What got lost when records stopped having two sides?

Certainly if you buy the Small Faces' "Darlings Of Wapping Wharf Launderette" the first CD ends where side 1 of "Ogden's Nut Gone Flake" ends and similarly I believe the first CD of "Love Story" ends where side 1 of "Forever Changes" ends - although whether that serves the same purpose in that context or serves merely to encourage the listener to play both discs one after the other is debatable (and how do CD multiplayers fit into this?).

["still the norm" poss. = "I was still buying them"]

Of course this also entailed the joy of having one of the records fail to grip properly on the one below and starting to slip....

< realises he's made appallingly embarrassing revelation regarding pre-punk listening habits; walks away whistling and attempting to look nonchalant whilst hoping no-one will notice and draw attention to this extraordinary faux pas >

you know if you look at an old (ie 20+ years old) record player, it often says 33 1/3 as opposed to just 33, which is all you see nowadays?

does this mean record manufaturing techniques have also changed in the intervening years? And if so, does this mean if I listen to an original 1968 pressing of The White album on my bought-it-last-year deck, I'm actually hearing the music a little bit slower than was originally intended?

I ask becaue a friend of mine played me some Magazine album or other on her ancient turntable a few months ago, and I mentioned that it sounded a bit fast, and she said she'd only ever heard it on that particular machine so didn't know if it was fast or not.

So maybe she's spent her whole life hearing music too quickly! Truly mind-frying implications, methinks.

LPs are much, much more interesting than CDs to me from a textual standpoint

Don't you think creating a (good) CD requires a similar process and discipline?

Just because the contraints are different doesn't mean they don't exist or aren't equally significant....

"I also think that for pop/rock/r&b, whatever, 40 minutes is more than enough for an album - these CDs that drone on and on and on for 70 minutes get on my wick."

Indeed, but doesn't that actually mean that knowing when to stop / what to leave off is a vital (additional?) discipline required for making a (good) CD?

A discipline that seems sadly lacking - especially with hip hop artists!

My parents gave my half-brother a copy of a record -- I think it may have been the Star Wars soundtrack, although I don't really recall -- and it turned out he already owned it. Rather than return it, though, he expressed his delight that now he could just put both records on the spindle (he, like me, had one of those nifty old hi-fi's where you could stack up multiple records, and when one was done playing, the next one would just drop on down) and listen to the whole thing in sequence, without having to get up and turn it over. I don't think this was for any particular aesthetic reason; he was just lazy. I don't think my mother ever really forgave him for that, although I'm not sure it was the waste or the laziness that galled her more.

An answer to Mark's question: What got lost? One more petty reason for families to squabble.

http://www.3e.org/nota/archives/pix/cbg.jpg

artists didn't put 40 minutes of music on classic vinyl albums because they thought that was a good platonic length; they did it because that's what the vinyl could hold. when vinyl used to spin at 78 rpm, they put less music on it. and if they could've figured out a sonically acceptable way to make the thing spin at 16 rpm, they would've put more on it.

we animals aspire to fill the time we have; always have and always will.

and when the time we had was 33 rpm vinyl, it was a good time.

I'm all for double-sided DVDs. People should be forced to get up and flip it over every six hours.

While I do like the two-side structure, I think that most really great albums (with all terrific songs, sequenced well) are probably equally great either way - especially now, in the CD era, when good sequencing involves figuring out how it's going to sound all in one shot. For more average albums, it seems like the programming template has just changed. It used to be that Side A would have most of the best songs, and Side B would kick off with a particularly strong song (often a single), and then slide into filler after that. Now, with CDs, the best songs tend to come at the beginning and end of the disc, with the filler towards the middle.

I do like it when a CD reissue of an older LP puts a little pause in between "sides," but I don't think it's really necessary (you can put it in mentally, as long as the songs are grouped the original way on the back cover). For (usually indie) albums released after the advent of CDs, in which the band knew they'd be issuing a vinyl version as well as a CD, it's kind of interesting sometimes to see how the songs are arranged. (Like with Pavement's Crooked Rain, which is a prime example of the "LP-era" filler-on-side-B template.)

The switch from 2 sides to 1 changed the emphasis from space (or time-geography) to simple pure time. That is, the 30 or so minutes of 1 side was a terrain that could or probably would or is markedly possible manipulable: it is a geography, a country, a map reliable or not. And you had two to play off in a civil war or dance or a fuck. Whereas, the switch to CD expanded everything out into the formless size of a universe. Or another way to put it, perhaps, '2 sides' is equivalent to poetry where the sure marshalling of scansion, space, pacing, footings and holdings are all dictated as part of the form. (Constraints sediment content; form sediments content.) '1 side' = prose, woah free for all till the paper runs out. (But obv. structures develop within the loose of the novel / 1 side, so as in novels we accept the Chapter, in CDs [or albums?] we accept certain memes [the classic British hopeful end-song eg Mazinquaye, OPM, Boy in Da Corner]). Huh.

this was deliberate but nice marketing -- the thing won't work over a whole lp, you've got that backup career of coverds, -- but essentially a prog rock /canterbury/ guild style jibberish country and western as sung by Frank Sinatra Jr. -- mr america

this was a challenge to the whole format
each side had a different length
because sometimes you are forced to get up and flip the record over
to get back to the mangnificant a-side -- all the songs are about war or dirty deal aor post-hippie -- with this record you're meant to take the needle off after the second song on side two, perhaps

the b-side is consumerism -- 15 minutes of commercial material -- plus two songs that seque into each other

but yeah, the only record lp i know of with three different lengths and again that london scheme of making lps not '45s

laurie uses it to move her voice down a scale so she can sing and using a vocoder satarise Dolly Parton, that's "Walk the Dog", the b-side -- sick and sped up and dolly parton at 45, same but different at 33\1/3 -- and o superman would work better as music when sped up (so as not to get monotonous, but to propel the words at a real rappers wollop of politics

just one 20 minute jab of "Sandanista" every so often is enough for a while, but i might change the side

buying "Sandanista" the big cardboard and vinyl 3lp set (never done before except by Yes when in decline,) so yes to Escalator over the Hill, and no to the science fiction prog rock drips, no to yes

"Sandanista" is the first record set which imposed a semi random sequence of moods on the listener, ie the format ensured that enough different sides meant a different engagement would ensue, that you would get lost in the middle of this music thing, 6 sides on random play, thier would be enough permutations and just not too many to ensure a quite different broad geo-political perspective

so it's an early example of random play you can only just do with cds -- selecting the next side to play was throwing the coin/lp

the format theoretically ensured you just kept changing sides all the time, or went off and did something else

that first situation where twelve inch 45rpm lps were accepted and used by artists, which gave them a whole new sonic palette,
eps with different songs at different speeds and the anderson certainly fits that case (done in new zealand on yinyl b.t.w.),

could be used to modulate and distort the sound, degradation into what MTV calls its "lo-fi" category (for the white tripes) spectacularly and fool radio listeners that their radio was melting (just for instance)

i missed the dead c play canterbury university the other day and that was annoying, and i do love bits of trapdoor..exit and the various DRx flavours -- more deserving of the lo-fi award i thought

lo-fi is that much more potentially self-destructible on vinyl, many sorts of frequency screw ups and bad needle counter-weighting (of course that's abstract art though, not rock music) problems, meaning you'll hear the record once spotless, and every time after that it will distort more and more (and you might want to cheque your needle)

because i haven't finished but i don't want to terminate the thread accidentally by boring anybody

"THE 2-SIDED LP MODEL"
    Side A
1. Big Opening Number for Side A
2. Hit Single
3. Knockoff of Hit Single
4. Filler
5. Filler
6. Peppy Number to close out Side A
    Side B
7. Big Opening Number for Side B
8. Possible other Hit Single
9. Knockoff of Possible other Hit Single
10. Filler
11. Big Symphonic Finale Number and Outro! TADAH!

"THE 1-SIDED CD MODEL"
    Side That Ain't Shiny
1. Big Opening Number
2. Hit Single
3. Knockoff of Hit Single
4. Feebler Knockoff of Hit Single
5. Filler
6. Filler
7. Filler
8. Filler
9. Filler
10. Filler
11. Filler
12. Filler
13. Filler
14. Suprisingly good song stranded at the end.
15. Filler
16. Big Finish and Outro! TADAH!
17. (Silence)
18. (Hidden Bonus Track)

if you get the lp sized 3lp, set, you get a nice box,
and the 32 page guide/ libretto forms the coffe table book

(and lot's of secret studio tricks)
(2 years to make 3lp six side set)

(and inter-galactic action with the radiophonic masterpiece "Dr. Why" -- nerdy ?)

- Music fans' health decreased considerably as they did no more have to get up from their sofa to turn the record over
- Doubled album length means that most major acts will wait 2-3 years between every album release.
- Those useless throwaway efforts that would be put on a single b-side earlier on (or hidden away to appear on a box-set or as part of a remastered album 20-30 years later) are now put at the end of the album instead

Plus, there's nothing that turns girls on more than when having sex and stopping to to flip the record over.

sonic youth programed four 12" eps at 33\1/3 and an album or two well

i think that album and the companion whitey album, that sonic youth showed us all their ideas -- DN was their crossover hit album, along with whitey -- theiw best two or three albums

And whenever there's bonus tracks, I program them last as a third side.

Two notes to this: There are certain albums that I've never seen on vinyl, so sometimes I have to make my own guess at when one side ends and the other one ends. Sometimes I am wrong. On All Shook Down by The Replacements, I always thought that "When It Began" ended side one and "All Shook Down" started side two. Not so.

I do prefer the CD copy of Big Star's Third. I can program the album with two sides. I can rearrange the sequencing to mimic some of the other issues. And I can go ahead and add "'Till the End of the Day" as the song to finish with.

But yeah. Definitely bring back two sides. Didn't Bob Mould stick fifteen seconds of a needle hitting the label between "sides" of his Bob Mould CD?

Umm. Come to think of it, good riddance.

Ha ha indeed! And another ha ha! to the group (whose name I infuriatingly cannot think of right now, altho I know that they were quite popular) whose first LP had a "Side One" and "Side A"!

Here's what I lament the loss of the most: The lack of a Side One Closer - Many classic bands over the years apparently considered that final slot to be the "prestige" position where they inserted the tours-de-force that they were proudest of at the time. I'm thinking of "Light My Fire", "Marquee Moon", "Stairway to heaven", etc. Not any more.

.

Joni, before I got my own first record player in '75, I used my parents' old 1960s-vintage 4-speed hi-fi, and I too was always curious about the 16rpm function, never having seen ANY records that played at 16, so I looked it up recently. Turns out that it was apparently used primarily for spoken-word things, like books-on-disc or recordings of famous speeches. Main priority was to maximize playing time, of course; sound quality was a non-issue.

1) does dave q still listen to everything on random?

2) what does cozen mean by the "classic British hopeful end-song" or, well, anything else he writes in this thread?

3) why doesn't a gap in the middle of a CD accomplish exactly what two sides did? yeah you can skip it but it's a manual gesture prompted by a silence and that does the same trick (provisional ans: since it is obviously not necessitated by any formal constraint, the "artistic whole" of the musician's bi-partite scheme takes on a different cast, is just (possibly) pretentious rather than ingenious; in any case, it niggles and feels imposed, because it is)

4) what does george gosset (where is he, by the way?? i am suddenly alarmed) mean when he says "twelve inch 45rpm lps were accepted and used by artists, which gave them a whole new sonic palette" ... i am only familiar with this on "dj copies" of singles and sometimes albums, where i assumed it was at 45 in order to spread out the song spatially so that it was easier to find a spot in the song to drop the needle into. also it has bizarrely only now that it's occured to me that 45s (and 78s) have better sound quality than 33s, given that the needle travels over more space - more space = more "resolution"? is this why john fahey released that set of 78s? (besides his being a cantankerous old you know what.)