Record Store Day Ramblings

Record Store Day 2012 

So tomorrow is Record Store Day.  I’ll be at Jack’s Music Shoppe in Red Bank checking out what’s on offer.  I hope to score the St.Vincent 7-inch and, maybe, the “Rocky Ground” single from Bruce.

I’ve always kept my old vinyl albums, and a year or so ago, I even bought a new turntable so I could listen to them.

Funny story:  during our recent home renovation, the young man doing the new A/V setup wanted to test the turntable as he had just hooked it up to the system. 

“Do you have one of those black things, so I can test this?”

“Black things?”

“Yeah.”

 “A record?”

 “Yeah, one of those.”

Kids.

Anyway, as I went through my music collection then, I was struck by the gaping hole that represented all of the cassettes I had purchased and, I guess, discarded in my teens.  Vinyl, CD’s, and digital files obviously blow cassettes out of the water as a medium; and I have no desire to go out and get a cassette player so I can play old tapes.

I haven’t kept and I don’t go out and buy records because of some belief in their superior audio quality, though.  I’m pretty certain that lossless digital audio, either in CD or file form, is a more accurate representation of the original recording than what’s captured on vinyl.  People have their preferences over what sounds “warmer,” or “fuller,” or “more present,” or any other relatively meaningless description, and that’s fantastic, but I think the science is on the side of lossless digital.

I keep my records and I continue to buy music on vinyl when I can because it’s just so much cooler than a CD or a bunch of files.  Several things make that true for me.  The album artwork is nice and big, and there may even be some on the back.  You get a sleeve with liner notes and maybe lyrics on it.  I know you can get those things with CD’s and files, but the artwork isn’t as big or you’ve got to print out some digital booklet.  Sometimes, the vinyl record itself comes in cool colors or with pictures on it.  On top of all that, nine times out of ten, you now get a digital download with the record, so you don’t even need a turntable to get the cool stuff and listen to the music.  The one time recently that I bought an album that, for legal reasons, didn’t come with a download, I emailed the band and they just sent me the files, no questions asked.  I really do think it’s that digital download thing that has kept vinyl alive, and not the marketing blitz around Record Store Day a couple of times per year.

For those reasons, and because I like going to the record store for similar reasons involving stuff that I think is cool, and because, as a cooldad, I still prefer to purchase whole albums, I’ll be out shopping tomorrow.

Maybe I’ll see you.  Happy hunting.

Here’s a report on Record Store Day from CBS This Morning.  I find it interesting and aggravating at the same time.