The Musicology Behind the Vinyl Revival

The Geeks&Beats crew spent part of Sunday at The Downtown Record Show in Toronto, recording the podcast and spending far too much money on records and memorabilia. This is a great time to point at this article at Gear Patrol about the vinyl revival. Does vinyl really sound better?

If analog music production has a headquarters today, it’s located in a modest building just south of downtown Nashville, nestled in a group of scattered warehouses, two stories tall with a jet black brick facade and a brilliant yellow roll-up door. A name,Third Man Records, streaks along the top of the structure in an embossed silver sans serif font. Inside is a record store, studio and label headquarters, designed like an art-deco emporium mashup of a Stanley Kubrick fever dream.

Third Man Record’s mastermind and proprietor is guitar hero Jack White (of The White Stripes, The Dead Weather, and The Racounters). Along with running his own operation at Third Man, White invites other bands to record at the facility in front of an audience, live and direct to tape. The tape is then cut to a vinyl master and reproduced in limited quantities. There is no digital at any point in the signal chain, meaning these recordings, done in 2015, use similar tools to the recordings of mid-20th-century legends like Charlie Patton and Elvis Presley.

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