The Return of Vinyl
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a working turntable at home. This evening I suddenly have lots of new old stuff to listen to.
There’s a divide in the music I’ve been listening to for the past ten years or so. I packed away the records and turntable around the time our daughter was born, thinking that I’d put it back together when she was old enough not to destroy the records. So, ten years later, I have a fairly large collection of digital music, and a large collection of analog recordings which don’t overlap much, but which have languishing in storage.
I’m happy to find that the turntable still works. Modern stereos don’t have phono inputs, so I ended up rummaging in the garage to dig up an old amplifier, which makes for a large but serviceable preamp. Right now I’m listening to Brian Eno’s Music For Airports.
Looking through the boxes I’ve hauled out so far is like receiving a musical time capsule from myself. There are a lot of albums I haven’t heard in a while and that Emily’s never heard at all. Tomorrow I think I’ll see how she likes J. Geils Live or The Roches. The plan is to gradually migrate the vinyl to digital and put it on the server with everything else, but this evening I’m just enjoying a bit of analog technology and album artwork the way it was meant to be.
I haven’t started researching the best solution for digitizing the albums and possibly cleaning up scratches, pops, clicks, and surface noise. Anyone have a favorite method they’d like to recommend?
Tags: music, vinyl, analog, culture
