March 2025
A little more than a month ago, SoundStage! publisher Doug Schneider posted a message on Facebook that caught my attention. To be honest, I usually look out for Doug’s posts—they let me know what’s going on at the SoundStage! Network, and in the audio industry in general. This one hit home because it referred to something that has always been at the root of my interest in hi-fi.
“The vinyl resurgence isn’t a resurgence anymore—it’s here again and we believe here to stay,” Doug wrote. “Embracing that, the SoundStage! video team is working to expand our brand’s global reach even further with a new SoundStage! Specials video series called Why Vinyl.” The series debuted on YouTube in February.
I’ve been collecting LPs for more than 50 years, and even I am somewhat puzzled by vinyl’s continued, robust health. When I first heard about the format’s comeback, I was skeptical. The number of LPs pressed started to rise in 2006, and vinyl boosters in the audio press and on forums called this a sign that our preferred medium for music was returning. But we vinyl lovers were so convinced of the format’s superiority we had anticipated its second coming almost as soon as it began to decline in popularity.
Vinyl held on through the 1990s, much to our surprise. We could buy new LPs, replace worn styli, and even buy new turntables if we needed them. Granted, retail shops for those things were hard to find, but the internet increasingly provided for us.
A small part of my collection of rock LPs—including the many Beatles pressings I own
LP sales had dropped a little in the early 2000s, but we were used to our hobby being on the fringes. And, to be honest, when the numbers started to come back up, the increases were small at first. This 2008 article from Rolling Stone states that US sales rose from 858,000 units in 2006 to almost 1 million units in 2007. Things picked up the following year: CNET reported vinyl sales of nearly 1.9 million, a significant increase and the beginning of a trend.
That CNET article also highlights downloads as the big revenue generator for the music industry in 2008. Downloads held steady for a few years, but they were declining by 2014 and now amount to almost nothing.
Nowadays, streaming rules. I’m skeptical that it generates as much income as record companies claim. They’re multinational, stock-driven conglomerates, and overreporting is to their benefit. Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that most people get their music via streaming now.
Music revenue reporting is often unreliable. A few months ago, Billboard magazine asserted that US vinyl sales for 2024 would shrink by 33%, based on information from Luminate, which tracks such data. The magazine then backed away from its initial conclusions after reexamining Luminate’s methodologies and data, which actually showed a year-on-year growth of 6.2% by Q3 2024. Final figures for 2024 aren’t out yet, but likely will show a modest increase over the RIAA’s stats for 2023: 43.2 million LP/EPs.
Recent annual LP sales increases aren’t as dramatic as they have been in the past, but vinyl is firmly reestablished in the marketplace. LPs outsell CDs, a format that dominated music for more than 20 years and is still hanging on. Cassettes may be making a comeback, but at this point their sales don’t amount to much. In the world of physical media, LPs dominate.
I emailed Doug for some details about the Why Vinyl series. He told me that there was no question mark in the title for a reason: “It plays both ways—Why Vinyl meaning ‘here’s why vinyl is so popular,’ but someone also might just consider it a question.” He opens the debut episode with a couple of questions: “Why do people like vinyl so much? What do they hear and see in it?
“I don’t have the answer,” he continues. “I don’t think any single person has the answer. Instead, it’s the people who are into vinyl, who buy it, who know. So, we’re gonna let them tell the story.” For the first episode, he talked to vinyl enthusiasts who were shopping at the Record Centre in Ottawa, Canada. Owner John Thompson opened the shop, which also sells new and vintage audio gear, in 2011.
Thompson is one of the interviewees, and he says something early in the video that echoed my experience: “I can remember when CD came out and I did not buy in on CD, you know, I didn’t. Never warmed up to it. So I was one of those guys that, you know, Betamax, vinyl, that was me.” As I’ve noted in other SoundStage! columns, my first experience with CDs was not pleasant. They sounded harsh and unnatural to me.
“I can remember the big purge,” Thompson went on to say, “where people were literally dumping their vinyl and going to CD.” He placed ads in a local paper and people contacted him to pick up their LPs and take them away. In time, he had about 250,000 LPs in storage. He wasn’t sure what would happen with his massive collection of vinyl, but the tide turned. “What I had hoped would happen, did,” he says in the video. “Vinyl made this massive comeback.”
Indeed, by the time Thompson opened his store, vinyl was well into its second wind. True believers like Thompson helped keep the vinyl flame alive. Others who contributed and kept things going included online retailers, such as Music Direct, Acoustic Sounds, and Elusive Disc.
Local retailers also played a vital role. When my wife and I are traveling, she always searches online for any record shops along the way. If I’m visiting a town with a university, I know I’ll find records. Big cities have plenty of stores with large selections of new and used vinyl, and more are opening all the time. My daughter lived in Washington, DC, which has many great vinyl haunts, and she moved to Boston, MA, which has even more. Now, there are two record stores within a short drive of my house, and I try to get to KT Media in Middletown, PA, whenever I can.
Vinyl also has its apologists who never lost their faith. I might not necessarily agree with everything audio journalist Michael Fremer writes, but he’s certainly been a consistent cheerleader for vinyl. He was diligent, if occasionally overenthusiastic, in jumping on inaccuracies in media reports about the limitations of LPs versus CDs and the decline of the format. And I like to think my colleague Jason Thorpe and I have also helped the cause by reviewing and proclaiming the virtues of vinyl here on the SoundStage! Network. Fellow SoundStager Thom Moon has been reviewing affordable turntables here for many years, as well.
By keeping vinyl alive during the ’90s and into the 2000s, we all helped maintain the infrastructure of vinyl manufacture and distribution. When the resurgence started, it wasn’t as if things had to start from scratch. A couple of the people appearing in the first episode of Why Vinyl mention that they or their parents had unloaded their LPs. However, I kept my collection and continued to buy new records. Folks like me kept factories and retailers going, so the industry was poised for the vinyl comeback and ready to commission new pressing plants.
One of the interviewees at the Record Centre says he has a collection of 15,000 LPs and is at the point where any new vinyl requires getting rid of old records to make space. There’s no question that vinyl takes up room. I’ve built new shelves a couple of times in the last few years to accommodate my still-expanding collection, and I now have about 5000 LPs. I also have a few thousand CDs that have to be shelved and stored. This is a nonissue with streaming, of course, and it’s possible that old age and smaller quarters will make streaming more attractive to me.
Some recent vinyl purchases waiting to be filed
For now, I like physical media for music, and I prefer vinyl. Today’s CD players and DACs are so good that digital playback sounds very close to analog to me. However, that doesn’t keep me from continuing to buy LPs. Some of vinyl’s allure is the sense of history I get, especially from original pressings. Dennis Burger’s column last month on SoundStage! Access describes his recent foray into vinyl and what he’s learned during that time. At one point near the end of the article, he writes: “What I wish I’d done sooner: embrace original pressings.”
I recently picked up a few Dave Brubeck Quartet albums that were released on Columbia Records in the mid-1950s. Original “six-eye” mono Columbia pressings of those records are available for reasonable prices and they sound wonderful. I have CD versions of many of them and they’re also very enjoyable. They were beautifully recorded, and that fact comes through in both formats.
With original pressings, it seems as if a moment in time had been preserved in amber. (Or rather, in vinyl.) Brubeck recorded Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A. in New York City in November 1956. The recording engineer was probably Fred Plaut, who worked on other great sessions, including Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Brubeck’s Time Out. As popular as Brubeck has been, Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A. has never been reissued on vinyl over the years, and only saw release on CD in 2009.
My copy of Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A. is an early pressing, and I can hear some groove wear between tracks. Younger listeners who are used to the clean perfection of digital sound might not be able to get past that noise, but even in quiet passages the album sounds terrific. It sounds audiophile to me.
Many of Brubeck’s other albums—especially, Time Out—went through several reissues and each sounded a little bit different from the others, likely due to remastering and the cutting of a new lacquer. The original Blue Note LPs cut by Rudy Van Gelder sound different from later pressings, and from the current Blue Note reissues. Chasing down different copies of an album and being able to enjoy slight variations in how they sound is one of the joys of collecting.
My copy of Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A. came with the original inner sleeve
Yet, collecting can be frustrating and hard to fathom if you’re new to the game. CDs are absolutely consistent: although remastering can make reissues sound different, every disc in a release is the same. Vinyl adds the mystery and unpredictability of the manufacturing process, especially in older pressings. When Columbia Records released Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, the label had three plants kicking out LPs. The results could vary subtly depending on the plant or at what point in a run your copy was made—in other words, how many LPs had already been pressed from the stamper. Some copies of an LP are better than others, even in the same run.
There’s a company that chases down the elusive “best pressing.” Better Records listens to many, many albums to find the best, most exciting copies. This is controversial, even among collectors, but I think the company’s claims are valid. “No two copies of a record sound the same,” Better Records says on its website. The pressings it sells “sound dramatically better than the average LP.”
That doesn’t mean that I don’t think Better Records charges insanely high prices. $650 for a copy of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s first LP is ridiculous, no matter how good it sounds. And Better Records is open about the fact that you will not be able to resell any of its LPs for what you’ve paid.
I mention the Better Records “Hot Stamper” phenomenon as a warning: Don’t let yourself go down that kind of rabbit hole. Enjoy your LPs and be happy with what you’re hearing. If a record is warped or noisy, return it. But if it plays well and sounds good, be satisfied. If you begin collecting in earnest, you will probably find a few records that meet the Better Records standard anyway. I have a few in my collection.
The people at the Record Centre who shared their opinions with Doug mention many of the things that continue to draw me to the format after more than 50 years. They talk about the tactile experience—holding and reading an LP cover. They talk about the ritual of cleaning a record and placing it on the turntable, preparing yourself mentally to listen. They talk about vinyl’s collectability.
All these things are true. For me, the sound of an LP carries a magical and emotional pull that digital playback, even in high resolution, doesn’t quite manage. I just bought a new DAC for my reference system. It sounds so good that I spent three days just listening to CDs. Then, some LPs I had ordered earlier arrived. As I cleaned and played them, I realized, once again, that vinyl will always have the edge for me. Is my preference logical? Can I provide data to support it? Does it matter?
No, it doesn’t matter. Enjoy listening to your LPs, and watch Why Vinyl for reassurance that others share your passion.
. . . Joseph Taylor
josepht@soundstagenetwork.com
