The music industry is changing. If you want your music digital chances are you're probably going to download it. That's great for your iPod or car stereo, but we've sort of lost that tactile part of listening to an album. I'm an iPod user as much as the next guy. I love the convenience of it, but sometimes miss sitting down with a recording, reading all the liner notes and really getting familiar with it. For that type of listening experience it really doesn't get any better than opening up a 12" gatefold record sleeve, slipping out the record, setting it on the turntable and dropping the needle. 
 
It appears that I'm not the only one who thinks that way.  Vinyl record sales are up. In fact, in an industry where every year CD sales decrease exponentially vinyl sales continue to increase.  It's the only segment of the music industry that's actually growing. According to Nielson Soundscan, CD sales were down 19.7% in 2008, while LP sales showed an increase of 89%!
 
I'm so ahead of the curve. Except for a brief period in the early 90's when I lost my mind and sold some of my precious records, I've always been a vinyl junkie. My dad worked for Delta Airlines and every year we'd take a European vacation. I'd save up all summer long and buy as many records as I could carry through customs. It drove my dad nuts. "There's no way you can possibly listen to all those records." I religiously carted those heavy milk crates around with me through all my various moves in my early twenties. I may not have listened to them as much anymore as I began to accumulate more and more compact discs, but always knew there was something special about those records.

Somewhere around 1995 after listening to CDs almost exclusively for the last 5 years I decided to put on a record. It was Pink Floyd's Momentary Lapse of Reason. Not the greatest in the Floyd oeuvre I admit, but somewhat nostalgic for me as it came out during my high school years. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. It was a revelation. It had so much more depth. It sounded so real. So I put on a few other records, records that I had been listening to the CD version of for the last 5 years. The same thing...the vinyl sounded fantastic. So much better than the CDs. My elation soon gave way to anger. I'd been duped. We were all sold on the idea of pristine sound in the late 80's. But we got so caught up in the clarity of the compact disc, or more specifically lack of any surface noise so familiar to us vinyl collectors, that we somehow made the jump to believing that the CD created superior sound to the LP. It didn't. Somehow the overall quality of the sound was left out of the equation. It was boiled down to:

CDs = no surface noise = better sound vs. LPs = surface noise = inferior sound.
 
That whole experience in 1995 actually started me on the path to my current career. A few years later I was given a CD recorder for my computer. It cost over $500 and only recorded up to 4x, but at the time it was the coolest thing I owned. Later my brother and I split the cost of my first pro-audio sound card and recording software. I started playing around with recording records into the computer and burning them to CD. The strange thing was that my digital recordings of the records usually kept their "analog warmth" and sounded better than their commercial CD counterpart. I think a big part of the reason for that was that early analog to digital converters from the mid 80's, and still in use until the early 90's generally weren't very good. They produced digital audio that to this day still gives digital audio a bad name. "Tiny", "lifeless", "thin" are all good descriptions of that early digital sound.

Fast forward to 2009. I would hold any digital recording made by my current A/D converter, a Prism ADA-8XR, next to an analog recording and be proud. The digital recording will have all the life, warmth and reality of analog and be virtually indistinguishable from it. Which is a good thing because I couldn't do what I do without digital audio.