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Best Buy Boosts Vinyl LPs

Here's a story that'll warm the hearts of aging audiophiles (me) and anyone nostalgic for the heyday of electromechanical storage: Best Buy is considering dedicating space to selling vinyl records, after a sales test proved there's life in the old platters yet. Can vacuum tubes be far behind?

As my three regular readers know, I'm a big fan of old technologies like 33-1/3 records. (Beatles trivia fans will recall that the revolution rate of the long-playing platters invented by Peter Goldmark in 1948 is also the title of a 1976 album by George Harrison.)

Vinyl resurfaces periodically, usually via a news story which reports credulously that it's making a comeback. This time, the blip came via New York Post, which noted that Best Buy is planning to devote eight square feet of retail space to spotlight about 200 albums per store. According to the story, "though vinyl represents less than 5 percent of Best Buy's music sales, the format is growing while CD sales continue to shrink."

While it's welcome news to see a warm -- in both the sound and social senses of the word -- technology like vinyl amid what appears to be a modest resurgence, one shouldn't make too big a deal out of it. Being compared favorably to CDs, which are continuing to tank for the obvious reason that they're obsolete, is no great endorsement. You can't play a compact disk on your iPod. (OTOH, optical storage as a medium is anything but kaput -- witness GE's recent development of a 500GB platter.)

Vinyl, while technologically outdated, is destined to retain its niche popularity for well into the future. That's because records are fun to play, even with scratches and their short running time. (There's only one place I can think of where vinyl is used in non-outmoded fashion. That would be in a club DJ set-up, where there's no modern functional equivalent offering the mixing flexibility of the old-fashioned platters. Even there, though, equipment has emerged to enable music programmers to segue and scratch their way through mp3 files or CDs.)

What vinyl will never do is reclaim its place as the best medium for music reproduction. That's something its fiercest advocates claimed well into the CD age. In the mid-1980s, their arguments held some sway because of bad analog-to-digital transfers and hiss-laden CDs. These days, though, only the most retro stereophile won't admit that digital offers a more faithful, non-degraded rendering of the input signal.

Which doesn't mean that LPs aren't fun, and that they don't sound "warmer" (as do tubes) in the non-gold-plated systems on which most of us listen to our music. I should also mention that there are two very large contingents of modern-day vinyl lovers -- collectors who scour both old record stores and collections (or the new outlets like Best Buy) to build their collections, and audiophiles who purchase high-quality reissues such as those pressed on 180-gram vinyl.

Me, I'm in a record lull, having recently thrown out three turntables in various states of disrepair, because I got tired of promising myself that's I'd fix them. Now I've got to go find a working motor for my remaining circa-1970 Dual 1214, and then I'll be able to break out the old copy of Sgt. Pepper's.

For more nostalgia, see Sad Day For Radio Row As Harvey's 45th Street Store Closes.

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Alex Wolfe is editor-in-chief of InformationWeek.com.

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