God How I Love Vinyl Records

6/4/2016

Commentary and Analysis
by Mitch Santell / Co-Founder Big Reggae Mix

There is nothing that is more fun for a fan, a musician, a producer, an engineer and thousands who enjoy the sweet sounds of a real Long Playing Vinyl Record.

How popular is vinyl now? Barnes and Noble have brought vinyl back into the music departments of all their major stores. Lauren Passell who is a writer at B&N had this to say about why those L..P.'s are back!

All the cool kids are clamoring for vinyl these days. The LPs that took a back seat to CDs for 20-odd years are having a resurgence, and fun fact: Barnes & Noble offers a slew of vinyl LPs for your listening enjoyment. Here are seven reasons we think vinyl is here to stay—and why you should jump on this trend.

The sound of the music. There’s no disputing that listening to a song on vinyl is a wildly different experience than listening to the same song digitally. Vinyl offers a warmer sound that really fills the room, one that tells you more secrets and offers a richer story than an MP3 ever could. The whirring of the album on the table, the occasional scratch—they make the music a uniquely personal experience.

The experience. Listening to something on vinyl requires you to pay attention. Sure, you can putter around your apartment or dance while you listen, but you can’t bring your turntable on a run (oh, you can? I am impressed.) and you can’t bring it in the car. When you’re experiencing vinyl, you’re in your home. You select an album. You put it on the table. And you start it—at the very beginning. Then you listen to it, giving it your full attention. Kind of beautiful, right?

The cover art. Album covers give artists a lot of space to fill with an image that will provoke a powerful feeling and connect them to the music inside. There’s nothing quite as iconic as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Thom Yorke’s The Eraser is a hypnotizing sweep of black and white shapes and scratches that seem to personify Yorke. And you probably had a poster of the Abbey Road cover on your wall in college. In contrast, album art for digital tracks means tiny thumbnail images on your iPhone. Not quite the same.

The tangibility. It feels so right to hold a record. You’re carrying around all the work and emotion the album contains. The LP drives home the idea that real people poured their hearts and souls into creating a lasting piece of art for their fans to enjoy. Carrying an LP in your hands is so much more satisfying than carrying a collection of bytes in your pocket.

The full album experience. Sure, you can lift the needle and skip to your favorite song. But when you’re listening to an LP, you’re a lot more likely to chill out and experience the album in its entirety, from start to finish, as the artist intended. In this way, you might come to love a song that you weren’t sure about at first. You’ll start to understand why the artist ordered the songs in the way she did. And you’ll really grasp concept albums like Pet Sounds.

It’s what our ancestors listened to. My parents have a large vinyl collection that I love flipping through when I’m home. What am I going to give my kids? The password to my Spotify account? When you buy LPs, you’re building a library that your friends and family can enjoy perusing. Looking at the albums you’ve selected will give them insight into your personality—and make them realize that you are one cool and trendy person, since you’re up on the vinyl craze.

Value. You can actually make a profit on your albums if you should one day choose to part with them. Vinyls new and old are highly sought after—mostly because they are hard to find. So aren’t you glad we’re selling them? We sure are!