Op-Ed

Do yourself a favor. When that next generation of mp3 players hits the shelves take the $400 and treat yourself to the satisfying sound of a record player. You don’t need to upgrade your device, it already does what you want it to do, which is play music, right? What you really want is to supplement your music collection with cheap, amazing sounding, rare and addictive sounds from the garages and basements of your neighbors.

Firstly, if you’re paying 99 cents a song, you’re a fool. You don’t own the music, you think you do but in reality you just bought the modern equivalent of an eight track. Sure it’s easy to cart around but it sounds like crap, has all the glamour of Google’s home page and, when you tire of the music, its resale value is about as much as a slightly used chapstick. Coincidently, but strangely not surprising, 99 cents is about the going rate for a record from your neighbor’s yard sale. Actually, it’s marginally more expensive due to the currency issues of dealing with pennies, usually $1 is the settled upon price but, nevertheless, $1 buys you not just one track but around twelve plus pretty pictures, lyrics, personnel listings and, if you’re really lucky, a piece of history especially if the previous owner wrote their name on the sleeve in neat cursive. To this day I’m not sure why people monogrammed their records, it doesn’t happen with used CD’s and it certainly can’t happen with mp3’s but it does provide a sense of tradition and accountability. People that steal music from P2P’s care nothing for the tracks they just acquired, yet it makes me sad when I accidentally drop the needle on Trudy Sherman’s old copy of The Sugercubes‘ Life’s Too Good. She looked after it, why can’t I?

I digress, back to the economics and a word on sound quality. Records sound amazing. You probably don’t know this. If you’re under thirty, you’ve probably never heard one and if you’re over thirty you probably can’t remember one. Sometimes they get dirty but a 99-cent (there’s that price again) bottle of rubbing alcohol diluted 1:20 with a 99-cent bottle of deionized water (both available from your local mega-mart drug store) does wonders. PopClickSkip be gone! Spend no more than this on your cleaning kit because you probably only spent a dollar on the record to begin with. Oh, next time you illegally download a song and are disappointed that the encoding rate and quality sucks just remember that you can take your prospective new record purchase out of its sleeve and see just about all the bad sound quality that record has to offer before you part with your dollar. Anyhow, why do records sounds amazing? Mojo, that’s it, plain and simple mojo. It’s the ghosts in the machine. It’s like the scene in The Wizard Of Oz when the movie turns to Technicolor. Who wants to live in Kansas their whole life?

How much does it cost to buy a record player? A good used 1970’s era turntable should not cost more than $150. Don’t buy a DJ deck, anything made in the 1980’s or anything made of plastic (not for sound quality, it’s just turntables are cool and plastic isn’t). Add $50 for a reasonable cartridge and $50 for a cheap but useable phono stage. Say what? What’s a phono stage? Well, it’s pretty much a given that your amp/stereo/surround sound setup doesn’t have the circuitry required to convert those little grooves into lush bass so you’ll need one of those things to do the job for it. Now we’re at $250 – the new portable device costs $400 so that’s $150 to spend on records. Holy Cow, that’s nearly 150 new albums or over 1500 tracks. Makes a 99-cent track look somewhat quaint, doesn’t it?

Of course, you can spend so much more on both the hardware and the vinyl but why bother. The more you spend the more you diminish the wow factor of having bought this stupendous sounding setup for next to no money. Considering love of music is an emotional response to vibrations in the air, heighten that emotion by gloating at the economic miracle that lies before you.

But what about the digital download format? It too is a wonderful thing but think of it as a summer dalliance. Buy yourself a subscription to Rhapsody - it’s like taking your summer fling out to dinner, ice cream and then a romantic walk along the beach in the hope of a little nirvana. Sure, it’s a running cost but when the summer is over, you’re only out of pocket the price of a few meals and you’re not stuck with a diamond ring that won’t fit on the finger of the next new hot girl that comes your way.

DaveTheGrinch is DaveTheGrinch doesn't like Christmas - that's why he's a grinch. He's also a grinch because unless he does something really quickly his world might crumble under the pressure of all the 'nice' people in it.
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