Vinyl Love

A piece on CNN about those of us hopelessly in live with "obsolete" media:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/IREPORT/08/11/vinyl.irpt/index.html?hpt=C2

I happen to have the Dirt Band and Alice Cooper albums mentioned in the story, inserts intact. I am clearly a pack rat.

I hung on to my rock LPs after buying a CD player about twenty years ago. I had the storage space for the vinyl, never thought of getting rid of it, and still played the LPs every now and then. My wife bought me a pair of cordless headphones for my last birthday which means I can now wander round the house listening to 'Let It Bleed' or 'Raw Power', so my LPs have had a new lease of life. That said, I don't go along with the argument that the recorded sound of vinyl is superior to that of compact disc - they both sound the same to me - and wouldn't buy an LP if I could get the same album on CD. If only my audio cassettes weren't dying en masse...

P.S. There's a music shop close to home (Manchester, NW England) which has started selling new LPs once more, albeit jazz records.

I still have 1200 or so LPs ... they take up the bottom shelves of about half my bookcases. Unfortunately, there's so much crap piled up in front of my bookcases, that it takes a major "archaeological" project to get to the albums.

My 10-year-old just started taking violin lessons, and I was trying to explain the possibilities of the instrument, via Papa John Creach. I ordered in a CD of Jefferson Airplane's Long John Silver (I would have preferred Bark, but could only find that as an import at the time), and then had to explain how the original album folded up into a humidor (leaving out the part about how "back in the day" that was typically used ... ahem), along with other classics (School's Out, Billion Dollar Babies, Sticky Fingers, Led Zeppelin III, the "JA" variant of A&P on the grocery bag around Bark, etc.).

 

I have around 3,000 LPs. I never saw the point of getting rid of LPs in order to replace them with CDs, although I have a decent CD collection as well. I still play my LPs quite frequently and I bring them in to the radio station I volunteer at and use them on my weekly jazz show.

I still paw through the vinyl racks at used record stores and garage sales from time to time as well. And when I feel like treating myself, I'll buy one of those spiffy "super duper extra special vinyl" versions of favorite LPs.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, in the world of recorded music enjoyment to match listening to a great LP the first time out of the jacket. A CD cannot match that experience, in my personal opinion.

Long live vinyl!

#3> I believe Papa John Creach also makes a terrific appearance on Hot Tuna's album, "Burgers."

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, in the world of recorded music enjoyment to match listening to a great LP the first time out of the jacket

You and I are in good company: both Keith Richard and Bob Dylan have expressed the sense of warmth and authenticity that comes from the contact of needle with vinyl.

In the early days, I played with the notion of jettisoning the vinyl when the cd came into my possession. (I still mourn the day I heartlessly put my copy of "Hot Rocks" in the recycle bin.) What broke me from the delusion was the realization that there was not way in hell I was going to turn loose of my two Robert Johnson albums, no matter how damn good (and it was good) the CD boxed set was.

No matter how densely you pack those bits you just can't come up to the smoothness, warmth, presence, and immediacy of an analog record.

Re violinists outside of classical music: I love Stuff Smith's performances with the King Cole "Trio" - all of which, I believe, have been reissued on heavy virgin vinyl.

I work at book and media retail store. With the oncoming death of compact discs, it is amazing to watch people look at our used and new vinyl racks with absolute glee, seemingly going against logic and the winds of time.

I have always believed that jazz music sounds infinitely better on vinyl, than any other medium.