Better Offline - Monologue: You Should Get Into Vinyl

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

In this week’s monologue, Ed Zitron talks about why you should get into vinyl, and why analog music is so much fun in the digital age. U-Turn Audio: https://uturnaudio.com/pages/turntablesDiscogs: Discogs.com YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All-Zone Media. Hello and welcome to your weekly Better Offline monologue. I have course am Ed Zittron. And this week I'm going to be talking about something completely analog, vinyl. Okay, it's not completely analog. There's some electricity anyway. Now, some of you might have paid attention to how I've been talking the last few months about my mental health journey and all that shit.

And a big part of feeling better about myself has been finding ways to relax. I'm not like a lot of people. So I've had to, I have to teach myself things. I really have to sit down and say, like, look, Ed, you're going to try and work out what relaxing feels like. and I've literally had to teach myself, and I'm getting close. And a lot of this has been about returning to older music and letting things just kind of play instead of pecking around. So the older music in questions like Joe Cocker,

Charles Mingus, Lee Morgan, Durondo, Van Morrison. And as part of this, I decided to get into vinyl because I was walking around with my dear friend Tori Elliott, wired, and she said, we're going to go on a field trip, and I said, I don't like change, where are we going? She took me to Music City in, New York City, and it was just full of vinyl, and I thought, you know what? This looks like fun. I want to get one of these every week. I'm in New York. So I have been doing so. And it's been great. Genuinely,

it's been wonderful for me. And I want to kind of walk you through why and how vinyl works, because surprisingly enough, there's not been a ton about it. There's been a lot of audio pervert stuff. And there's been people saying, oh, vinyl's having a resurgent. Fuck all that. I just want to talk about listening to it. So if you don't know how it works, it is delightfully analog. And I did not know how it worked before, so I had to look it up. So a record player is made up of a few pieces. The platter where you put the record, the belt that spins the platter, the spindle, which is the thing that you put the record on,

like the hole in the record goes on that. The motor, which turns the platter to spin said record, and the tone arm, which holds the needle or the stylus, which sticks onto the record and goes along the grooves of the record, sends the signals to the cartridge, which is the little box on the top of the stylus that takes the vibrations and turns them into electrical signal, signals that play music, signacles. We're not editing it, I'm just going to let that one fly.

Now, if I miss the piece there, do not bother correcting me. I'm not going to edit it, not going to fix it. But in simpler terms, it's quite literally record player go brer. Now, I basically only spend my money on Diet Coke and going to baseball, so we'll have myself a little bit of an extravagance. I got myself the Orbit Basic Turntable from U-turn audio, which is the wirecutters budget pick, along with their ethos speakers, which sent me back about a grand. You can go cheaper on record players and speakers, but I think this is absolutely a place where you get what you pay for. Based on a little Googling, it seems getting a cheaper record player can literally destroy the records, because if the needle and the cartridge

aren't good, it scrapes them. I didn't really understand why, but it sufficiently scared me. I'd also already bought the other things, so it didn't really scare me that much. I should note that I got the all-big basic, because it has a pre-amp built into it, meaning that you can just plug it directly into some speakers rather than having to get a separate amplifier. If you're not super technical, just know that this means a plug go red and yellow cables, red and white maybe, into a speaker rather than a giant box that has a bunch of other stuff. I also got something called a cue lever, which is a little arm that delicately raises or lowers the arm and the stylus onto the record. You need one of these. You must have one. My ape-like hands would probably just shove the

needle repeatedly into the record, destroying a beautiful relic of the 60s. Anyway, all this took about 10 minutes to set up, and it was mostly because it was learning our record players work, as I went and also I was on two hours of sleep. I'm 39 years old. I shouldn't be taking a red eye. You have to loop the belt around the platter, which is the round bit, and then click some stuff into place, then connect the speakers with the cables that come with it. And there you go. You just kind of start playing records. Now, as far as actually getting records, I'm a nasty freak, so I decided to go to a website called Discogs.com, which is both a great place to organize what records you have and buy the ones you don't. I decided to get a selection of classics from the

60s and 70s. Originals. Joe Cockers, with a little help for my friends, Charles Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Lee Morgan's Cornbread, Van Morrison's Moon Dance, in part because I wanted to hear them as they were played on release, and in part because these are records that came out when my mom was in her 20s, which is when I moved to New York, so I was kind of like, fuck it, play records like my mom. I also got a few newer records and remasters of things like Queen's Stone Age's songs for the death and working with the Miles Davis Quartet, as well as this insanely high-end limited edition pressing of Miles Davis is kind of blue, because I was curious and I had some Amazon credit.

Now, the reason I got such a selection was I was curious whether things sounded different based on how old they were and whether the whole vinyl sounds better thing was a myth. And the answer is, yes, they do sound different and no, it's not really a myth at all. The originals from Mingus, Morgan and Morrison all sound different, old, but not in a way that's crackly or bad. The percussion feels a bit more present and the bass tones are a bit more forceful. It feels, I don't even know how to say it because I'm not a music journalist, but it feels rounder. It feels more alive.

And I realize this might be psychosomatic, a thing I'll say later. But, and I'm going to be honest, like, Cocker's help with help from my friends. I've listened to this album a great deal digitally. It's down pitch and it has a softer feel to it. And it just sounds different in a nice way. Describing sound with words is difficult, which is why I'm not. a music journalist, but the way these record plays was and is incredibly special. And what was heartening was even the cheaper, by which I mean 30-buck records. I got like Herbie Hancock's

Imperial Isle or Art Blackie's Caravan. They still played marvelously. And I must say, Caravan is a fucking incredible record. Just the drums at the beginning. It's insane. I stood up and I did the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing thing at my record player. And all of this is possible because we kind of live in the golden age of vinyl. We've got these dedicated audio engineers who dig out master tapes and perfectly press them onto these gorgeous records, and they sound amazing. And my favorite example of that is this UHQR pressing of Miles Miles Davis's kind of blue, or mentioned earlier. And it came from this company called Analog Sounds, and it just sounds insane. Like the instruments are in the room, and Miles Davis is watching

me write a post saying, what if Anthony Bordane saw Jojo's Bizarre adventure? I don't think Miles Davis would love that. I think Charles Mingus might have liked Jojo, but I don't think Miles Davis would have. This is based on my very thin knowledge of jazz history. Email me if you have any thoughts about this, what famous musicians would or would not like Jojo. But nevertheless, the UHQR stuff is insane. I'm going to put a link to them in the notes. There's a story from the Times I believe about them. It's just there are people dedicated to vinyl right now, more dedicated than any tech CEO, and they love it, and perhaps it will destroy them like a cursed amulor. But they have found this incredible way of recreating music, I guess, if you could even call it that.

And it sounds just bonkers. I've already ordered a few others because I really wanted to hear Steely Dan's dirty work on an extremely expensive vinyl. And I'm not even being sarcastic. That song is a complete banger. And if you disagree with me, you're simply wrong. I love listening to vinyl. It's changed how I listen to music for the better. The convenience of digital audio means, though, I have this kind of bad habit. I imagine some of you do as well. I skip a around, I repeat songs, I find myself stuck in these musical ruts, where I'm just listening to one or two songs again and again and again because of my emotion or stay, because I want to feel a certain way, because I want to sustain a mood, or banish a mood. And while that can be useful, kind of takes

the fun out of music at times. Vinyl obviously naturally forces you to sit with at least one side of it. And I found myself keeping going regardless, like I'll flip it over. Now, Reditors and engineers will argue that vinyl does not sound better, but I, a moron, fully disagree. I've listened to LPs, I'll Sleep When You're Dead, maybe a hundred times an MP3. That song, that album even, got me through college. Without it, I would have probably gotten a train out of Aberystwyth and simply never returned. Wouldn't have gone back to London either. But that album helped me.

And I will tell you the vinyl-based version is different. The synths are more insistent. It feels dystopian and brutal. It's overwhelmingly dire, and it's because vinyl sounds warmer and more present. And I don't know if this is all in my head. I really do not. But I am someone that is naturally a bit cynical, and I'm just having more fun listening to music than I ever have in my life. Instead of those loops, instead of finding myself kind of just using music as a tool as just a thing that exists in my life, it's become this deliberate, not even mood setter, because sometimes, you know, you might feel like an album.

you don't feel like a song. And you'll find yourself really enjoying something you didn't really think of. Marjorie, with a little help for my friends, for example. A song that I on my MP3s would skip every time has this warm Hammondorgan shit to it. It just sounds marvelous. And you can also talk about music in this incredibly insufferable way like I am right now. But I don't know, insufferable or not, I'm having the time of my fucking life with this. And I really recommend you do too.

The ritual of putting on a record feels good. This sounds amazing. And we're in this digital age defined by convenience over joy, and it's a deliberacy and a way of focusing more, even if it's on in the background. It feels more significant. I don't know. I'm talking in the wanky way that I'd usually make fun of AI people for. But this is music.

You can be emotional. You can be esoteric with the things you love. You're not hurting anyone telling people. that vinyl is superior or makes you feel better, because it is a very personal experience, and you can, quite literally, travel back in time. You can pick up things from the 60s or the 70s and hear it as they were then.

And yeah, there are some crappy vinyl pressings. I'm hearing the No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom just doesn't have a good vinyl release, which sucks because that's one of my favorite albums. But it's helping me return to albums I love and listen to them deliberately and with just a whole new, different soundstage, I guess you'd call it? I don't know. Whether or not this is exact or not,

whether it's anything more than just the ritual and the environment that's making me feel this way, I feel fucking good doing it. And I just cannot recommend it enough. Give it a go if you've been considering it. I've found peace and happiness in LPs, and I think you will too. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

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