I put together a turntable and amp in my room the other night. Fueled by a strange, driving compulsion, at about 2 in the morning I disentangled the forest of cables around my parent's Sony phonograph, older than I am by several years, and lugged the thing down into my room. It's surprisingly difficult to silently carry archaically heavy equipment down a flight of stairs, and I probably woke everyone up in the process. I love the weight of dated electronic equipment though; something in the gravity of it makes me feel like it has more substance, originating from a simpler, more well built time, when things were actually constructed with the intention of repair, and a long lifespan, not just replacement in 2-3 years. Really though, whether my curmudgeon-ly ideals have any grounding in truth I don't know.
It's interesting how much more depth vinyl gives an album. It's difficult to really explain, because it's kindof an obtuse, audiophile/nerd/dork concept, but it gives the music this profoundly deepened impact. Vinyl has a smaller total range of sound than CDs or other digital media, but the way that it operates, as a steady stream of sound, rather than binary snapshots, makes the music more real in a lot of ways. It's almost as if, relative to a CD, the sound is squished, but instead of just becoming smaller, the excess shoots fathoms downwards, becoming a tangible sound-thing that you can almost sink your hand into.
I dunno, I find myself drawn to older things lately. Not ideas necessarily, but materials, aesthetics, substance. Simple guitars, natural finishes, raw woods.
