I also had 1210s and loved to spin with friends, this was a bit of a Friday night ritual. Go and play tunes and just sit their listening to them enjoying the sonic journey.

But what was really the highlight of me week was going to the record shop and picking up a few promos or a new album. There where two specialist dance music shop in my area, and it was a great place to find out about raves and new music. I used to save my dinner money to buy the latest 12″. Then could not wait to get home and play it!

Yes there are arguments about the sound quality and maybe I psychologically fool myself in some way but there is a richness of sound and something extra a CD just does not have.

Problem is space and upkeep… And that is such a big problem today.

Now much collection is gathering dust, and my 1210s are lying dormant. While I’m in Brazil and don’t want to pay the fees to have something shipped I have no space for – alas my life in vinyl has ended and been replace by something cheaper and of less value.

Secondly, a few months ago, I bought a copy of Abby Road on closeout at Best Buy for $2. I couldn’t resist. The clerk who rang up the sale had no idea what I had in my hand, and asked if it was a calendar.

I weep for the youth of today.

Jonathan R. Young
Mortgage Consultant

Also, I like to look at the boxes of old records at garage sales and swap meets and pull out the ones that have the really scantily clad women on them, and then see what the music is like. I have a small collection of records of just what I like to call “sexy women records”. It’s pretty hilarious how sensual the covers are, but then the music is crap.

On the subject of which is better, I think more of the issue is that CD is a precise sampling, turned into discrete steppings and turned back into an analogue signal suffers the distortions and degradations that accompany any such modulation/demodulation process. The transition from one form into the other is flat and precise and is based on a logical algorithm. It’s created by mathematical modelling and has precision as it’s goal, with warmth and naturalness added in after, again through a mathematical model. It’s also created as a generic algorithm designed to try to handle different kinds of sounds. Glitches and errors are points where the natural sound moves outside the bounds that the algorithm’s designers modelled potential sounds and usually results in “sharp” edges; much like artefacts in visual image stills and videos.

Fully analogue vinyl though is a different beast. There are inconsistencies and errors too, discordances and glitches, but they are made from the limits of a natural not a logical space. They are more like the oddities made by echoes from the corners of rooms and other quirks of a physical space.

There is also the the fuzz and warm hiss of the working of the device itself, but this is part of the experience. Much like there are times when experiencing the full reality of something would make it lesser (full lighting at night in a pub/bar/club and there are times when smoking bans make you wish there was something else to mask the smell) digital reproduction can sometimes make things a bit plain and clinical.

Another issue is the way music is mixed and mastered for CD/download, it’s compressed and flattened in a different way to how things used to be mixed. There was a great article in Rolling Stone in 2007 that described the problem very well, there is a PDF copy of it here: [http://www.electriccity.be/Images/The%20Death%20of%20High%20Fidelity%20_%20Rolling%20Stone.pdf] well worth a read.

I have only been purchasing records for the last 6 months, but i feel like playing records is a much more physical and involved experience. Even the act of having to go flip the record over and change records makes listening much more participatory than just putting my iTunes on shuffle.

Basically, whether i am going to listen to vinyl or MP3s depends on my mood and what else i am doing. Being able to selectively buy albums on vinyl or MP3 is a nice luxury. I don’t think going to solely one form or the other is the right answer.