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I am 35 years old. I grew up with records and cassettes. I personally just love manipulating the records and turntable. a vinyl record, grooves gouged out of a piece of plastic in which a tiny needle with a tiny sapphire or diamond on the tip rides along and moves up and down and laterally to recreate the exact wave functions that make the air vibrate as sound is magic to me.
I love the cover art, the inserts, the inner sleeve art, and in Jazz and classical and blues albums, the fucking intensive and lengthy liner notes. I miss liner notes in CD's. CD's ar so tiny printed that many bands forego liner notes. I used to learn about the band or the artist from them.
I like that if my records get dirty I can wash them. I like that many albums come in cool colors and crazy etchings and limited edition stuff.
I love how a vinyl record feels like an artifact or a historical record as opposed to a consumer product. CD's are by their very nature disposable.
I love how you can get an old 78 rpm shellac platter from 1920 and clean it and play it still, hearing what your grandparents and great grandparents used to jam and fuck to. Old records are stashed away everywhere and they are almost lik archeological finds. I doubt anyone willl ever do exhasutive searches through small mississippi delta towns for historical CD's. people did that in the 60's for old vinyl/shellac 78's, even robert crumb, going door to door at old black southern families and asking if they had old records they would want to sell.
I love how , on a decent system (nothing fancy) you can crank up the volume on a record and continue to get great sound, super fucking loud. you crank up a CD, and not even a poorly mastered one, and you can really hear the distortion and degradadation of the fidelity. I can hear this at clubs and bars when the dj is "spinning" cd's instead of vinyl. grandmaster flash still rocks vinyl when he dj's around the world.
I love the utter simplicity of the techonology needed to play records. anyone with basic electronic knowledge and a radio shack can actually build a turntable and play records. the same cannot be said for cd players or digital file players.
I love records.
I still buy CD's if not vailable on vinyl, but you must remember, that fully 99% of all recorded music of the last 100 years is on vinyl and not on CD and will likely never get re-isued on CD or digital files. if you like old music, old reggae and dub from jamaica, old soul singles, old jazz and classical, old country folk music, old delta blues, you can find the consensus "greats" on reissues, but that is just the tip of the iceberg there.
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