Record Revelation

So you may be asking yourself why I or anyone would get into collecting vinyl in an era of iPods, and MP3's. My story about collecting vinyl actually starts in 1996. If you remember back to 96' it was an era of Compact Disks, with cassette tapes slowly but surely disappearing, and MP3's on the horizon  but not yet in a transportable format. 

 

I was in my senior year of high school and part of our English 4 class was giving our "Senior Speech". We all got through our speeches based on a subject of our choice, being 17 and 18 year olds you can imagine it was nothing all that deep. Then one guy gave a speech that has captured my attention ever since. Ben, I think his name was gave a speech about why music on vinyl sounded better.

His reasoning was clear and his speech eye opening. "Vinyl, (and keep in mind I'm completely paraphrasing) sounded better, it was truer to the artist voice, and to the sound. CD's lost a lot of that due to digitalization and post-production, in an attempt to give a clean recording they lost the human elements. Those little mistakes and out of tone idiosyncrasy's indicative of live music are produced out. Oh, and you could get new stuff on vinyl too!". 

After that I gave collecting records a lot of thought, but just never got into it. Especially in a world of CD's and iPods coming to us quickly. 

Now, I was (and am) not a novice to the world of records. By parents had a collection with some good records including a 40's set that I loved, and as a small child I had a portable 45' record player and a stack of kids records (in a yellow Saturday Night Fever box) both are long gone. So I have an understanding of the world of vinyl and the delicacy of records, needles, grooves, and speeds. But what I don't know much about is collectibility, or even what sounds the best. Or to put it another way what records are essential to a record collector, what are those mind blowing records that really make you go "Wow, this what it SHOULD sound like!". 

So here I am 17 years after that speech, and starting to delve into the world of vinyl records.