Vinyl returning to the mainstream
Posted: Wednesday, August 29, 2007 6:58 PM
Downloaded music may be the way most people buy their music these days – but there is a growing number of aficionados who are turning back to analog – all the way back to vinyl LPs.
Today’s rebellious young adults started turning to long-playing records because they looked cool -- flat, 12-inch, black discs from the ancient past, which stored only 50 minutes or so of music. So retro!
Then something happened. People actually started to listen to what was on those LPs and discovered they contained great-sounding music. Music that was more lifelike than they were used to.
They liked what they heard -- so much so that vinyl LPs started selling in numbers. Same for all sorts of turntables that play them. Today, many new CD/MP3s releases are also being pressed for vinyl fans.
There’s a good reason for this. In addition to what people remember as the bad things that LPs provide (scratches, clicks and pops) vinyl discs have lots of good things going for them. LPs contain close to 100-percent of the uncompressed music information as originally recorded. CDs contain only about half of that recorded information. And compressed music files are left with only a small percentage of the information that’s on a CD.
Forget convenience. What would you rather listen to?
This back-to-vinyl movement has not escaped the attention of some of the major electronics retailers in this country. When they began noticing turntable sales on the rise they figured it was time to provide some “software’ for customers to play on their “hardware.”
If you look carefully on Circuit City’s Web site, you’ll notice a bunch of albums for sale.
According to spokeswoman Jackie Foreman, Circuit City currently has more than 10,000 album titles available on their Web site.“We want to offer customers a wide variety of entertainment products,” she said.
Foreman said that they’ve quietly offered vinyl online for some time, although Circuit City doesn’t sell LPs in their stores and doesn’t have any plans to do so in the near future.
Despite an unwillingness to break out Circuit City’s vinyl sales figures it seems they’re happy with vinyl’s growing popularity. Otherwise, they wouldn’t continue bothering with LPs.
It’s nice to know that there are still people out there who are able to listen and tell the difference.
