But that's okay, if you're not drunk, fifteen minutes is long enough. After that I turn into a complaining bitch - it's filthy (all clubs are); it's a meat market (all clubs are). But before I reach that point I can manage to get in some useful observations. Actually, it was enough time for me to write the post that follows in my head:
The debate about whether vinyl is better than digital seems to be going in circles. It can afford to just repeat itself ad infinitum, because the battle has long since played itself out... and vinyl lost. Thousands of hours of music that's free to steal or cheap to buy on a computer less than half the size of a turntable vs. a couple of hours of music that's difficult and relatively expensive to acquire as well as heavy as shit and consequently expensive to transport. So say a number of DJs. That's the deal breaker for most people who live in the real world or a city with no record shops like Ljubljana, and who am I to argue. It's a win-win situation, actually, because it enables vinyl heads like Theo Parrish to carve out a nice little niche for themselves.
I know nothing about the technical aspects of sound reproduction. I've read the Wikipedia article about a hundred times, and I'm none the better for it. I tried to equate the things I read there with what I've observed listening to music in clubs, but what the fuck do I know. On the other hand, my initial observations, which go back oh say to about 2006ish, are turning out to be have been more accurate than my complete and total amateurishness would have ever led me to hope. Which is somewhat of a surprise because, all things being equal, while I have no qualms about the advance of technology, I am allergic to imaginary glorifications of the past; I'm also poor, so if digital media could compete on an equal footing with vinyl, I'd be more than happy to take up DJing on the cheap.
But I just don't think it can. Current pro-vinyl arguments (to my knowledge) highlight the "mellow" sound of vinyl and, if I'm not mistaken, its wider range in certain frequencies; pace the pro-vinyl camp, the latter is apparently inaudible to the human ear. Then there's that argument universal to the digital vs. the-old-way-of-doing-things debate which states that whatever the current situation may be, digital technology has been continuously getting better at a very rapid pace and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. So even if the current digital standard is in fact inferior, a number of people are working on it and this can be expected to change very soon. Hence something called 32-bit audio, the superiority of which, I'm led to believe, is readily appreciated by people with perfect pitch, a doctorate in Musicology and a residency at Robert Johnson.
I digress. But... What I've observed from the start is that vinyl is very good at doing one teeny tiny thing which digital media (in my experience) can't. It makes sounds (and forgive me, I'm going to have to get a bit poetic here) "heavier". Not more "mellow" or "brown" (that sounds like a bullshit, faux-nostalgia argument to me, like someone describing the way they imagine the 1970s looked), but more, hmmm, "plastic". Listening to a good record on a good system, the sounds sound the way a physical object feels when you envision a physical object in your mind. You can actually hear the idea of "roundness" in the bass or the idea of "geometric rigidity" in the high pitched stabs. The same sounds on the same system played on digital media, on the other hand, sound the way you imagine sounds in your mind; bass sounds like the idea of "bass" and high pitched staccato stabs sound like the idea of "high pitched staccato stabs".
I'm getting downright Anaxagorean, which I knew was going to happen. This is why I never thought I'd bother to spell out my unqualified observations. But being dragged to a club when what I really wanted to do was stay home and play around with my Sega Saturn led me to a train of thought about the development of technology which, at least for me, helps to clarify my argument:
A Playstation 2, a sixth-generation console, blows a Sega Saturn, a fifth-generation console, out of the water. An Xbox 360, a seventh-generation console, blows a Sega Saturn out of the water, shoots it into tiny pieces in the air, and then shoots the tiny pieces into even smaller pieces before they hit the surface. This is all beyond debate. This is a fact. Again, I've read the Wikipedia articles for all the systems in question about a hundred times, and again, knowing nothing about frame buffers or polygon rendering, I'm none the better for it. It doesn't matter. Every generation of consoles easily trumps the previous one and is capable of delivering incomparably prettier games, and no one would argue otherwise.
But... Sega was known for developing the circuitry of its home consoles and its arcade machines in tandem: developments in the design of the chip set for the Model 1 arcade board influenced the development of the Saturn, which in turn led to new developments that influenced the design of the ST-V or Titan arcade board. The end result is that the Sega Saturn can perfectly replicate the experience of many 2D arcade games originally released in arcades from 1990 to about 1998. Although many of the same games were released for next generation consoles, i.e. the Playstation 2 and Xbox, and manage to preserve the gameplay and pretty much everything else more or less intact, thanks to its uniquely arcane architecture, only the Saturn versions succeed in preserving the "plastic" or "weighty" feel of the sprites (onscreen characters) of the arcade originals: the sprites, and in particular flat, 2D colored planes, feel "heavy"; the individual objects moving on screen look, or more accurately, have the feel of separate physical objects; since we're dealing with 2D games, it would perhaps be apt to say that they feel like separate shapes cut out of paper being shuffled across a colored background.
Cotton 2, probably the most impressive Saturn port. (Yes, I spent
three continues trying to get just the right shot of the leaf bomb.)
In my lucid sobriety, watching the DJ scratch one of those laser records while staring at his laptop, it hit me: technology doesn't universally evolve in the direction of "better" or "more powerful". It can also evolve in the direction of being able to do one thing very well. And that one thing, more often than not, is embedded in the general culture of an era. Once the era in question has passed, and technology continues to develop, that "one thing" gets lost among many other things in the discourse of technology. Conversely, once one restores the perspective of the culture for which it was developed, that one things shines through in its singular importance. 
Considered alongside video games that can faithfully incorporate the laws of physics and produce battle simulations that are the envy of Ministers of Defence, a powerful 2D engine (the thing that makes pretty arcade games) seems like an afterthought. Throughout the arcade era, however, video games faced fierce competition from other companies looking to market to the segment of teen and adolescent males. In a pre-CGI era when decent special effects were prohibitively expensive, the way to teenage boys' wallets was through bright, eye-catching design (see above). The airbrushed images that graced the covers of Iron Maiden and Def Leppard albums and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons manuals, MTV's early graphical image, or, across the pond, the powerful colors and scale effects of anime like Gundam and Robotech... all this led to a path of technological development that saw arcade games, then the vanguard of video game technology, aim to impress through effects of vivid, colorful plasticity. And anybody who waited in line to play TMNT: The Arcade Game in 1990 will recall being thoroughly impressed. That's the experience that the Saturn was designed to flawlessly recreate.
A parallel argument can be made for dance music. Until Friday, my observation that sounds played on vinyl sound "heavier" didn't seem to be of decisive importance. The ability to endow sounds with a physical quality is, after all, just one consideration among many. But when one examines accounts of the beginnings of dance music, it is precisely the ability to overwhelm the senses of listeners, to deliver a transcendental experience, to produce a psychedelic effect, that forms the foundation of both its artistic and technological developments. Telling a story through a series of records, extending records to produce an effect, the two-channel mixer, the twitter array, the modern club sound system, and, perhaps most importantly, the 33-RPM maxi single (which is what we mean when we say "vinyl") - all this was developed by a small group of closely connected DJs and technicians. And it was developed to address the needs of a scene undercut with notions of brotherly love, sexual and personal liberation and transcendentalism rooted in a culture of drug-taking. Those fortunate enough to have partied at the Loft or the Paradise Garage describe it as being an other-worldly, semi-religious experience, and what we know about the people behind those clubs leads us to believe that the technological aspects (all of which were to become mainstays throughout the vinyl era) were carefully constructed with the express aim of producing such an experience.
But we don't have to go so far back in time to figure all this out. We can listen to a track like Sandstorm or pick up a copy of Mixmag from around 1999, when it was essentially a magazine about E with a record review section, to realize that dance music's vinyl era was also its drug era. Without drugs, it is impossible to understand how dance music could have grown the way it did in the pre-internet age: it was the promise of a drug-induced transcendental experience that provided dance music with its popular base, enabling it to extend its influence to all corners of the globe at a rapid pace (again, mostly before the advent of the internet as we know it today), and, at the same time, keeping it from becoming too big on account of the taboos surrounding drugs. The fact that a sizable portion of most scenes was probably about just getting high, without any kind of spiritual connotations, changes nothing. Personally, I recall all those nights I spent high off my ass on the little ledge beneath the speaker in my beloved K4. It'd be pointless to try to describe what listening to the Martin Landsky or Justus Köhncke spin vinyl felt like, so here goes nothing: if getting high and listening to good house music at home is like getting high and watching a kung-fu movie on TV, getting high and listening to those sets was like getting high and having that same kung-fu movie broadcast directly to your head, with the colors re-mastered by Hype Williams and the entire thing reworked into a cosmic allegory about your childhood directed by you in real time (that really is the best way to describe it). The fact that, despite the glaring discrepancies, my personal experience is largely congruent with that of teenagers in Buffalo boots and candy necklaces doing piles of E as Adam Beyer spins hard Scandinavian techno is testament to just how firmly the technical foundations of dance music in the vinyl era were laid in a culture of drug-based escapism.
And in this regard, vinyl vs. digital debates centered on superior technical specifications get it all wrong. Superior at doing what? Today, dance music operates in a different world. Once a tiny minority in the scene, DJs and producers now make up an ever growing number of its most active participants; theirs is an erudite culture centered around sharing tracks, entire 6+ hour sets, opinions and tastes made possible by the internet. Hence the phenomenon, relatively concurrent with the start of digital media's hegemony in clubs (this is especially true of Slovenia), of guys who go to clubs to listen to sets as if they were at a poetry reading (of which I am one). At the same time, an international culture of cool has taken dance music under its mantle: even the most underground clubs are becoming a central place for neatly-dressed hipster boys to pursue the very secular task of attempting to enter into a Sex-in-the-City type relationship with neatly-dressed hipster girls. I'm neither complaining nor innocent on either count, and these are but a couple examples taken from my own experience of what has become a much more general trend.
The point is simply that this is the world into which digital DJ technology was born. It's not a question of whether a MacBook running Traktor can do what vinyl does. I'm told it can do a lot of things better than vinyl, and I have no grounds or reason (no pun intended) to refute these claims. But it can't deliver a spiritual experience, or capture the bright, powerful colors of the naive visions of youth... because nobody's developing it to do that.
And that's sad in a way the mundane progress of technology, with its inevitable losers, can never be.
Gone too soon: Larry Levan and Sega Saturn
