record_player ovenbird Despite his misgivings, my husband got me the turntable I asked for for Christmas. I woke up to a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon EVO under the tree. Glossy piano black. He thought I was nuts. In the months leading up to Christmas he kept trying to convince me that CDs are a superior technology and pointing out that we have a decent CD player and at least 800 albums. The second part is true, the first part is debatable. Is the sound quality of a CD better than a vinyl record? Maybe? Records aren’t totally silent. Even new records are prone to static and dust resulting in the occasional pop or crackle, but I’m no audiophile. My husband says things like, “Do you think I should turn the treble down a decibel?” And I have no fucking clue. He says things like, “Since we’re listening at a low volume I’m just going to turn the bass up a little,” and I say, “Go for it,” but I don’t notice a difference. I’m just as happy listening to music on the portable Bluetooth JBL speaker in my kitchen as over our fancy living room sound system. I appreciate the good speakers, but I don’t require them to have a visceral response to what I’m listening to. When I asked for a record player I wasn’t asking to experience hi-fi audio, I was asking for an acoustically induced emotional experience. I grew up listening to the records my dad played from a small collection of 33s: Stan Rogers, Daniel Lanois, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Billy Joel, obscure bands from the 80s folk revival. Dad says that when I was a baby he could sit me on the floor in front of the stereo, drop the needle onto a record, and watch me enter a trance state, rapt and unmoving for ages. It was a big deal when dad deemed me old enough to put on a record myself. I was probably ten or eleven years old. It was a rite of passage. I can remember the day he let me pull an album from its sleeve, set it carefully on the platter of his turntable, and lift the arm from its cradle. There was something so delicate about lowering the needle and watching it settle into the first groove. Putting on a vinyl record was not just a concrete act, but a ceremony steeped in reverence. Playing a CD doesn’t even come close. (Press a button to open, shove a disc into the tray, press a button to close, press a button to play). It lacks intimacy. When my dad let me use the record player he was giving me something—his trust, his belief that I could take care of the music he loved best, a way to use my own body to set something beautiful into motion. When my father got sick back in April and I rushed home to be with him (hoping it wouldn’t be for the last time) we played records: Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy, an obscure album of songs by a British troupe of Girl Guides, Liona Boyd, Jacqueline Du Pre playing Elgar’s cello concerto, Black Sabbath, and it suddenly felt essential that I be able to do this at home, miles away, on the other side of the country. Being unexpectedly gifted a copy of Bill Evans’ Waltz for Debby on my birthday sealed it. It would be a travesty to own an album I had no way of playing. So I started dropping hints. And researching record players. And suggesting that my life would be dramatically improved if I could spend Sunday mornings with a cup of tea, on my couch, spinning records on my very own record player. And my husband tried to talk me out of it, and failed, and capitulated because he loves me enough to indulge what he sees as my fundamental madness. So on Christmas Day my dad and my husband set up my new record player, and when I returned from walking the dog we all sat on the couch and I opened the record my parents got me for Christmas, Loreena McKennitt’s “The Visit” and I gently set the needle down like I was enacting a powerful spell, and we listened to both sides, and I cried. I cried because my childhood came back to me in a sudden flash. I cried because my father was sitting beside me, alive and breathing. I cried because something about watching the steady rotation of vinyl on the turntable dropped me straight back into that trance state I intuitively accessed as a baby. The gift I received was not so much the turntable itself, but access to a host of core memories and an internal state of being that I can’t tap into any other way. My plan now is to slowly amass a collection of records representing the music I love most in this world. I want to be a careful curator. In addition to Loreena McKennitt I currently have Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake, Graceland by Paul Simon (given to me by my brother), Songs of Love and Hate by Leonard Cohen, Such Ferocious Beauty by the Cowboy Junkies, and Waltz for Debby by Bill Evans. The Makem and Clancy Collection is on its way because I couldn’t pass up a copy I found online, still shrink wrapped. A lot of the magic has seeped out of the world since I was small, but if you know the right rituals and incantations you can call some of it back. The turntable let me do that. It might be madness, but if so I’m not interested in being sane. 260102 ... ancasa.reyn oh, man, you've got my eyes watering now. while i still have a couple hundred of my albums, i no longer have a turntable on which to play them. and, in fact, i started selling off my collection a number of years ago. i've offered to give a bunch to a friend who lives an hour or so away but that hasn't happened yet. some are probably collectors items and i'm sometimes tempted to sell them on ebay, but i've preferred to sell them via craigslist so that i can meet the people who will give them homes (while hoping they don't put them up on ebay). i now have tinnitus anyway, so my ears are nowhere near as tuned in to music as they once were. but yes, the intimacy of playing records and holding the jacket and reading the album notes and credits is one i sorely missed when cds took over the market. 260102 ... raze i think you've hit on something that not only gets at the heart of why those of us who love vinyl can't quite replicate the experience with any other format, but why we're here on blather. it's about ritual and devotion and slowing down enough to feel the full weight of the moment in a world that's forgotten what it is to be still. and while digital audio is sometimes more pristine (when it hasn't been distorted and robbed of its dynamic range at the mastering stage), what's "better" on a technical level doesn't necessarily land with the same emotional force. life isn't a clean experience with an infinite amount of headroom. there are scratches and scrapes and layers of surface noise. to buffer out the scars is to ignore half of what makes us who we are. i collected cassettes as a child and mined cd liner_notes for every available scrap of information as a terrified teenager while headphones hugged my skull. but records are in my blood. when i was too young to speak and sleep was a squirming thing i couldn't catch, my father would put a record on. then he would hold me in his arms and dance me into a dream. i don't think there are any stronger or more meaningful memories than the ones that are forged in love, even if we feel them more than we remember them. 260102 ... nr this struck me. admittedly these days i listen to music more often on my music app because it's readily available and easier, but there's a feeling that playing records can evoke that nothing else can. the crackling and the needle placement and the immersive sound just transport you to a calm place. 260103 what's it to you? who go blather from