When Records Ruled

Yea, nostalgia! I have a Technics turntable too, which needs a new needle that I have no idea where to find.

I don think records provide a better listening expeience. It a reverse reward system: the more you love the record, the faster it wears out. Incentive to purchase a new one I suppose, but that just not possible for most of my collection.

What I miss are the album covers. Sure, CD have these mini-graphics and teeny tiny booklets, but it just ain the same. How awesome is it to open the original Yessongs album, with cover art by Roger Dean, and actually see the little kitty footprints going across the center spread, where the artist cat walked on it?

Or the original The Who Tommy (not the movie soundtrack) with all of it teeny tiny illustrations?

Or the original Rolling Stone Sticky Fingers album, complete with zipper?

Thanks buy wow gear for this! Great memories!

If you go on down to my local Goodwill store, they might still have mine. I just got rid of it, after playing all of the records into the computer and digitizing all the wow gold music I had on records. What I sorry to see go is the album cover art. As for the listening experience, I don enjoy having to interrupt what I doing every 20 minutes just to continue listening to music. They need to be flipped way too often. And my musical ear is just not sophisticated enough to hear much of a difference beyond the pops and scratches, which I don like except in a sort of nostalgic "that was then" way. It did feel very weird to get rid of the record collection I spent a good part of my youth accumulating, though.

George, When I was a kids, I had a metal record player. I was probably about 9 or 10 years old when I got if for Christmas. I was ecstatic. The first record I ever played on it was Frosty the Snowman sang by Gene Autry. Then came the Beatles, Elvis etc. When I got married, my husband and I made our first big purchase. It was a hi fi. The wooden cabinet was beautiful. I will never forget it. It had great sound and I loved it dearly. It played a wide variety of records - 78 and 33 rpm. Those were the days. Thanks for bringing back the memories.

Geroge, I absolutely love this. Growing up, I had a small turntable for my room. My father built a very large (4 foot high) monoaural speaker, which we used tor the family HI Fi. In 1972, I bought a very nice Sony stereo, which finally kicked about 1996. My husband Technics of 1982 finally kicked about that time, too. It rounds out our cassette and CD collections. A precursor to the LP.

Thanks for this article, George. wow gold !!! You are so knowledgeable and are bringing back an important era to Gather.

A little tech talk: Many people mistakingly believe that CDs offer better sound then LP records. "Better" is a relative term. It is true that turntables can produces noisy artifacts from scratches or pops and hiss. But the audio fidelity of an analog recording on vinyl with a good cartridge is far superior to the digital sound of a CD. Why you ask? Sound waves are by definition analog waves of particles. In order to digitize them, you must pick a sample rate to snap a picture of the sound regularly. CDs are made by sampling sound 44,100 times per second. Although that is a frequent sample rate, it cannot reproduce the exact sound it was sampled from. The frequency response of most CD players is narrower then a turntable with a good cartridge. This means you may lose some subtle elements of the audio when converting it to digital. Again, since sound is inherently analog, a digital recording must be converted back to analog in order for the sound waves to fly across the room. So in many cases you have analog source sound, recorded on analog tape, sampled to digital, then converted back to analog. Needless to say bad things can happen along the way! I get a kick out of how marketing people have turned the term "digital" into meaning better for most things. Digital is not necessarily better. Alas, digital is often more convenient. I do not own a turntable anymore. I digitize all my music onto a hard drive. That process in itself is worth another discussion, since decisions made setting parameters for "encoding" the audio have profound impact on the quality of sound.

Firoze ,

You can still buys cartridges and styluses at all the major music stores ( Like Sam Ash ). LPs are still real popular with the hip-hop kids and so the major music stores still sell turntables and styluses.

You should know that if you are transferring your LPs over to CDs, a major study came out of Germany last year that found that CDs you burn at home only last about five years, then they start to get quirky when you play them.

You should back up you CDs by keep a copy on a hard drive.

Late to the party; but, for anyone who finds this page I felt it necessary to make it wow items clear. neither records nor turntables ever had their production halted. They still make great turntables (both DJ and HiFi) and records (both DJ and audiophile including current 2008 releases and reissues of older releases) today! Check out the following. The larger stores, even B. (which I loathe) have been known to carry them occasionally.

Stranger than fiction. I have records that still sound great from the 50 (before I was born). There are store bought CD that deteriorated in less than 5 years and CD-R in less than 2 years! Complete losses! And hard drives. It not a matter of if, only when. And remember CD (worse) MP3 rely on sampling rates. The very essence of a sampling rate means that some or large chunks of the original audio signal is thrown out to make it fit the format - then an algorithm guesses what was originally there when the format is played back and it different every time. Things that make you go hmmm. Don take my word for it. check it out. I do believe I keep my vinyl on the shelf, or better yet, keep buying the vinyl other people get rid of ;-)
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