I used to be the owner of about 2,000 vinyl, long playing (LP) albums. Also known as records. As the 5″ optical disc (CD) grew in popularity, my CD collection followed suit and I began to pass along my albums to friends or sell them at garage sales. Slowly my music collection went from 12″ discs to 5″ discs. They were easier store and move, but required new playing hardware. I didn’t have a CD player in my car which meant I continued to make mix cassette tapes from CD’s so my music could travel. Soon a portable CD player was added to my travel bag, expending the possibilities even further.
Then Steve Jobs invented the iPod which signaled another shift for music; the conversion to digital and streaming. Yes, we had Napster and other music sharing sites, but use of them was limited to a sub-section of the music consuming public.
We began to feed CD’s into our computer and transfer music into iTunes which was installed on the hard drive. From there we could load playlists onto the iPod. Just like that, the death of the Walkman. It was a time-consuming process to transform one’s collection to digital, but we did it anyway.
Music labels stopped placing orders for vinyl, which ended a generation’s cultural icon for the packaging of music and expression. CD’s filled stores and we bought them. Lots of them. But technology was not finished with music. Pandora and Spotify, along with dozens of other sites / apps cropped up to curate and stream music for free or without embarrassing ads, for a small monthly fee. Streaming is how we listen, discover and share music. There are millions of Millennials that have never been in a record store and most no longer browse CD bins. Music comes across the Internet directly to the glass of their smartphones and into their ears via bluetooth.
But something has been slowing happening lately and I’ve seen evidence in my local Barnes and Noble store. B&N has replaced racks of CD’s and DVD’s and began stocking vinyl LP’s. Hundreds of them.
The industry has done away with the terms album, LP and record, and are describing this format of music as vinyl. We all knew it was vinyl when we were listening decades ago, but we didn’t much care about the material, only about the meaning of the music. Vinyl is a nice pithy term. A way to distinguish this format from digital or streaming. Seeing vinyl’s comeback makes me smile.
There are two headwinds facing vinyl and they may be too strong for it to be more than a passing fad. First, the factories who manufactured vinyl have been idle for years. Getting them back on line will take investment and time. The second is the hardware needed. To listen to vinyl properly you need a turntable, an amplifier and quality speakers. There are turntables with USB ports that can be hooked up to digital speakers or one’s computer, but this is not at all an acceptable or respectful way to listen.
I’m going to spend the rest of this weekend dusting off my Hitachi diamond stylus turntable, cable it to my Pioneer amplifier and set it to Phono. The diamond stylus will slowly descend onto the grooves of the thin vinyl disc and sound will flow from my Boston Acoustics speakers. I wonder what my ears will think. I also wonder if I will be purchasing many of those albums a second time on vinyl.
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