Why PlayVinyl?
The marketing dream for music seems to be reinventing and reselling much of what we already have, after all this takes much less talent and is far less risky. It can even represent a known formula to investors.
Truth be told the Vinyl already in circulation has not been of any interest to the major distributors for many years except as a catalyst to supply a niche new market. This has now grown into a remastering or reissue market which mostly exists because playback standards have generally dropped. This need not be the case.
Streaming both existing and new production often fails to represent the actual artist, using compressed digital source that cannot connect our senses. While convenient, and often free, this is a real example of us getting what we pay for. This model for playback is the processed lookalike food to our real and organic needs.
Just as we are what we eat, we ignore feeding our hearing as a loss to a most primary sense of our being. We only have five senses with which to shape our world and they do and should overlap creating mood and feeding our souls through sound.
Musicians have been adding the alcohol for our ears, enhancing bass for years, and the Vinyl representing the world’s songbook ensures we always come back for more. We do this as it makes us feel great and for once it’s good to gorge ourselves with real analogue sound – the low fat skinny latte ideal is a compressed version of great analogue sound which is too great a price to pay for convenience (a waste of our precious time).
Music gives back to the listener in its natural analogue form, but we have to appreciate that all formats are not equal. Time is the only thing which we all have to use, and at our own will, how we spend our time is what defines our enjoyment and our fulfilment.
What Do PlayVinyl Do That Is Different?
We rebuild, we re-purpose, we re-engineer and most importantly we work to simply reproduce the sound expected when an artist cut a record.
We offer every type of player imaginable as well as some bespoke machines we have even fully imagined ourselves.
The mediums of idler drive, belt drive and direct drive turntables all have their place at PlayVinyl where we have the best of the many always available for our customers. Alongside these we display and contrast our own uncompromising improved versions which are both unique and boast a growing following. Whatever your style or pocket we have a matched and quality product for which we primarily engage in demonstrating the differences, which serve to inform your choice.
Appreciating the recorded sounds of the pre ’90s halcyon days of Vinyl, which incidentally represent over 90% of everything available to play in world terms, and how playback is achieved, seems odd to us: in that it is not simply a matter of course that we regard the machinery available for playback at that time and for which the original Vinyls were in fact mastered.
This machinery isn't mass made anymore and the reasons why are obvious from a manufacturer and market-forces standpoint where it is simply too expensive. Original equipment in good usable condition is not readily found because the process of recommissioning takes financial investment, time and skill for which value must be attributed. This is a journey in understanding value alongside price and this is an area where music and the general public have been manipulated by an industry sadly delivering way below the value which is available or was available to the mainstream during its heyday.
However, we know that playing Vinyl is a proactive choice and actually getting to hear it properly should be treated as a key part of that choice.