All hail the resurgence of records!

A trend has to be huge for TIME to notice:

From college dorm rooms to high school sleepovers, an all-but-extinct music medium has been showing up lately. And we don't mean CDs. Vinyl records, especially the full-length LPs that helped define the golden era of rock in the 1960s and '70s, are suddenly cool again. Some of the new fans are baby boomers nostalgic for their youth. But to the surprise and delight of music executives, increasing numbers of the iPod generation are also purchasing turntables (or dusting off Dad's), buying long-playing vinyl records and giving them a spin.

Like the comeback of Puma sneakers or vintage T shirts, vinyl's resurgence has benefited from its retro-rock aura. Many young listeners discovered LPs after they rifled through their parents' collections looking for oldies and found that they liked the warmer sound quality of records, the more elaborate album covers and liner notes that come with them, and the experience of putting one on and sharing it with friends, as opposed to plugging in some earbuds and listening alone.

At at glance, I think I have about 100 records or so in my dorm room. A lot of records also come with codes to download the digital files now, which is really the ideal way I'd like to acquire music, analog and digital. A lot of people seem to think that this is a rebellion against poor-quality mp3 files, I don't think so. I encode into Apple's AAC format at 192 kps, at which I can almost not tell the difference between that and the CDs. If people were producing better quality digital tracks, it wouldn't be an issue. A bigger problem is the "loudness" in CD mixing today. Read this fascinating article from the last Rolling Stone.

For example, the "loudest" Led Zeppelin album? Mothership, the remastered 2007 compliation.

Sometimes I think the music industry is killing itself loudly.

Labels: Music

Posted by Ryan S. on Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 1:14 PM | Permalink |