All of which I feel compelled to lay out, because those always seem to be the precursors to any conversion story. Which is why everyone hates such stories. But in a sense, it’s a conversion story that I’m writing here, much as I hate reading them myself.
As I’ve mentioned numerous times in recent months, SoundStage! founder Doug Schneider intimated to me late last year that it was time to think about changing my ways. He wanted me to add vinyl playback to my reference system. And after six months of fretting about it and considering pretty much every turntable in my budget range, I finally bought a U-Turn Orbit Theory ’table last month.
So now what?
Well, now I have a turntable. Obvs. And with the very first new integrated amp I connected to it in the course of a review, after acclimating to it with my reference system, I stumbled upon considerations that I wouldn’t have otherwise—considerations that might make that integrated amp a better choice for some turntable owners and a less-ideal choice for others. So mission accomplished. Doug had a point. Measuring these things is necessary but not sufficient. Duh.
But that’s hardly what you’d call a conversion story, is it? What I didn’t suspect to come from all this—although I definitely hinted at such in my Record Store Day recap—was the extent to which this new platter-spinner would change my personal life, not merely the particulars of my profession.
To recap a few key details that are relevant to what follows: For the past decade or thereabouts, my friend Michael (hopefully soon to be a SoundStage! Xperience contributor) has been buying me records for Christmas, all of which I’ve raided for their download cards and cherished dearly, albeit on my phone and/or computer, since I didn’t have anything to play them on. My wife, unbeknownst to me, has also been squirreling away a vinyl collection of her own in her office, in the hopes that I would one day get a record player. And my mom had a pretty decent collection of records, including some of my childhood favorites, which my dad invited me up to pilfer after he found out I was getting a turntable.
So I’m starting off as a brand-new vinyl convert with a pretty decent milkcrate full of records, once you combine all those (plus the King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard records I’ve picked up over the years just to support the band) with my haul from RSD 2024 and the two records I’ve bought this past month despite not having room for them in my budget. FOMO is a real thing, though, and I simply couldn’t pass up the 20th-anniversary Wicked double-LP set, nor the Rhino High Fidelity AAA pressing of American Beauty.
That about covers the collecting aspect of it all, at least so far. But what about the listening? It seems that some of my colleagues who knew I was on this journey had convinced themselves that once I had a good turntable and had a chance to listen to it, I’d see the light and repent my digital ways. And I really would love to tell you I’ve had some revelatory experience along those lines. It’s exactly the sort of penitent navel-gazing that sells in the audiophile press these days.
The truth is, a great new pressing that’s been thoroughly wet-cleaned and then stored in a proper poly-lined inner sleeve is just super fun to listen to. The Rice Krispiefication of everything else honestly bothered me more at first than it does now. And oddly, my wife was bothered by me being bothered. “It has character,” she groaned at me. “It’s a whole aesthetic. It sounds like nostalgia. Embrace the crackle!”
Zen and the Art of Wet Cleaning
I wish I could get there. But I’ll say this: the process of trying to minimize all the snap, crackle, and pop is one that I oddly enjoy. The wet-cleaning process to which I alluded above has become part of my Zen practice, alongside the regular watering of my bonsai trees and the daily cleaning of my CPAP gear. (Yes, I’m the weirdo who actually derives some satisfaction from that.)
I’ve got two options for how I go about bathing my records when they need it—or when I’m just bored and want to play with my toys. If I’m just looking to clean one record that I’m ready to listen to right this very now, the Record Doctor VI vacuum system does the trick and is an absolute delight to operate. If I’ve got a batch of records in need of a dunk, though—like the filthy old things I inherited from my mom—I’ll sit down with my Big Fudge record-cleaning kit and while away an afternoon while listening to music.
Each has its advantages—one being more efficient and more effective, the other being a lot quieter and batch-friendly. But sometimes I feel like the only person on the planet who views the process as a feature and not a bug. Seriously, it’s half the fun of the vinyl hobby for me so far.
It’s the music, stupid!
Ultimately, though, the entire point of all this is the music, and the strangest thing for me is that having a record player is changing my relationship with my favorite tunes and most beloved artists in some very unpredictable ways (to me, at least). I went into all of this thinking that I’d use my record player a couple of times a month, mostly in the course of a review. Instead, I now carve out some time at the end of every workday to flip through my little collection, pull out something that strikes that day’s fancy, and sit down to listen to it rather than firing up my Sonos system and loading up some tunes to accompany my evening tasks. Could’ve done that with CDs. Dunno why I didn’t. Might start. Dunno. All I know is that vinyl has kickstarted a daily music ritual that I now cherish.
And it’s changing what I listen to, as well. As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’ve been buying King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard LPs over the past few years, not with any particular intent, but simply as a way of supporting the band. One of those records, Omnium Gatherum, is getting a lot more time on my turntable than I would have expected. And perhaps a bit of backstory is in order here. King Gizz never made a digital master for that album, which is one of their catch-all collections of random tunes that they just never could find a way to develop into a full concept album. Instead, they dropped a needle on their test-pressing LP, recorded it to a computer, and released that rip to streaming services.
So I’ve only ever known the tunes on Omnium Gatherum with the distortions and noise of vinyl baked in. All of that is essential to the aesthetic of the album. But the first time I dropped a needle on my own copy, I couldn’t help noticing that the pops and crackles all came at different times than the ones baked into my brain. Yes, I could still hear the inner-groove distortion toward the end of “The Dripping Tap.” But the wholly random nature of the occasional pop and click—which had always been wholly predictable before—drew me into the music in a different way. Because allofasudden I’m not merely listening to one of the best rock tunes of the past quarter-century; I own it. This copy is uniquely mine, and not only does it sound a weensy bit different from every other copy, but it sounds a weensy bit different every time I play it.
The odd effect of this is that I’m listening to oodles more King Gizz these days, and not just on vinyl. When I’m driving to my doctor’s office, I’m way more likely to load up Polygondwanaland via Apple Music than I ever was before. I’m listening to Float Along—Fill Your Lungs at least once a week.
And albums by the band that I’ve long loved but never procured on vinyl seem to be getting less play even on streaming. I’ve already decided my next LP purchase, when I can afford it, is going to be Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, if only because I miss listening to it since getting a record player. Even though it’s still out there in the cloud, where I’ve always accessed it. I can listen to it at any time, and yet I don’t—at least not nearly as much. Because the records I own on vinyl are simply taking up more of my consciousness, even when I’m miles from my turntable.
Brains are weird, y’all.
Another thing I’m loving about listening to vinyl after all these decades is that so much of the music I love was made with the LP in mind (and yeah, that includes pretty much everything KGATLW is putting out). It’s hard for my brain to make sense of the structure of Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, for example, without thinking of it as four distinct movements. I remember the first time I said something about side C of the album to my daughter, and she looked at me like I’d sprouted horns.
Listening to American Beauty with a distinct side A and side B is unlocking a new appreciation for that album that I already know like the back of my favorite cereal box. I must admit, though, that this whole process is putting me at odds with so many of my fellow Deadheads who are also vinyl enthusiasts. As soon as he heard I was getting a record player, Xperience’s Joe Taylor started rattling off all the Dead records I needed to pick up as soon as possible, including the exact pressings of Europe ’72 and Skull & Roses.
I had to explain that, a handful of studio albums aside, I have no interest in engaging with my favorite band on vinyl. Less than none, in fact. I’m downright opposed to it.
Over my Deadhead body!
To get why, you have to understand that I’m mostly a fan of the Grateful Dead as a live band. The bulk of my Dead collection consists of bootleg soundboards and a heaping helping of Dick’s Picks and Dave’s Picks releases. I’ve spoken about one of the latter over on Simplifi, but it’s worth reiterating here:
One of my recent obsessions is an archival release titled Dave’s Picks, Volume 23 (McArthur Court, U. of Oregon, Eugene, OR 1/22/78), which I received as part of my annual subscription back in 2017 and promptly forgot about because it didn’t seem to include much of what I love about the Dead. It didn’t have any of my essential song sequences. I’m not really into the vibe of 1978 shows. I had so much other Dead to listen to that it just didn’t call my name.
But once I did listen to it, I fell hard. Immediately. I cannot believe that I wasted so much time depriving myself of the experience of the long jam at the end of the second set, which goes on for over an hour straight and runs the gamut from a gorgeous “Lady with a Fan > Terrapin Station” through to a pulse-pounding cover of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around.”
I know that concert better than I know my wife at this point, so when I saw that Rhino had released it on vinyl in a limited edition of 5000 copies, it seemed a no-brainer. What else could one want in a reference record than to know every note of it intimately?
But then, as I was adding it to my cart, I decided to take a peek at the song sequencing to see how they’d broken it up. That one jam—a single, interrupted act of musical worship with no breaks and nothing but gorgeous, fluid transitions—is spread over five sides of vinyl. I mean, had I thought about that ahead of time, I should have guessed as much, but seeing it broken down in no uncertain terms was a shock to my system.
I immediately emptied my cart. Seriously. When I started listening to Dave’s Picks 23 while swimming, I had to drop the album into my digital audio workstation and re-render it as a single track because my swimming headphones aren’t gapless and the split-second boops between songs were sending me into a rage. There’s just no way in hell I’m going to tolerate four compulsory calisthenics breaks simply to get through what’s supposed to be a free-flowing transcendental experience.
So, yeah, I’ll eventually add the handful of other studio Dead albums I dig—Anthem of the Sun, Aoxomoxoa, Workingman’s Dead, Blues for Allah, Garcia, and Ace—to my milk crate. But for the most part, vinyl is just not going to be a way that I enjoy engaging with my favorite band.
And that’s OK. I’m not ditching my shelves and shelves and more shelves of compact discs. Hell, I still do the overwhelming bulk of my listening via streaming, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
A sense of community
But what I do see happening is the amount of time I spend in record stores, just talking about music with people who are as passionate about it as I am. I haven’t really had that sort of community in person since my favorite local new/used CD shop shut down in the early aughts. But more than that, my local record shops have reconditioned my brain and reminded me that high-fidelity playback isn’t always the point.
The music is always the point, though. If there’s one thing I appreciate most about my vinyl experience to date—limited though it may be—it’s that it’s liberated me once and for all, I think, from the notion that if it’s not hi-fi, it’s not really a proper music experience.
As I’ve said before, I first fell in love with music via an old mono clock radio sitting atop the fridge in the kitchen of my childhood home. That crappy 2.5″ speaker was sufficient to make me fall in love with Elvis and Pink Floyd and Elton John and Led Zeppelin and the Doobie Brothers and, yes, even Captain & Tennille (fight me; they’re hometown heroes just as valid as Nat King Cole, Hank Williams, and Clarence Carter).
Learning to love music again in less-than-pristine form feels kinda freeing. And I don’t think this is Stockholm syndrome talking. Yes, if lower-resolution sound, surface noise, pops from dust that no amount of air purification can eliminate in my home, and distortion from the fact that you’re dragging a rock through a piece of plastic are part of the price I have to pay to feel like part of a community that loves music as much as I love music, then so be it. That’s a price I’ll happily embrace. But there’s something deeper going on here.
Maybe it’s just because my vinyl collection is still so small and unlikely to grow substantially anytime soon unless I win the lottery. But my hand-selected collection of big 12″ records seems to say something about me that my shelves full of CDs don’t. It almost reminds me of the bygone era of the first decade of this century, when you’d swap iPods with a friend just for the chance to climb around in each other’s brains, because space was limited then, and you could pack that hard drive with only so many records. So every one of them counted. Every one of them meant something.
I had just such an experience recently, with the eldest spawn of a friend of mine. They’re designing my next tattoo, so we’ve been chatting quite a bit lately. A recent conversation about music took a turn when they saw that I owned the aforementioned Float Along—Fill Your Lungs by King Gizz on vinyl. It wasn’t enough that I knew the album. It wasn’t enough that I loved it. What impressed them is that I carved out space in my tiny little record collection for it. It’s probably the last time I’ll ever be cool in the eyes of a 21-year-old, but I’ll take it.
The kids aren’t alright
Speaking of the youths, they’ve long been blamed for the vinyl resurgence, and I often hear old audiophiles bemoaning it all as a hipster trend. “They don’t even listen to them!” I hear over and over again. “They just buy them for the artwork!”
Well, as someone who’s been spending a lot more time in record stores recently, I can tell you that’s poppycock. They are listening. In fact, some of them eschew any other medium aside from perhaps cassette (a whole other story for a whole other day).
Many of these zoomers (or doomers, as so many members of Gen Z tell me they prefer to be called) go so far as to use flip phones and won’t drive cars new enough to have factory-installed touchscreens, so deep is their distrust of the multinational corporations creating and weaponizing today’s connected technologies. As such, secondhand vinyl is the main way they consume music, and as a result, their tastes and influences aren’t being tallied in the weekly Billboard charts.
And I’ll admit, I’m wholly sympathetic to the reason some of them are into vinyl: the belief that when—not if—the ruling class finally destroys civilization as we know it in their infantile quest to extract infinite growth from finite resources, it’s somewhat comforting to know that the rest of us will still be able to listen to The Battle of Los Angeles in some way, shape, or form.
A page from The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization
Mind you, that’s not the only reason kids these days are into vinyl. For some of them, it’s nostalgia for a time they don’t remember, when life seemed simpler and when working a full-time job meant you could afford a mortgage. For some, it’s just retro-kitsch. And for some of them, they just really prefer the sound.
And in a way, I get that. That might seem contradictory to what I said above about the sound being just sort of barely acceptable from an objective perspective. But I still get the appeal. I think it’s largely an illusion, but I get it. The other night, I was kicked back listening to the RSD-exclusive 2×LP release of Buena Vista Social Club—an album I’ve owned and loved for years on DVD-Audio, CD, and high-rez digital download—and I was so captivated by the sonic experience that I couldn’t help investigating what made the vinyl so much better to my ears in that moment. So I loaded up the CD. I spun the DVD-A. I cued up the 24/96 AIFF files. And I did some head-to-head comparisons.
All the digital formats sounded better than the LP when compared directly. Substantially better. No contest whatsoever. So why did my brain try to convince me otherwise when I wasn’t A/B-ing but simply sitting and listening? Maybe it’s all of the psychological effects people have been deconstructing for years—the ritual of dropping a needle on the platter, which put me in a different headspace; the big gatefold cover sitting in my lap, acting as a sort of arcane focus for the musical experience; the whole cat-walking-on-its-hind-legs phenomenon, whereby it seems so miraculous that this crude mechanical format results in anything remotely listenable at all that my brain overrides my ears.
Or maybe I was just enjoying myself more, and the non-auditory stimuli modulated my experience of sound. That’s also a thing. I have to admit, the appeal of the old records of my mom’s that I’ve now inherited is that she touched them with her own hands. Hands I haven’t held in nearly 20 years. But holding her old LPs makes me feel physically closer to her. There’s an imagined psychometry that warms my heart.
Granted, there are a few old records in my collection where the LP master simply sounds better than the CD/download masters. And a few new ones, too. But that’s the master, not the format.
Who really cares, though? Honestly. Who cares? Just as I think we ought to stop administering purity tests to the youths and instead celebrate the fact that some of them are willing to buy music when so much of it is available for free or next-to-nothing, it’s OK if I don’t love vinyl on your terms. It’s OK if I think the fidelity is just sort of fine at best, if we’re willing to put in extraordinary levels of effort to make it so. It’s OK if I don’t want to own the albums you want me to own. It’s OK if I still stream from Qobuz most of the time.
Isn’t it enough that I enjoy vinyl now and that it’s connecting me with my favorite music on—dare I say it—more of a spiritual level? Whatever the hell that means? And isn’t it enough that I’m getting hands-on experience with the format on a technical level, such that I can finally say something halfway informed about whether one phono stage is better than another? And why?
Buyer’s remorse?
At any rate, sorry about the rant. If you will, please come back onto my lawn, because there’s one last thing I want to address. Since I got my U-Turn Orbit Theory and have had a chance to play around with it, a lot of curious onlookers have asked me if I feel like I made the right decision regarding which turntable to buy. That’s a fraught question, because I often feel like most people who read my product reviews have already purchased the product in question and are seeking validation.
I worked hard for the money that paid for the Theory, so I’m automatically inclined to pat myself on the back for a job well done. But there are a number of things that make me think that, yes, objectively, this was the right purchase for me.
One thing that steered me toward U-Turn—and one thing that made a lot of old vinyl heads try to steer me in a different direction—is that the setup is incredibly easy. We just don’t talk enough about how daunting turntable setup can be for those of us who’ve never done it or have long since forgotten what it was like. Much as I hate the comparison between hi-fi gear and musical instruments, setting up a turntable is sort of like setting up a guitar.
With the Theory, it felt more like setting up my PRS Mira than my old Stratocaster. There’s just not a lot you can mess up. But I still fretted over the instructions, watched the setup video a bazillion times, and half-convinced myself that I was going to sneeze and destroy this $1000 investment before I knew it.
As an objectivist digital audiophile, I find that instructions such as “With tonearm in rest, slide counterweight onto tonearm until it covers about half of the indicator line” seem more like steps in a shrimp creole recipe than instructions in a quick-start guide for a piece of gear. When I actually had the thing configured and making noise, I felt like I’d earned a gold star or something.
And then Jason Thorpe started pestering me about getting a digital scale to check the tracking force, and I balked. The tracking force is accounted for in the setup! It should be fine! I’m scared! Leave me alone!
And then, maybe two weeks ago, curiosity and that FOMO I talked about before got the better of me. I ordered a cheap digital stylus-pressure gauge and checked the tracking force. It was close, but roughly 0.2gm lower than ideal. So I put on my big-Wookiee pants and adjusted it myself—then drank an entire bottle of St. Bernardus Abt 12 between puffs of hyperventilation. But I didn’t mess anything up! Huzzah!
All of this sort of served as training wheels, and if I eventually pass the Theory off to my wife (who covets it and wants one for her home office), I think the U-Turn has primed the pump and prepared me for something a bit more tweaky—something with all the little variables, like vertical tracking angle adjustments and tunable antiskate, that are unnecessary on the Theory but seem like they might be fun to tinker with.
We’ll see. The one thing I know for sure is, I’m hooked. I get it now. Again, perhaps not in the way that some of my SoundStage! siblings want me to get it. But I get it.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
