Thomas Edison did more than just invent the lightbulb, he also invented the record player. Despite vast improvement of technology, record players are becoming more and more common place; or maybe they never really died out? When I was in high school I started really wanting a record player, I couldn’t tell you the reason why now because simply put I just don’t remember. Later that year my dad got me one for Christmas. To this day I still have it. I have fun going out the thrift shops to find cheap records.
Vinyl, despite being obsolete, has refused to die. My question is why?
There are arguments that Vinyl produces better sounds than CDs due to the compression in the audio that CDs cause. In fact, there’s a large base of people that live or die by this claim. They’ll refuse to recreationally listen to music other than a record player. I have found that I DO prefer listening to music through my record player as opposed through a CD player or streaming it off my phone externally.
Popular trendy shops such as urban outfitters even sell record players that are customized to be aesthetically pleasing. When polling my friends, I find that a good portion of them either have a record player or frequently come in contact with one. For something that was invented over a hundred years ago it’s strange that it’s still so widespread.
Today, even top music artists will have their albums released on records. This isn’t a thing of the past. You can probably expect to find the Beatles on records and in fact I have both of their first albums that they produced, the official and unofficial ones that I found in a garage sale and bought for 50 cents apiece. But, you can also buy Kanye West’s or Taylor Swift’s most recent work on Vinyl.
There has to be a reason that this form of obsolete music playback hasn’t just simply died out. For example, televisions used to be in black and white and didn’t have remotes. You don’t see those commonly used anymore—if at all. Most people nowadays will have a flat screen TV, it isn’t very common to see Tube TV’s anymore but occasionally you will, but certainly not a TV that is only in black and white.
My only answer for this phenomenon is that perhaps those who claim that vinyl sounds better aren’t that far off. No one will likely say that TV’s produced in the 60’s looks better than TV’s produced now. However, for some reason this line of thought isn’t applicable for the record player. Besides just opinion on the matter, maybe the record player actually DOES produce better sound quality than its successor’s in the field.
Me? I am in compliance with this line of thought. I love listening to vinyl, even if it is inconvenient to have to turn the record over after it’s done with that side. As a typically lazy person that’s usually too much work for me to do to listen to music, especially since I can stream any song right from my phone. BUT, I do enjoy music far more when I listen to it on vinyl.
