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Vinyl has come back in a very big way. Vinyl went out as far as the commercial business,
but vinyl never went out in terms of collecting.
There's a huge market now of vinyl collectors and stores are starting to stock vinyl again.
People are talking about vinyl, people are listening to vinyl.
Well if you just come up to the second floor of Mugar Library, head over to the Charles
River side. We have somewhere between twenty-six and thirty thousand vinyl items here.
We've been in this area for thirty years and we've been through, you know, records, CDs,
cassettes, but we've always had vinyl.
It all of a sudden started picking up around 2006. Now, it's, you know, a lot more young
people are buying vinyl.
I ended up getting my own record player about two years ago. I've always grown up in the
era of putting on an mp3 and everything is just so perfect and out of your control.
But there's something that a record player...You can change the speed, you can change the tone.
Vinyl and digital are not really competing in my mind.
They occupy different, different worlds and that's what the appeal is.
Digital is everywhere. What you have now is an iTunes playlist that looks like an Excel
spreadsheet. Most of the time you're listening to a highly compressed version, which shaves
of high end spikes and some low things.
All listeners have been pushed into a type of listening format which is not real.
You can definitely hear the quality difference between vinyl and digital.
I feel like the tone's warmer.
The way it sounds coming out of speakers is, you know, a lot more exciting than just listening
to things on headphones. It's more of a social activity as well.
Well, the vinyl record is more something you actually sit down to listen to.
What vinyl is now doing again is helping us refocus the listening experience. Some of
it's listening and some of it's even, you know, a fashion statement where people like,
you know, records they like the covers.
You can read it, you can look at it, and it's also a piece of art.
We forget how much a recording carries with it.
Now, who hasn't heard of The Supremes? My heart leapt when I pulled out a Motown vinyl
of them with this gorgeous photograph of these three young women.
It's nice to be able to go into a record shop and find something that's been around for,
like, the last thirty years.
We have people coming in, wanting to hear Rolling Stones on vinyl because it's the Stones.
I think it was Keith Richards that said, "it was that Chuck Berry record, and you heard
that dah-dah-dah dah dah dah dah that just jumped out at you." That kind of sound that
jumps out at you, a riff like that, is really only possible on vinyl.