Todays Sundays topic is about the return of the vinyl records into the the home of music lovers.
While I’m a bit to young to fully remember and buying vinyl records, i do know my dad used to play some when i was a kid, you had to walk through the living room calmly, so you didn’t make the pick-up jump. After that i rarely saw records, i bought all my music on CD’s and eventually moved on to digital media such as iTunes and similar services. I was one of the people that said that physical media was dead in just a few years and that everything would be digital in the future.
But a couple of years ago when i got my first stereo setup, although without a turntable, i started seeing more and more albums released as digital download, CD and VINYL!? And i still see them coming. I often look up a release on discogs.com, where you can find good info about different releases. And I’ve noticed that vinyl is coming back, The Rolling Stones is a good example here they are starting to release albums and compilations on vinyl again. There were a couple of years with CD as the only format but that is changing.
One more big indication that vinyl is coming back is the lack of second-hand vinyls. Just 5-10 years ago, i often saw in the local newspapers “buy & sell” section that people were selling or giving away plastic crates full of vinyls, just because they took up so much space. In the same sections nowadays it’s “looking for crates of vinyl” or “looking for vinyl collections”. For me as a collector this is both good and bad, it’s fun to see vinyl coming back, it really is, the more support it has, the longer it lives. But at the same time it’s hard to do find the super deals you could find a couple of years ago with a crate full of vinyl for 5-10$ or even free.
Even if it’s only a return into the homes of audiophiles and collectors, it’s still a return and i think it’s great that the future not just holds digital formats.
I’m a big supporter of vinyl records, i think the sound is slightly better then a CD, but of course it depends on the song as well as the quality of the original recording. But there is something strangely satisfying with putting down the tonearm and hear the pops and crackle as the needle make contact with the vinyl and that’s what keeps me playing a vinyl rather then a CD when it’s time for some fine listening.
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Music for my eyes? 