Tech

Neil Young says modern vinyl is a fashion statement

by Tyler Munro

Neil Young is an innovator and an icon, but with every passing day, he becomes more and more curmudgeonly. Now, with his Pono player seemingly like more of a failure with every passing review he’s dangerously close to “old man yells at cloud” territory.

Most recently, he’s taken issue with vinyl’s resurgence. Sure, he thinks vinyl is a “great niche,” and that “it’s a wonderful thing.” And sure, he hopes “people continue to enjoy vinyl and it continues to grow,” because, again, “it’s a good thing.”

But he also has a problem with how vinyl is consumed because, as he tells Vulture, “people that buy vinyl today don’t realize that they’re listening to CD masters on vinyl.”

Young goes onto say that companies are lazily meeting the demand for vinyl with digital masters and that as a result, vinyl is “really nothing but a fashion statement.”

This is of course a sweeping generalization.

Many albums are mastered for vinyl, often with different masters than their digital counterparts. Albums like Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days and Sleater-Kinney’s No Cities to Love were mastered specific to the format, and even still, engineers aren’t convinced the distinction is even necessary.

Neil Young is likely referring to the Loudness Wars, a mastering technique that essentially cuts out an album’s dynamic range that has famously plagued albums by Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But if the mastering is so explicitly terrible on one format, it’s likely to translate to the other. And as we’re learning with Pono, sound quality is neither a distinction most people can make, let alone 69-year-old Neil Young.