VCU news

By Leila Ugincius

In the 1890s, the cylinders in Thomas Edison’s phonograph invention were replaced with flat disks — the precursor to the vinyl record albums that dominated the 20th century and still live on today. Since the Gay Nineties, other technologies such as kinetoscopes, cinematographs, VCRs, typewriters, rotary phones, 8-tracks and cassette players have come and gone. So why has the vinyl record endured when so many other forms of technology have not?

There’s something about instruments being reproduced through an analog process that sounds warmer and more real than digital recordings, said Stephen Schmidt, Ph.D., director of the Mary-Anne Rennolds Chamber Concerts at the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Music in the School of the Arts.

Schmidt’s love of music came at an early age. He started playing music in third grade, choosing the violin because it was the instrument his grandfather played.

“He had a very old, nice violin that I was not allowed to touch, so I thought that if I got good enough he would let me try it,” he said. After a couple of years, he switched to the viola at a teacher’s recommendation. He attended The Juilliard School in New York City from age 14 to 23 and then went to Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Conservatory to pursue a doctorate. While working on that degree, he won an audition to be a full-time violist with the Richmond Symphony, moving to Richmond in 1996.

In his capacity as director of the Mary Anne Rennolds Chamber Concerts series, he has brought some of the world’s finest classical musicians to Richmond to play at VCU.

We asked Schmidt to speak about vinyl’s perseverance.

You’ve mentioned that you've been collecting records since you were a child. What was the first album you ever bought? Do you still have it?

I have two main areas of music that I collect — classical and rock ‘n’ roll. My first albums were Foreigner “4” and Billy Joel “52nd Street” and yes, I still own them. I bought plenty of Van Halen and Rush albums, too, in my youth before moving into the 1980s new wave and post-punk genres. But in terms of my classical record collecting, the first classical album that I owned was violist Kim Kashkashian’s “Elegies.” My father gave it to me because there was a piece on that album that I was learning to play. From there I started buying and collecting recordings of pieces that I was learning or wanted to learn as well as recordings made by my teachers and other famous classical performers. While I was in graduate school at Juilliard, I worked at the Tower Records store in Lincoln Center — I spent two-and-a-half years as a senior supervisor there, working nights in the classical department to help pay for school and rent. But by that point we were firmly in the CD era — cassettes were on their way out, vinyl was practically nonexistent, and we had laserdiscs, not DVDs. Records were only to be found in the used stores and in the clearance outlets.

Did you ever board the cassette wagon? Were there any advantages to cassettes other than portability?

In a way I sort of bypassed the true cassette-tape era. I was not buying new albums on cassette. The advantage of cassettes was the ability to record on them. I was using blank tapes to make copies of my vinyl record albums which I would then listen to on my Sony Walkman (remember those?). I would also use my expensive Sony Pro-Walkman recorder to make recordings of concerts that I played in. It was years later (mid-1990s), when I owned my first car that I would buy real albums on cassette, because at that point I could find great titles on cassette in the local secondhand stores for only one dollar. I would buy them to listen to in my car because it had a cassette player only.

You've lived through the trend from vinyl to CD to mp3-download and back to vinyl. Can you describe the progression from one platform to the next?

I have to admit, I am a bit old school — because I grew up with records and CDs I never really got into buying music on MP3. I am a true collector — my wife would call me a pack rat — I want to own something physical that I can touch, keep, collect and that will have some value in the future. That is why in this digital MP3 era, I am still buying CDs and then loading them into my iTunes. I didn’t want to pay money for a download that I could only use on one device and that would disappear when that device broke or became obsolete. I continued to buy used LPs, used and new CDs, and use MP3s much like I used to use cassettes — as portable copies of my real music collection. But I am so glad to see that this generation is starting to appreciate vinyl again. MP3s are not even as good a quality as a CD, let alone an SACD or a DVD. So for a while I was dumbfounded that people, perhaps unknowingly, were sacrificing a lot of quality for convenience and trendy devices. The progression from one platform to the next has always been about getting smaller and improving sound quality, but that took a bit of a break until recently. Now there are new devices that play higher-quality digital files and vinyl is back for those who always believed that vinyl has a warmer sound than digital formats.

Is vinyl's popularity soaring? Or did it never really go away? To what do you attribute its popularity?

I would not say that vinyl’s popularity is soaring, but it is definitely making a strong comeback, one that I hope will last. I don’t know that it ever went away with the real diehard record collectors. We just had to fill our needs with used vinyl, buying from the used stores and websites like eBay and Discogs. On those sites there are tons of buyers and sellers for vinyl. I think there is a bit of a cool factor in play right now with the resurgence of vinyl, but I think that part of that can be attributed to the bands and companies that have been releasing their albums in vinyl with a free digital download card. That is my favorite way to buy music today. I get the best of both worlds — I get an album that I can keep forever in my collection as well as a digital version that I can play on my portable devices. I hope that the record companies will continue their expansion of vinyl releases and include digital versions with them. There has always been a market for high-quality audiophile reissues of classic titles on vinyl, and the people who spend more money on music want quality not convenience.  

Are there certain genres that sound better on vinyl than other platforms? Conversely, are their certain genres that don't benefit from being on vinyl?

This is a personal opinion and is very subjective, but I think that genres like jazz and classical music sound better on vinyl. Real instruments being reproduced through an analog process sounds warmer and more real to me.

What would you like to add?

I would encourage people to keep buying vinyl and supporting the manufacture and release of real physical albums. Don’t let the record companies and the music industry die. Don’t get me wrong, the Internet is great and the access it provides to all music and recordings ever made is amazing, but you are not always going to want to get low-quality music cheap or for free on the Internet. Also, if 35 years of collecting records has taught me anything, it is that one day you are going to want to hear all of the music that you grew up on again. I find myself buying albums that I once owned when I was younger and now regret having gotten rid of as my tastes changed. Imagine your future: Wouldn’t it be great if those recordings that remind you of your entire life were still sitting on the shelf instead of being just a bunch of ones and zeros lost on some old obsolete device? I still remember the actor John Cusack in the movie “High Fidelity” as he reorganized his record collection not alphabetically, not chronologically, but biographically. His record collection told the story of his life and the places he had been both physically and emotionally — and he wanted to remember that..

In the spotlight image: "Vinyl" by Flickr user Kim Faires

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