Picture This

It was a Nicolas Cage movie, perhaps The Rock, where he received a record album in the mail for which he had paid a large price. When harassed by his fellow workers,” Why vinyl?” he replied, “It sounds better.”

I got to pondering that response, and I remembered the slight degradation of quality from 4 track tape to 8 track and again from 8 track to cassette. I wondered,  “Is it true?”  Who knows?  I haven’t had a turntable for over 20 years even though I continued to move my record collection from California to South Carolina to Texas and back to California.

I had purchased a few CDs of my favorite albums but most of my albums were not available on CD. So it was with some interest when I read an article about converting your old albums to CDs with the new ION Turntable. They were sold out at Christmas time so I waited a few months until they were in stock again at Circuit City.  This turntable comes with a USB port and plugs into your computer.  Also supplied with it is Audacity shareware for editing, sequencing, removing scratches and pops, and conversion to MP3 or WAV format.

It is all quite easy to do but takes a lot of time; however, it is quite enjoyable listing to those old songs you’ve had stored for years.  I can get 18 –19 albums worth of MP3s on one CD. It certainly makes your day at the computer go much better to have your own music playing.  You just feel better. I attempted to remove the background hum of the needle on the vinyl, and was successful in doing so but I ended up with something akin to today’s CDs. And it was, well, lacking.

So to answer the original question?  Yes. Vinyl does sound better than CDs.   Much better!  — even with scratches, skips, and pops.

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It may come as a surprise to some but be common knowledge to others, that people think differently.  It’s not that they are thinking about different things.  The process itself is different - rooted in it’s own tradition, perspective and heritage.

For example, western thought is liner reason. Not just reason but linear reason.  A + B = C.  Spock as opposed to Capt. Kirk.  Spock was the voice of liner reason balanced by the emotion and quirkiness of Capt. Kirk.  The best western comedy sets you up with liner reason and does a 90 degree turn for the punch line.  The best examples were George Burns and Gracie Allen.  George was the voice of liner progression (reason) and Gracie delivered the punch line. Gracie would make a conclusion that made sense for all the wrong reasons and did it with such innocence, style and grace that you couldn’t contain your laughter.

There are other ways to occasionally poke fun at western thought forms, and that is with any paradox.  There is just no place for the paradox in western thought because the paradox de-thrones reason.  Which came first the chicken or the egg?

It’s always fun to ask this question at the end of a long lecture on evolution or Cosmology; however, for Cosmology there is a better question.  Scientific theories continue to advance on the origin of the universe and can take us back to within moments of the big bang.  Current thought believes that the universe spring forth or exploded from nothingness.  There was nothing, and suddenly  there is something within that nothingness.  They also tell us that the universe is expanding into nothingness.  Not empty space but into where nothing previously existed.  So it’s fun to ask, “If the universe came from nothing and is expanding into nothing, is the universe bigger or smaller than nothing?”

As this de-thrones reason, western thought has no answer.  Eastern thought embraces and welcomes the paradox but seems to replace reason with practicality. Thus the answer is, “Yes.” And perhaps the paradox is not to be answered but merely acknowledged.

I’m sure this is way over simplified but perhaps food for thought.

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