The Comeback of Vinyl

Maybe it’s the crackling sound of the needle as it sets in the groove. Or maybe it’s the way it feels in your hands. It could even be the fact that the album artwork is really big. Either way, vinyl is making a comeback.

            In a world of dying physical media, records are starting to creep their way back into stores across the United States, even though CDs and DVDs are rapidly disappearing. Promoted by college students and indie rock bands, records have suddenly become hot collector’s items, succeeding where other forms of physical media have failed.

            “Well, I think that people are starting to see through the digital sheen and gloss that things like Pro Tools and things like a process called ‘gridding’ do. It makes the music too perfect,” says Sam Smith, a night clerk at downtown Springfield’s, Stick It In Your Ear, the only independently owned record store in town. “Gridding” ensures that the beats per measure in a song stay exactly the same throughout the track, unless the artist changes the tempo on purpose. It avoids the human error that artists make when they play a song too fast or slow live.

            “With computers and Pro Tools, you’re allowed to mess up a bunch, and even if you mess up a bunch, whoever is producing it can go back and just align it to the grid and to the program, so people started to, I think, see through that farce. And if you want to hear musicians playing music, then [vinyl] is the best representation,” Smith continued. Of course, this rings true for vinyl records that were recorded when that was the only form of media to put music onto, but today artists are using CDs, vinyl, and even cassette tapes to distribute music that is recorded to perfection. Even with the unrealistic quality to the music, people are still buying vinyl for the sound.

            Many people today swear that the sound quality of vinyl records exceeds every other form of recording medium. Smith also agrees with them. “Vinyl is the best representation of an analog recording of the instruments, the sound and vibrations of the instruments falling on the magnetic tape, it’s the most real way to experience music.”

            Even Jeff Moffett, the night manager at CD Warehouse, another store in Springfield that sells records, brought up that vinyl sounds better than other forms, only with some artists, however. He explained how only bands that sounded similar to older artists could translate well on vinyl.

            “You know your classic artists like Neil Young and Bob Dylan and things like that, or some of the newer bands who sound like that: My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, that sort of stuff,” Moffett said.

            So maybe it’s not the sound quality. Moffett thinks it’s for a different reason that vinyl records have made a comeback.

            “Nostalgia,” he professed. “We sell a lot to kids that are in college, and they love the nostalgia of it. You know, maybe their parents had turn tables growing up and had their Boston records and their Peter Frampton records. And now this new vinyl is pressed on 180 gram, which is the good heavy vinyl.”

            Older records were not pressed on 180 gram vinyl, which is heavier and decreases the risk of the record warping over time. Instead, most vinyl records that were released in the 20th Century were pressed on 120-140 gram vinyl which was the “normal” vinyl size. Now that records are coming back, however, newer albums are being released using the heavier material. It is usually more expensive, but the quality of the sound is better, and it is a sign that the band cared enough to make their album sound the best it could.

            So why did record stores like Stick It In Your Ear and CD Warehouse decide to invest in selling vinyl?

            “Collectors,” Sam Smith said. “We were here long before the resurgence and interest happened. I have my own collection of, oh I don’t know, a hundred or so. That’s not a lot, though, we have 20-30,000 in this store. Yeah, it’s a collector’s type thing.”

            It’s an expensive habit according to Jeff Moffett who explained how records were sold for about 10 to 20 dollars, with some of the more expensive records being $40 or more. But for a music collector and admirer, it’s a small price to pay for a product that’s worth its weight. According to Moffett, the records still sell well under the current expense.

            The biggest job for employees like Smith and Moffett, then, is deciding which records to sell in the store.

            “We all decide, we all kind of offer our thoughts. We can order things as well, but with our distributor, vinyl is non-returnable, so we kind of have to be careful about what we bring in, because if it doesn’t sell, we’re stuck with it,” said Moffett. It’s a problem they rarely have, it seems.

            Across the city holds a kind of decision-making process, explained Smith. They rely much more on sellers and collectors than their own opinions.

            “People bring them in, walk in the door and lots of times people say, oh you know, this was my grandma’s collection, or this was my uncle’s collection,” remarked Smith. “And then there’s also the type of sellers that go through flea markets and pick through that mess and come to us with what they think is good.”

            With the comeback of vinyl sales, stores such as Target and Best Buy have released new forms of record players on the market. Some play by themselves and are modeled after the old technology, while some can connect and play through computers. There is even software to convert vinyl to MP3. All these factors fuel the return of records, but while records have seen success, other forms of media are struggling to stay relevant. DVDs, CDs, even books are having a hard time, staying on the shelves, waiting to be bought. With the new technology such as Kindle, Nook, Hulu, and Netflix, people can stream music, news, books, and media online without ever having to buy the physical copy of it. The Best Buy in Springfield drastically cut down their selection of music and movies, while the Barnes and Noble completely took their music section out. They only sell the most popular CDs and DVDs in the store, but Hannah Tennison, a book seller at Barnes and Noble, assured me that everything could still be ordered to the store from online.

            “I think they’re just hoping for anything that will sell, and we’re getting a lot more Nooks,” said Tennison. “We’re coming out with an HD Nook so that’s going to take up a lot of space. Now we will utilize more of the Nook area than before.”

            Taking out the entertainment section of Barnes and Noble may have been a smart move for the company, being a large corporate industry. But for the hard-core fans of music, they still like to hold the CD or record in their hands, to feel the ridges of the vinyl, to flip through the cover booklet, to listen to it so much that is skips or warps. These kinds of people are who keep businesses like CD Warehouse and Stick It In Your Ear afloat. They were the ones smart enough to see the growing trend in vinyl and to jump on it. There will always be people in the world who like the physicality of an object, who don’t trust that everything will always be in the air or the Cloud, as Apple calls it. When all this was beginning to be taken away, they clung to the truest and oldest form of listening to recorded music, and that was the vinyl record.