Like most everyone else who came of age in the 70s and 80s and had wrestled with record cleaning brushes, cartridge alignment tools, antistatic sprays and other manner of voodoo that was seemingly required to play vinyl records, I fell in love with compact discs: the convenience, the sound, the general coolness of the damned things…
And like everyone else, I bought into the marketing hype of the time. "Indestructable!" "Will Last a Lifetime!" and so forth and so on. Of course, reality has proven something quite different as we have all come to learn over the years. Scratch the wrong side of the disk (i.e. the label side) and you might as well play frisbee with the thing.
Years ago, when the news of "bit rot" (the tarnishing of the aluminum layer in commercial CDs and the fading of the dye layer in CDROMs rendering them both unreadable) came out, I thought, "Oh Jeez…my collection is disintegrating right before my eyes and I don't even know it."
But along about the same time, I rediscovered the joys of those big black analog vinyl platters. I don't know whether it was prompted by an attempt to recapture some of my youth, or I missed the music (most of which has yet to be re-released), or that I could pick up a pristine copy of some recording for $1 on vinyl that would cost me $16 on CD, or simply because the act of playing a record was so damned satisfying, but I fell in love with music all over again and realized that no matter what happened to my CD collection, my vinyl collection would survive the ravages of time.
And surprisingly, many of those old vinyl records actually soundbetter than their shiny CD counterparts.
As Ted Rall so succinctly pointed out in a column several years ago, because of our rush into the digital age, not only are we at risk of losing some of the musical treasures of our time, we're also at risk of losing most of the record of our culture in general. Even if bit rot weren't a concern, we're still facing the very real possibility that none of our digitalized history will even be readable in the years to come because of the ever-changing march of technology and the obsolescence it leaves in its wake.
Makes you wonder if the ancients knew something we don't. They carved into stone tablets not because they had to, but rather, because they wanted to ensure that their legacy lived on.
One thing I know for certain: as long as someone can affix some sort of pickup needle to a phono cartridge, centuries after the aluminum reflective layer in the last of my commercial CDs has tarnished, the dye on my home-grown CDROMs has faded to invisibility and my iPod is at the bottom of a land fill somewhere, whoever comes after me will still be able to play my records.
My sentiments exactly! If some asshole terrorist org. figured out a way to take out all the digital data and electricity in the world, we would rapidly regress to the stone age. Besides, all that, there is something really satisfying about playing your vinyl on a good turntable.