SilentTalkie

As digital piracy and distribution continue to grow, there’s an interesting trend developing in the music industry. People are abandoning Compact Discs. While many of them are jumping ship to the aforementioned mediums, a larger number are re-visiting their childhoods and moving back to LPs. But why would anyone want to do this? Vinyl is more expensive to create and distribute, with many fewer production facilities, so it takes longer for your album to be pressed.

Well, there are a few reasons. Most champions of the medium celebrate its warmer sound. Well, this doesn’t do that much for me. Most of the music I listen to is spun on my iPod and done while I’m sitting at my cubicle at work, so this doesn’t really fit with me. Some labels, like Merge Records have started offering free mp3 downloads with purchase of the corresponding LP. This solves most of the problem (although it’s pretty easy just to download it as well) but I’m not sure if it makes up for the lack of availability of vinyl and the slightly higher expense.

Another consistently orated excuse for the switch is the experience. You are confined to the area around your record player, so you’re bound to make it more of an event and treat the artistry less like background music. While this is nice, this reasoning also requires a decent record player (which is expensive) and stereo to go with it (which I don’t have). Purists will tell you to buy a belt driven player because it produces less noise than a motor driven turntable (if you have $10,000 you can buy one with a laser stylus so you don’t have to worry about anything touching the record) but I’ve never been that concerned about sound quality. If I was, I probably would’ve ripped my CD’s in a lossless format, but with the amount of hearing that I’ve lost, I don’t notice much of a difference between 192 kB/s MP3′s and the real article.

The biggest plus for the format that I can see is the bigger artwork and packaging (yes, that’s a plus). While you need bigger shelves to store them (I wouldn’t recommend just stacking them like your CD’s), the 12″ record allows for you to actually examine the artwork and get a full appreciation for something that is usually extremely compressed. When you have a large canvas, it’s a lot harder to apply some mediocre artwork to it where everyone can see it.

I’m not sure if this enough for me to make a full conversion but slowly, I seem to be moving that way. Collector’s Edition LP’s with bonus tracks and 7″‘s with exclusive material (like Starflyer 59′s deal with Burnt Toast Vinyl ) were enough to get me started, I’m just not sure if it’s enough to pull me all the way.