Vinyl
Yesterday, we tackled one of our storage rooms. Perhaps storage is too kind a word. It was a room where we put stuff. Lots of stuff.
After a concerted effort, we have cleared that room. Now the stuff is all over the rest of house: in the downstairs family room, in the dining room, in the garage. But only for a little while. Big garage sale in a couple of weeks and whatever remains gets designated as give away or junk.
In the process of going through all of this stuff, I came across my record collection. You know, vinyl LPs. Hundreds of them.
I also came across my Yamaha PX-2 turntable which is pictured below. I had picked up the turntable circa 1980. A beautiful and high performing unit.
Does it make sense to digitize all of those wonderful LPs? I thought I would try. Sadly, the turntable did not work. It would stop tracking after five minutes or so. Probably needs new belts and lubrication but where on earth would I find those parts? And, for the small bit of tracking that it was able to sustain, the sound quality was, well, really bad. In the haze of euphoria for all things analog, I had quite overlooked all of the negative attributes of vinyl: scratches, pops, crackles.
Sad to say, most of my LPs live on in the catalogs of iTunes. It is faster, easier and arguably of better quality to simply buy the digital copies from iTunes than go through all of the effort with manually migrating the current collection.
I will spend this evening building up the inventory and, for those LPs that matter, I will get a digital update.
I rarely have time to listen critically to music for pleasure in controlled listening environments. Virtually all of my pleasure listening occurs on the road — trains, planes and automobiles. AAC at 256kbps, or even 128kbps, works just fine. And much more portable than several hundred pounds of vinyl.
RC – I can still see you in the room at WC, standing in front of your Yamaha PX-2, delicately grabbing the vinyl lp of Bruce Cockburn’s ‘The Trouble With Normal”, giving it a quick “zap” with your red plastic anti-static gun prior to placing it onto the platter. I was in total wonder watching the worm gear of the perfectly linear tone arm aligning toward the 4th track of the album – “Waiting For The Moon”… and then, sonic bliss… no ones or zeros in the equation at all…
Seems like yesterday…
J
Well, if you’ve given up on vinyl, why not send those records to a home where they’ll be appreciated?! I’m the archivist for the music archive of the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra. Anyone donating his collection to the orchestra will receive a free appraisal (most collections appraise out at between $3.00 and 8.00/LP), and if it’s large enough, the orchestra will pick it up. Anyone who would like a brochure describing the orchestra’s archive and possible tax benefits for donating to it need only send his street address to me at davecanfield@sbcglobal.net