Why are records making a comeback?
My sister is having a cake day that ends in a zero, so a big deal. I can't be there due to a lack of earned vacation days, so I asked about presents. She said that she and husband were getting into vinyl, so record albums would be cool. My sister, by youth and non-geek-itude has never suffered the embarrassment of asking vinyl records to do something they never could do, so she' setting into it for other reasons.
I think I've just figured out why.
They're both huge music fans, lots of concerts, really wide experiences in genres, no lack of strongly-held opinions. Music is important, enough so that in her packing the family up to visit the ancestral home, she included her Bluetooth speaker and deployed it for background music frequently. Even though my dad's living room has a pretty ok stereo in it, the CD collection is hopeless and she probably doesn't know about our local public radio station devoted to pop/rock/cool music.
So why records? Because they are apex-musicvores and have decent mastery of the latest repro systems (alll engineered towards convenience), and the process of live music is what makes it so attractive, they're seeking to make their casual music more of an event.
Look at steampunk. It's successes are wrapping 21st C. tech in Victorian clothing. This skin can be deep enough to go beyond simple deception, but none have gone so far as to achieve the results of “The Difference Engine” a truly mechanically-powered digital-experience. I'd like to suggest that this esthetic is, in part, about making the effortless experience more important. Ideally, we want it no more difficult to achieve the task—say, turning on the laptop—but if we can do it with an ornate series of brass levers and push- pull tubes, that would be cooler!
I believe my sister and brother in law, having perfectly internalized the music-on-demand experience made by MP3's, now they want the little-jewel-on-blue-velvet. Both grew up in homes with easy access to recorded music, and look back on records for their experience. Nostalgia is at play here, as that explains they're forgetting record's shortcomings. But they want a stylized version of that experience, something like the advertisements that lead to the bachelor pad audio in “Down With Love”: a scene of lovers en-snuggled by the fire, sharing the lovely tunes from the stereo that blends-in and stands-out from the dark, mellow wood paneling.
They've never suffered embarrassment by a record skipping on-air when you ran for a quick bathroom stop. Never spent hours on a mix-tape or audio-bed, trying to remove transients at least 10x too small for the analog tools of the day, or one of my faves: to really demo a gigantic sound system just completed, we had to place the record player (a magnificently expensive example of the day, in a stunning field-case so it could travel to each new installation of these sound systems) in a closed room separated by two walls from the theater where we'd listen. Inside this little temple, the God of sound sat on a throne of cinder blocks to isolate it from any floor vibrations. Imagine coordinating through those walls, because if that needle dropped with the master mute off, 20,000 watts would've destroyed $250,000 worth of speakers. These are my experiences of records, so I can't see any romance.
But they never suffered at the hands of analog reproduction, or the few events have been smoothed by the long climb that we call living. And so their love of music wants expression in more than thumbing FFWD when shuffle chooses an off segue. Now I get that. In fact, now I might contribute to that. Since I went through those experiences, maybe I can contribute more than just some wax to put on the platter. I think I'll go do some research on turntables and see what's out there. Or go dig my old Technics out of storage and put a new cartridge on it: for its day (the apex just before the first front-loading CD players came on the market) this was the best ttbl a real person could have!