Dear Friends,
Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!
I want to share with you the newest addition to the study. Over the past few years I have dabbled a bit with collecting and listening to vinyl records, or “LPs.” There are a lot of reasons for that.
First, it’s kind of romantic to put a record on a turntable. It’s just intentional in a way clicking “play” on Spotify or Apple Music isn’t. It takes work. You have to want to listen to this album at this moment in time.
Second, listening to vinyl helps one to recover from the attention deficit disorder that has plagued the music industry since the advent of the Internet. People no longer listen to albums. They listen to single songs, which they arrange in their own playlists. I am a bit more old school, and think the arrangement of a set of songs is itself part of the intended art. You can do that with CDs, of course, but it just isn’t as much fun.
Third, it is fun to look for records at thrift stores and book sales. You can find gems hidden in the stacks, and often you can buy them for a dollar. If you take home some artist from the 70s you’ve never heard of, put it on the record player and discover why you have never heard of said artist (i.e., it’s terrible), you’re not out much money for the experience.
Fourth—and I know there are many who would scoff at this notion—vinyl really does sound better. Maybe that’s too value-laden. It sounds different. Digital music has a “brittleness” to it. Some might call it “crispness” or “clarity,” but I call it “brittle.” I think it actually takes switching to vinyl to really get what I’m saying. If I listen to Apple Music in my study all day, my ears get tired like they are getting slowly assaulted by sound. I find myself having to turn it off to give myself a break. Vinyl has a natural warmth that simply does not have this effect. It is more relaxing.
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