You need the original synths if you’re a composer or producer. You listen to music on digital streams? Join the retro-future of vinyl enthusiasm, and feel the grooves under your fingers like your parents or grandparents used to.
Or you can even make music physical again through the horrible medium of cassettes: all that plastic, all those tiny liner notes, all that high-speed dubbing. Retro-futurists cherish what they claim is the extra warmth and sonic richness of vinyl, but there is no acoustic reason why vinyl is better. It is in fact objectively worse as a carrier of sonic information than any high-resolution stream of the same track, song or symphony.
For cassette nostalgists, if it’s got that old-fashioned tape hiss, it sounds more “real”. We’re now looking for things to sound less clean. Because we distrust today’s technological utopia, we want signs that our music is less polished, less perfect, and thus more human.
But what the recording industry is doing now with its return to vinyl, classical music has been doing for decades. Musicians and musicologists have long been obsessed with learning about the origins of the music they study and play, to experience what the technology of instruments and performing cultures of earlier centuries actually sounded like, whether the 12th-century Germany of Hildegard of Bingen or the 19th-century Vienna of Beethoven and Schubert. David Munrow brought medieval and Renaissance music to the mainstream across TV, radio and recordings in the 1970s and showing what instruments such as shawms and crumhorns could do; Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner set up choirs and ensembles to do the same for 17th and 18th-century music, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt led the charge through the music of later centuries, putting the ethos of early music research into the lifeblood of chamber groups and large-scale symphony orchestras in music from Schubert to Bruckner.
But where the claims for vinyl or cassettes’ “authenticity” are bogus when it comes to actual sonic fidelity, it’s different when comparing older instruments in classical cultures and their modern counterparts. Earlier instruments have different qualities of sound and expression. The sound and feel of a harpsichord that Bach was writing for in the 18th century is vastly different to a grand piano made today: the plucked strings of the harpsichord mean that the sound of each note disappears quickly, where a Steinway can create halos and continuities of sound.
French horns that can play in any key are taken for granted today, where previous generations had to literally pull their brass instruments apart to play one set of notes or another. It’s a similar story for strings and woodwinds, as earlier generations of musicians had to play with the temperamental realities of gut strings that don’t stay in tune, and reeds that couldn’t be relied on. But the sounds that earlier orchestral instruments make aren’t “worse” in the way that cassettes or vinyl are.
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