In the 1970s and 80s my parents had an AM/FM stereo system with a cassette, an 8-track, and the quintessential record player on top. When I was a teenager in the 1990s my parents replaced it with a much smaller system that had a 9-disc CD changer and I got to put the old stereo system in my bedroom. I then made my way through garage sales and flea markets for “old” records and grew a small collection of classic rock and Disney albums, many of them selling for 10-25 cents a piece. Like many people of my generation I got rid of my collection when I moved away from home and went fully digital.
I am not an audiophile, so I never really understood the recent rise of record player popularity. Day to day I’m perfectly happy to stream music through the tiny Bluetooth speakers that float around our house. It wasn’t until recently when I started seeing the value of slowing down and appreciating the warm, physical sound of a record. The discourse around this thread of thinking tends to be that we’re all running around living this fast-paced life, so we’re losing some of what is so beautiful about life. Mindfulness and other slowing down practices are bringing us back to enjoying the present, and this is right where the record player comes in. You slow down, pull out this giant piece of media from a beautiful sleeve, and hear the scratchy of the edge of a record before settling in. It turns hitting play on your phone into a ritual, one that I really like.
So one night when insomnia was creeping up on me, I bought a record player off of Amazon for less than $50. It was a purple case player with built-in speakers and a familiar old brand name, and it was so cute!
It was a mistake. I posted it to Facebook and swiftly got a response explaining that the cheaper players with the simple needle and plate systems were very bad for records, and I should reconsider my purchase. That’s the curse and benefit of clever friends! As much as I liked this cute little player, he was right. I had read entry level reviews saying this player was fine, but anyone who knew anything about modern record systems would have tried to warn me against it. I packed it up and returned it, and it r/vinyl for a proper recommendation. I quickly discovered that I was very much not the first person to have gone down this identical path. Some people are perfectly happy with their $50 player, especially if they don’t use it much or expect it to be more of a novelty, but I knew that wouldn’t be me.
I was quickly swept into the $200 range with no built-in speakers, and ended up with an Audio-Technica AT-LPW30TK. It was the right path to take. We have a receiver and nice speakers in our living room, where I’d listen anyway, so there was no need for built-in speakers. MJ ordered some wires to get it configured properly since the receiver several feet away from where it ended up residing, and we sat down one evening last week and got it set up. It looks beautiful.
Already little Aaron is a big fan, and when he’s in the living room he’ll walk over to it and say “play music!” as if it’s the most natural thing he’s ever been exposed to. I’m a fan too, it really is a lovely record player.
Now to find vinyl that hasn’t exploded in price. This new world of vinyl fans like myself means the flea market bins of 25 cent records are hard to find. Many albums that have name recognition are going to cost at least a few dollars, and at the record shop in my town there are shelves and shelves of vintage records already going for over $30 each. They’ve become real collectors items! So went to the back room where the records were much cheaper and found a few gems, walking out with a $16 pile of $2 records that I’m quite pleased with. Then, when we were at the antiques fair in Alameda I found a booth that had a lot of vintage records that were more my pace price-wise, ranging from $5-10 each, immediately half off of list price, and they’d “work out a deal” if I bought more than five. Cool. I got my deal, and was amused when I got home and peeled off the $5 sticker from the new-to-me Toto album:
Hah! So I only spent $2.50 on it, but up from 25 cents? That’s a 10x increase! Now these folks have had to pay for storage all these years, and have to pay for a stall and haul out these records to sell every month, so I don’t begrudge them at all for serving the needs of folks like me, and truly I’m grateful.
And with that I conclude with my first new vinyl purchase…ever? I don’t think I ever got anything new when I was a teenager. I started browsing through online shops and found the perfect one, the Encanto soundtrack. It wasn’t going to break the bank (about $20), has songs that I love, and it’s just a lovely sleeve to behold.