lps

LP revival: Fact or fantasy?

I'm not sure why, but there's a never-ending stream of articles cheering on vinyl's comeback. I guess if it's a slow news day, editors can't resist plugging in yet another story about booming LP sales, and they always claim something along the lines of "Kids are digging the grooves, they've seen the light, and now crave analog sound!"

Puh-leeze!

Don't get me wrong; I wish it were true. Maybe in some alternative universe, vinyl is flying off the shelves, and kids are ditching their iPods and buying turntables.

Back here on the Earth we know and love, 2008 sales of LPs were up 89 percent, from 990,000 in '07 to 1.88 million in '08. That's hardly a boom, now that CD sales are in the hundreds of millions. The best-selling LP of 2008 was Radiohead's "In Rainbows," which sold a piddling 28,800 platters. Second-place honors went to another British band, The Beatles, which sold 16,500 "Abbey Road" LPs. If those numbers are accurate, and Radiohead's Thom Yorke and company were trying to live off LP sales, they'd have to get day jobs.

So sure, there's more and more new and reissue vinyl, and that's great, but only a teensy-weensy number of people buy new vinyl. Most of my vinyl-loving buddies regularly score free records on the street, or pay a buck or two for used vinyl to play on their megabucks high-end turntables. Again, no problem there, but it's not the same as a true vinyl resurgence. That's just media hype.

I love vinyl because it looks cool and sounds great. I own around 4,000 LPs. And I'm hoping that the vinyl revival keeps growing. But the market for physical media--CDs and LPs--has nowhere to go but down. More than anything else, people want cheap or free music, playable anywhere they want. … Read more

LP collectors: Vinyl-obsessed video tells all

Alan Zweig's terrific YouTube video takes you deep inside the record collector's mind. The funny part is, even guys with 15,000 LPs don't think that they have a lot of records or consider themselves collectors.

Hey, some of us collect baseball cards or Corvettes. What's so wrong with filling your house with vinyl?

How I get my music

Over on the Audiophiliac blog, Steve Guttenberg is polling readers about how they get their music. Here are my answers to his questions.

Do you buy CDs, LPs, MP3s, iTunes, or 8 track cartridges? I purchase about 80% of my music on LP. For a few years in the early 1990s it was almost impossible to find new vinyl, but now it's reasonably common, especially for indie rock, electronic music, and hip hop. (Classical? Not so much. Jazz? Only re-releases.) In fact, vinyl availability sometimes convinces me to buy a record I otherwise might have skipped--Of Montreal'sGladiator Nightstick Collection … Read more

A turntable for all generations

Apparently, the musical nostalgia we've noticed recently just won't quit. The latest gear for LP die-hards comes in the form of Numark's "x2 Hybrid Turntable" as featured on Uncrate.

This music time machine spans several generations, mixing vinyl albums, CDs and MP3s (what, no cassettes?) to bring out the aspiring DJ in you. But for its $1,000 price tag, we'd expect them to throw in a few 8-track tapes too.

Save LPs on CDs for auld lang syne

Maybe the New Year is making people reminisce, but for some reason lately we've been seeing more products than usual that convert cassette tapes, LPs and other historical artifacts to digital form. One such example is Hammacher Schlemmer's "LP to CD Record Stereo," which does exactly what its rather prosaic name indicates: It records albums onto discs, allowing you to pause or change LPs along the way if some tunes are just too embarrassing to preserve.

In addition to standard 33 albums, Chip Chick says the machine can record at 45 and even 78 speeds. Now … Read more

The $150,000, quarter-ton turntable

With a name like the "Transrotor Artus," this contraption sounds like a piece of heavy machinery that might be found in an assembly plant. And by the looks of this photo, it almost could be.

But closer inspection of the top reveals the real purpose of this erstwhile bucket of bolts: a turntable. And not just any old record record player, but an "LP player/phonograph/grammophone" that goes for $150,000, according to Hiendfi, and weighs nearly a quarter-ton. Maybe it's priced by the pound.