JoshuaKaiser.com Joshua Kaiser's Blog

I am Starting a Vinyl Collection

I've been a music collector for the majority of my life. My very first album was Still Cruisin' by the Beach Boys. My parents bought it for me on cassette for what must have been my 10th or 11th birthday. Of course, over time a migrated away from cassettes and now have several hundred cd's sitting on shelves or in storage cases at home. Since then, I've also set out to remove many of the media hassles in my life by embracing downloadable music through services like iTunes.  I now have thousands of albums in my music collection, mostly digitally purchased from iTunes or ripped from my personal collection. I love my iPod, and my media center PC, and I'm not likely to move away from conveniences like that any time soon. However, I've recently become interested in the world of vinyl.

So why vinyl? It's nowhere near as portable. It adds to the stacks of media that I already have to manage and keep organized. It scratches and wears out. It's pretty much all of the things that made me want to digitize my whole collection in the first place. However, I've realized a few things that may it pretty intriguing.

• Vinyl Cannot be Digitized
• Vinyl Brings Back an Experience
• Vinyl Can Appreciate in Value
• Audiophiles LOVE Vinyl - Why?

So here's just a little explanation.

One of the basic appeals to vinyl records is that the somehow have more life in them than a digital recording.  Now this might be the result of those hippie record player taking one trip too many, or of the vinyl record industry trying to preserve its stakes in the music game, but the bottom line is that if you believe that analog has something that digital does not (other than crack and fuzz), then downloading it is out of the question.  That gets us back to the basics with physical media, which brings me to my next point.

Vinyl brings back the experience of purchasing an album.  Remember getting a new CD as a young person and sprawling across the bed with the book open, blaring the new tunes as you thumbed through the pages of the insert and began to memorize ever lyric of each song?  That whole scenario is bigger and better with vinyl.  The page are bigger, often filled with extras that are not included in smaller formats, and definitely not in digital downloads.

Vinyl can appreciate in value.  Take any one of the CD's from my shelf and throw it on eBay.  You'll be lucky to get a couple bucks.  You definitely aren't going to get what the disc originally cost and, unless you are a record store paying next to nothing for used discs, aren't going to make a profit.  By contrast, many vinyl records have a collectible appeal to them that makes them actually gain value.  Various printings are frequently very short run, or have collectible extras that make the purchase more than just a product.  It's a piece of history.

Finally, I've noticed that audiophiles seem to have an insatiable lust for vinyl.  As noted above, I'm not sure if this is the hallucinogens talking, or if they are genuinely on to something, but I aim to find out for myself.  With CD sales still dropping, and vinyl sales nearly doubling over the past two years, it's reasonable to assume that record labels may be involved in increasing the hype.  It would be a clever marketing tactic to say the least.  If downloads destroyed record sales as we know them, then what better way to combat them then to convince the general public that a product that is by nature not digitizable is in some way a superior product?

The next step is to do a little research and find a good record player.  I've just started to dip in on this, and there is a lot to learn.