This past week I purchased the new Calexico and Okkervil River albums. No big deal, right? Certainly not blog-worthy. Well not quite. After threatening to purchase new albums on vinyl only, I finally took my first step. Anyone who has ever listened to music with me knows I love old vinyl. I've even been known to buy new vinyl. But accepting the demise of the CD by NOT buying albums from iTunes, instead taking it back to the pre-cassette days, pre-8-track days and going exclusively vinyl? Now that's change I can believe in.
If you like your drums to sound like a three-year-old banging on pots and pans, then stick with digital files. But I like to hear the instruments damn it! Fortunately there are other people out there that realize that mp3s have this terrible tinny sound quality. So about two years ago, record labels started going for a best of both worlds approach. They began issuing new albums on vinyl that also included mp3 downloads. Now I can listen to my physical media at home and the mp3 at the gym. Only problem is that you can't hook an iPod up to my car. I have one of those on-the-cusp cars. They don't have a tape deck, so I can't use one of the tape/ipod adapters and they don't have an aux input either. It's a car in audio limbo.
Now I don't for one minute think that my CD buying has stopped. For starters, sometimes the vinyl version of the album doesn't come out for a few weeks. If it's an album I really want, I can't wait a couple weeks. Impatience is a vice, I know.
My only major gripe with vinyl is that it's extremely environmentally unfriendly. I usually don't drive during lunch though, so I figure my vinyl-induced carbon footprint is less a Bigfoot print and more of a chipmunk print. That's not so bad, right?
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