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.