Wow, no sooner do I blog about buying a turntable for Christmas, when one shows up for me during Chanukah! Thank you, wife, Sharon!!

She even bought one of the ones I blogged about—the Ion.

The thing SOUNDS GREAT and it’s even the less expensive one—about eighty bucks on Amazon.

If you still own even the smallest record collection, I cannot recommend this more highly. The “come on,” of course, is that you can transfer your albums to compact discs, but that’s not the real treasure. The real treasure is being able to listen to albums once again!!

I am a stickler for fidelity, and my feeling is that we have sacrificed great and incredible sound for convenience. Now, I’m not saying that we’re gonna go back to vinyl (especially with everyone running around with iPods and iPhones), but it is interesting to note how every band and artist worth a sh*t, does, indeed, do a small vinyl pressing! It’s because they know the difference it makes on how the music enters your body

Put on any album and compare. When you hear a record, you hear all the instruments and they enter your ears, your body, and your soul in a very magical way. You can almost feel the fingers of the bass guitarist—you can almost smell the wood of an acoustic guitar. Its because the sound is analogue (sound waves), and your ear drum vibrates, naturally picking up those sound “waves.” The fact is, we hear in analogue. Because the CD only gives you some of the sound (digital is just a series of yes/no coding blocks or sectors) and everything is compressed, you THINK you are hearing something good (mostly because the compression makes it all sound more in your face), but in fact, you miss so much fidelity that the music doesn’t quite reach your most inner soul in the same way.

Do your own comparison and see for yourself–even with a rock record. If you take an AC/DC record, for example, and turn it up loud, you will “feel” the bass, the drums—you will feel like you are right in the middle of the band. That feeling, along with the driving guitars, will just make your body move, and instinctively, you will want to dance.
Put on a CD of that exact same album, and turn it up just as loud—it hits you like a brick, and you just get a headache!

One of my pet opinions is that one of the reasons music doesn’t seem quite as important as it once did not that long ago, is because it doesn’t move us in the same way–because we listen digitally and mostly on small speakers and with portable players.

So, who knows? Maybe we will go back to vinyl for home, and disc for travel. They say that the Blu Ray technology might be the answer to bring back fidelity. So far, the jury is still out.

For eighty bucks, go buy a turntable! It will blow your mind, I promise.

Keep Rockin’!

Rap~