Grooving on retro

Can you name an industry that’s logging over 50 percent growth? Well, here you go: Last year’s sales of vinyl records was a 52-percent increase from the prior year; 2013 tallied 6.1 million records sold, while 2014 tallied 9.2 million.

This action is a far cry from vinyl’s pre-CD heyday, but, still, it’s a long way up from the year 1993 which, for the sake of contrast, saw just 300,000 records sold.

This story is delightfully retro. That’s why I like it, so I’m going to blow some dust off the past just for the fun of it.

I don’t know how many vinyl records, be they new or old, are being played on Saipan, but I’m sure there are some. Cars and other machinery rust away too soon on the islands, but vinyl doesn’t corrode.

Vinyl records, for those who haven’t encountered them, are thin plastic disks the size of dinner plates. Before CDs and other digital media came along, these records, along with magnetic cassette tapes, were how most of us bought our music. By the late ’80s CD players were common household items and vinyl was on its way out.

As for 2014, I stumbled across this gig in a big city bookstore, where I saw a display devoted to newly-produced vinyl records. Vinyl? For a moment I thought I had fallen into a time warp.

As if on cue, a bubbly 20-year-old store clerk entered the picture from stage left. Noting my interest in the records, she addressed me.

“Oh, those are the latest thing,” she said.

“Latest?” I asked.

“Yeah. You need a special player to play them. A good one is, like, $200. I’m going to get one someday.”

As for record players, there are, indeed, contemporary models on the market, ranging from $50 into the hundreds of dollars at the consumer level, and I’m sure the specialist niche goes higher than that.

Something that I haven’t seen on the modern market (though I haven’t really looked carefully) is what we used to call a “changer.” Instead of playing records one at a time, a changer automatically played several of them sequentially. This was remarkable engineering: It was wacky, it was intricate, and it worked. Out of sheer awe I’ll attempt a description, though memories and words might fail me:

You’d start by stacking a few records, like pancakes, atop a spindle on the record player. A flange on the spindle would retract, allowing the bottom-most record to plop down onto a spinning platter.

The record on the spinning platter was read by a needle that rode atop the record’s surface. The needle was housed at the end of a pivoting arm called a “tone arm.” As part of the changer’s elegant ballet, when one record was done playing and it was time for the next one to fall down into playing position, the tone arm would pitch up, thus lifting the needle up from the record that just played, and then the tone arm would swing out of the way so the new record could drop down. The new record would drop down (landing atop the one that just played) and the tone arm would swing back into place over the new record. Once in position, the tone arm would gently pitch down to lower the needle onto the record surface. The music would start to play.

Magic! And for all their ingenious intricacy, changers were so inexpensive that even teenagers had them.

As cool as that scene was, many purists took a dim view of mechanically plop-dropping records on top of each other like pancakes. So I think most of the high-end turntables (record players) were one-at-a-time affairs, dispensing with the tall spindles of stacked-up records.

Although you could injure a record by scratching it, and if you abused them they could warp, outside of that nothing short of a bazooka could mortally wound them. I don’t have a large music collection, in fact, it’s miniscule, so I don’t nearly have enough data to really mean anything. Still, I have noticed that my vinyl records have, on average, been less prone to failure than my CDs. I’ll also note that that some of my favorite tunes never made it to CD to begin with. No, I’m not trying to play off vinyl vs. CDs, both have served me well, but I think vinyl sure deserves some respect.

The cardboard sleeves that records came in had roughly a square-foot of surface area. Album-cover art was a very big part of pop-culture.

Well, such are some of the memories that come along with vinyl’s retro revival. How far will it go? I have no idea, and I’m not really sure what inspired it to begin with. I’ll leave those matters to people who are knowledgeable in this realm. Me, I’m just a slob with a few records to play. And, as such, vinyl brings back good memories. That’s all I know, and, in fact, that’s all I have to know.