Jan 27, 2011 4
Thoughts Regarding Kanye’s Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy on Vinyl
I just brought home the supposedly limited vinyl edition of Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy from Sloth Records. By the time I finish writing and editing this, I’ll have listened to it twice. Before I even finished listening to the first of the six sides I noticed it sounds dramatically better than the leaked 320kbps mp3s I’ve been listening to since the day before the album came out. This probably isn’t that much of a surprise to anyone, least of all me. It is making me think about why this might be, though. I’ve been listening to the mp3s constantly for weeks, so the way the tracks sound is imprinted strongly into my brain. The vinyl sounds smoother and much less harsh. It’s different, but not so much that it sounds “wrong”.
First off, I never really thought about what the bitrate of the mp3s I was listening to were, I’m a little surprised they were that high. Higher than iTunes or Amazon sells them at. There is some serious digital distortion in the music and now I understand that it’s meant to be there, artifacts from the processing and the samplers used. I don’t have a problem with this, just noting. That distortion is easier on the ears from the vinyl than it is from the mp3s. While I don’t have an audiophile setup, music from my turntable and computer essentially follow the same path to the speakers, so I feel it’s a fair comparison for me to make. In a blind test I honestly think I could hear the difference between the two easily.
So, why the eff do I need to write a blog entry about this specific record, when I bring home one or two records a week? Good question, jackass. Let me explain to you what hearing this record caused me to think about.
Records need to be mastered differently than digital delivery methods (CDs, mp3s). If they pressed a record with music mastered as loudly as a CD, the needle would jump right out of the groove. To keep that from happening, they don’t just turn down the volume on it, they apply a RIAA approved equalizer setting to it that is then reversed when it passes through your preamp or phono input on your amplifier. It’s my belief that because a master for vinyl requires more finessing to make it work in the medium, a good portion of why it sounds better is as much attributable to the careful processing that happens to it before it gets pressed into wax as it is to the medium itself. These have been my thoughts for years, and I’m sure I’ve written this paragraph at least once before.
What makes this interesting to me is the aforementioned digital distortion. There is a TON of it on this album. So much that I thought it was a problem with the download. I know nothing of what gear Kanye used in this album, and I’m ignorant to his production process. In the Runaway video he uses an Akai MPC-2000XL first made in 1997, which, looking at the stats, could easily offer up the sort of distortion that I hear. Ok, so “big deal”, right? Well, maybe. I honestly don’t listen to a lot of hip hop albums, but it would seem to me that a lot of the excitement I feel for this album comes directly from how raw the production is. I can already hear people arguing with me, “But this album is so slickly produced you dumbass.” I don’t think “slick” is the right word though. “Carefully” yes, but there is a specific LACK of slickness where it counts. Timbaland is a slick producer, Dre too. I think this album has more of Afrika Bambaataa’s DNA in it than either of those guys, and I’d call that guy precise, but not slick. Examples of so-called raw production: Ghostface’s lyrics are cut off before he finishes words, which makes them sound like they are a sample cut from another song, the crazy treble distortion on vocals (especially female vocals) and samples, these all make this album sound positively OLD SCHOOL. All of this, when pressed onto vinyl sounds very special to my ears. The harshness gets rounded out, makes it more musical, while keeping the lo-fi fun of it.
Anyway, back to the actual album. It’s on three records, which annoys me. I understand the reasoning behind it. Hip hop artists like doing splitting their albums up over many sides because it essentially makes their album a bunch of 12″s, which are much more DJ and scratch friendly. The reason I like this album so much is the seamless way the songs flow into each other, and this way of pressing it breaks it up. Who knows, maybe this will be my preferred method of hearing it. The songs do make for 6 good combinations. Monster has side 3 all to itself and I think it’s a possibility that the bass on that song was so fierce they needed to cut the grooves exceptionally far apart, which would make that the primary reason for the decision to press the album on three records.
Ok. Enough writing about this, I have my doubts that there is anyone out there that got this far in this post. I’m pretty much the only one who cares about this shit. Although, I’m sure there are others that care that the Phoenix artwork that was meant for the cover was pixelated even in the insert. Totally pissed about that.
This.
Is supposed to look like this.
You said.