Why Vinyl?

by Nick Seiflow

A Vintage Vinyl Player - The Elac Miracord 50H Turntable

Why Vinyl? It’s the question every listener asks. It’s the question that we three at The Turntable Shop discussed endlessly – and our answers ended up with us opening our store. We felt that we should share the joy with everyone.

The answer? It’s better. In just about every way you could imagine.

Sure, the sense of connection is partly in the tactile pleasures of opening up a record and placing it on the turntable, gently lowering the tiny stylus into the groove, and listening to real, undigitised music.

But the truth is also that it simply sounds better. Dynamic range, low-level information retrieval, soundstage, all these things are better rendered with the LP.

Some of these improvements can be absolutely shocking: to hear a 70s pressing of your favourite band in analog can be so different from the CD or download you’ve been used to that you might not believe your ears at first hearing. Even in mono, believe it or not. The early Jimi Hendrix recordings, early Beatles etc, recorded in mono will convince anyone that Analog is King!

We’ve come through a bad patch with the recorded music industry. The CD, MP3 downloads, and the ability to endlessly and mindlessly press ‘next’ on our players, never really engaging with the musicians, came close to completely dominating the marketplace. But the LP hung on, sometimes precariously so. And now, in 2014, its position is unchallenged. Slowly and surely it has come back – and this time to stay.

We love turntables. We love the round black shiny things we put on them. We love the music that comes out of them. Long live the turntable. Long live vinyl!