When my grandmother entered a memory care facility a few years ago, I drove down to clean out the condo she lived in for the past three decades. One room was basically a dumping ground for things she brought with her from New York and then never touched again. In that room was an old stereo with AM/FM radio, an 8-track deck, and a turntable. I brought that, along with her records, back home with me.
To my dismay, I couldn’t get the system to make music happen. After a little bit of tinkering, I decided to junk it and just buy a working turntable. (I settled on the AudioTechnica AT-LP60X, in case you’re wondering.) Pretty quickly, I started listening to a lot of records. Which meant I also started hitting up flea markets to expand my catalog.
As my friend Lyz wrote,
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.
I also have come to appreciate the album itself as an art form, not merely a collection of songs. A well-crafted album can take the listener on a journey.
I also discovered another, more practical benefit: listening to a vinyl record is a great time box. When I was writing Program Management for Open Source Projects, I would put a record on and write until the side ended. Having to get up to flip or replace the record gave me a good mental break and also got me moving.