Vinyl is the new CD

Vinyl is the new CD, Vinyl sales are higher then they have been in a decade and CD sales are down. Some might ask why this old music format is doing so well. Well, the simple answer is 'Vinyl kicks ass!'. While CD's take the music and gives it a nice polished sound, it is often over produced and digitized while vinyl brings that raw sound out of the recording process and lets you hear the notes and sounds the way they were intended. My love of vinyl is not new, my mom used to work at a record distributor in Toronto and brought with her a sizable vinyl collection with some great music, and some not so great. But, we grew up listening to Simon and Garfunkel, Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin on our old Sony turntable.

Today, I have my own turntable, a newer purchase and one of my favorite possessions in the world is my Audiotechnica USB turntable. I have started my own vinyl collection and it grows almost weekly, I have become a regular at an amazing little music shop called the Inner Sleeve in MardaLoop. As you can see from the picture above (my latest purchase) vinyl is fun and exciting. The Black Keys (one of my favorite new bands) released the above vinyl in 2002, it is one of 500 yellowlp's pressed for this release. The entire album is amazing, the Black Keys soulful rock sound with deep bass lines and amazing guitar riffs are brought out to their amazing brilliance on this lp. The sound is deeper then a CD and you can hear that rawness to it. Amazing!, the LP is called "The Big Come Up", if you don't own a turntable you should still get this album on whatever musical format you have, it is great and will be in your music player for years and years.

So, you might ask 'How does one get started in listening to vinyl?' Well, the answer is fairly easy. You can get a turntable for around $150 and vinyl lp's range from $5 to $50 depending on what you want to get. A lot of new vinyl such as The Black Keys, She & Him and Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin come with a digital download code from the record label that lets you get the digital version and put it on your iPod. Starting a vinyl collection is a ton of fun, you can go garage sale shopping and find some great gems that people are selling for $1.

Have fun with your music collection!

- Dave