The VINYL FRONTIER

LPs are notoriously fragile, but Kiwis are buying them in greater numbers.

- PAUL LITTLE

Since about 2010, vinyl records, once confined to the bargain bins of music history, have spun back into market prominence.

The growth has not just continued but accelerated in the face of digital downloads and streaming. Meanwhile, the once-ubiquitous CDs are increasingly being repurposed as novelty coasters. A large part of the growth has been driven by a fervently held view that vinyl makes music sound better. It's the claim that launched a thousand Record Store Days and Rolling Stones rereleases.

When this argument over sound quality started, buyers had a choice for most releases between vinyl and CDs, which roughly equated to a contest between analogue and digital recordings. It has become much more complicated since then. For example, a lot of reissues of classic LPs were originally analogue recordings that at one stage were converted to digital before being remastered back on to vinyl. It's a purist's nightmare.

If by “sounds better" you mean “consistently reproduces with the greatest accuracy the noises the musicians made with their instrument and voices”, the claim doesn't hold up. Vinyl cannot hold as much musical information as CDs, especially at the highest and lowest frequencies.

“For vinyl mastering, you need to sum (combine) certain frequencies in mono and have anything below 20Hz taken out, otherwise the needle could just jump out of the record groove," says producer Greg Haver (Manic Street Preachers, the Chills). “This is something younger producers haven't had to worry about until the recent resurgence of vinyl."