Me Gears Is Ground…
In the animation series, Family Guy, the moronic Peter Griffin is taken on at the local TV station where he does a weekly rant, about things that 'Grind My Gears'. Well here's something that grinds my gears. People who waffle about how they miss the hiss, pop and crackle of the gramophone record. I quote a DT column: "When the compact disc was launched in the early 1980s, we were told it would never wear out, and would produce sound without the hiss and crackle associated with vinyl recordings. Yet the hiss and crackle of vinyl were for many of us part of the experience." (My emphasis.)
True, the durability of the CD was exaggerated, but what the hell, people, how can the distortions of static and physical wear improve the experience of listening to music? OK, it hardly matters with pop and rock, but for anything else? Is the Mona Lisa lovelier seen through a layer of tobacco tar and fly-specks? Should Michelangelo's David be covered with dust, cobwebs and tattoos? Well, should it? Eh?
My first records were all 78rpm shellac, played with a needle like a nail. If played often they became, with each spin, not enhanced, but closer to unlistenable... Not too long ago I had a demonstration of an Edison "hill-and-dale" recording that was amazingly clean and unsullied by noise -- that was because the signal was all at the bottom of the (square-section) groove, and the wear caused by the playback head was on the sides of the groove. But it's the sides of a V-shaped groove that carry the programme — and the wear — when playing a vinyl LP or EP.
It seems to be true that audiophiles hear what they want to hear, which is why it's a prime target area for con men with highly expensive gimmicks to sell. Like power cables costing thousands of dollars that "improve the sound", even carved wooden volume control knobs that — you guessed it: "improve the sound". But nobody has yet come up with a package guaranteeing enhancing additional hum, crackles, pops, whistles, farts and raspberries... perhaps I'm missing an opportunity here!
I'll take my music neat, please... on a well-cared for CD. For me, the absence of extraneous racket is a most desirable "part of the experience".
7th December, 2009
Another script
On an unlabelled tape cassette I discovered a copy of the LP Songs for Swinging Sellers, which someone had made for me a good fifteen or sixteen years ago. I was delighted to find that one of the sketches was Shadows on the Grass, featuring Peter Sellers in uncharacteristic supporting mode as a lonely, bird-feeding, Frenchman, allowing the spotlight (if there is such a thing as an audio spotlight, which is, I grant you, unlikely) to fall on the lady who played his wife, in the film All Right Jack, the strangely wonderful Irene Handl.
My understanding is that Miss Handl ad libbed much of the sketch — the mispronunciations are kept to a minimum, with 'pruerile', 'cronscious' and 'bringit it in' (which may well have been a real slip of the tongue), and the characterisation, of a widow with aspirations to a somewhat higher social niche than the one she actually occupies, allied to healthy 'appetites', is beautifully conveyed. 'Do you know Dalston at all?' she enquires 'Ah well, they call it the Frinton of East 8, so that'll give you some idea'.
The clues to her availability are subtly dropped throughout, and the sketch ends with the lady and her equally lonely French acquaintance heading off for 'din-dins' at her little private hotel residence, where 'they keep a smashin' table… We nearly always have a second vegetable and always croutons with the soup…' And doubtless nature will thereafter take its course. We find ourselves hoping for their sakes that it will…
Anyway, I set to, and transcribed it, and added it here to my Scripts & Transcripts section.
