“With records in general, people are quick to talk about the analog experience of music, saying a lot of cliché things about warmth, texture, and authenticity, and how it ‘just sounds better…’ the first time you hear a 78, it doesn’t sound great. It is noisy either because the shellac is damaged or it wasn’t pressed well to begin with. They were often recorded on rudimentary setups, and everything sounds a little shoddy… [but] there is something about hearing every second of the hundred years that record has been around.
“Nowadays, people are hyper-aware, when they step into a recording studio, of the ways in which it will be the defining record of that performance, but that just didn’t exist back then. People didn’t really think about it; it was all so new. So there’s something really raw and pure about the way they perform—with singing, in particular, and I think you can hear it in the instrumentation a little bit, too.
“There’s a certain mystical quality to it… I listen to LPs, I listen to CDs in my car, and I have an iPod. But there’s something about hearing 78s that is such a singular and transformative experience.”
Creative Camerawork 