Oh I went through my dweeby high end stereo phase, with my Arcam amp and heybrook speakers hooked up to my Thorens/SME combo turntable and a Marantz CD player.

Then I came to my senses


Looked a lot like this in fact...thats spooky what google throws up!

I bought an old secondhand turntable last summer, it was first time I'd played my vinyl in donkey's years. It was great to hear my old stuff again.

It was just a cheap deck ($100 or something) and it never survived the "container cull" when we packed things up last month to go back to the UK. But I will look forward to buying a new set-up which will definitely include a turntable.

The ceremony of opening the album is great. As is being 'forced' to listen to whole albums... after so many years of being track-selective, it's refreshing to hear songs as a suite.

An old pal of mine who was a sound engineer at the BBC only used to play his vinyl through a valve-amplifier. It was quite the set up, these wax-filled glass cylinders that needed to warm up properly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12209143




A growing number of music-lovers unhappy about the way album tracks are enjoyed in a pick-and-mix fashion have decided to take action.

The rules are strict. No talking. No texting. You must listen to every song on the album.

Classic Album Sundays treat our best-loved records like great symphonies and are being set up in London, Scotland and Wales.

Groups of music fans sit in front of a vinyl turntable, with the best speakers they can afford, dim the lights and listen to a classic album all the way through.

This monthly club in north London is run by Colleen Murphy and for her it is a strike against "'download culture", the sense that music has just become an endless compilation of random songs used as background noise.

"Everyone, stop multi-tasking, sit down, open your ears and do some heavy listening."

The set album this month was Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. We sat in silence even as David Bowie's record was turned over to side two.

The seats were soft, someone had lit some incense. Some people closed their eyes, others nodded in rhythmic appreciation. There was a sense of being collectively submerged in Bowie's music.

"You're not even allowed to use the bathroom here, it's too noisy," says Ms Murphy.

Kate Bush's The Hounds of Love was a previous choice, and a popular one amongst the regulars. Most had heard bits of the record but few could remember sitting through it all the way through.

It is a topic that has been making the papers. Pink Floyd went to court to try to protect the integrity of albums such as Dark Side of the Moon. For music critics such as Neil McCormick of the Daily Telegraph they were totally justified.

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - David Bowie The Hounds of Love - Kate Bush Blue - Joni Mitchell Get Happy - Elvis Costello Dark side of the Moon - Pink Floyd Blood on the Tracks - Bob Dylan The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses "These are works of art at their greatest level. You can pick up a Dickens book and read a little bit of it and get some pleasure but you will not get the same pleasure as you would picking it up and reading it from beginning to end."

He took me through his vinyl collection, the albums you have to listen to all the way through. Top of the list was Blue by Joni Mitchell, then in no particular order came Get Happy by Elvis Costello, Dark side of the Moon, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and all of Led Zeppelin. The list was a long one.

"They've created works that have a beginning, a middle and end, that have nuances, themes, that take you on a journey that's as great as any novel, any opera, any drama."

One of the greatest crimes he feels is to split up the suite of songs at the end of the Beatles' Abbey Road, because each song drifts in to the next.

The little tune Her Majesty is a simple little coda to ease the tension left by the Beatles farewell to their fans, the song The End. At the end of the song there is a gap and a final crashing chord, then to relieve the tension comes 23 seconds of this little acoustic ditty. On its own it begins half way through that final chord.

"It makes no sense," says McCormick. "To split them is simply shocking, meaningless."

But to Peter Robinson of the website Pop Justice this is the past speaking.

"Most albums, you've got a pretty good idea. The bad songs are pretty bad, you know. We're busy people. Let's just get rid of them."

Every album he owns is split, analysed and re-ordered. This, he says, is progress. The listener is in control and we do not have to sit through bad music. If he were to spend time with a "classic rock" album, he says the solution is simple.

"What I would do is open the track as an audio file, take out any drum solos, look for any guitar solo, take it out, close it and put it back into iTunes."

Albums, he says, have often become meaningless. Some songs are given away as free downloads, track listings can change with bonus tracks being added or changed. You can, he says, listen all the way through but do not feel obliged to obey the whims of a pop star.

But back at the pub in Islington in London, we were coming to the emotional climax of Rock and Roll Suicide at the end of Ziggy Stardust.

The £12,000 speakers were revealing little nuances of sound that some of us had not heard before.

The remastered vinyl seemed to capture the feel of the 70s and I had stayed awake for almost all of it. Heads nodded, a foot quietly tapped and as the final string chord faded out the lights were turned back on.

For Gina Tapsley, it was a revelation: "Listening to an album like this shows me something new, it's always an emotional experience."

DJ Shadow, The Stone Roses, Kanye West, Carole King. The blackboard was already filling with suggested classic albums for the months to come.

'kin A, man! POST OF THE DAY!!!

Oh jeez, I have become the middle-aged rock bore.

S' alright. Better than listening to Lady Gaga on an iPod whilst playing brick-breaker and surfing Facebook.

I love the practicality of digital plus sticking an MP3 player on random is bliss, but I still have a soft spot for the warmth of vinyl.
And yes - you're forced to listen to the whole thing...although unlike CDs you can give up after side 1.

One of the first things I did when I came to Canada was hunt down a decent turntable and amp as I'd obviously offloaded mine back home before emigrating.
It took a great deal of consideration before I got one, partly because the guys at the specialist hi-fi store I went to insisted in demo-ing the gear (even though it was second hand) that I was looking to buy.
In fact, they shot themselves in the foot, as the Rotel amp I'd had my eye on, which sounded superb with the couple of cds I'd brought, had a goosed phono connection (or in the salesman's words to his colleague "This phono stage is bitched, John!").
I ended up buying a mid range late 80s Yamaha amp which weighs a ton and a refurbed Dual deck. Sound great when they're warmed up.

My 5 year old has just discovered vinyl and is obsessed with the ceremony of it.

I kid you not!

He comes round to mine and asks "Daddy, can I put on a record?" He flips deliberately through my shelves of albums and 12" singles (although he has recently discovered my box of 7" singles) and picks one out. Then he carefully slips the album from the cover, holds it by the edges - as I've shown him; I lift him up to the turntable where he places it carefully on, he presses the buttons according to sequence then gets on with playing with his Lego...

...whilst Voivod, Megadeth, or LA Guns or some other 80s rock/metal blasts out.
(I think the cover art must attract him...).

Digital all the way now, running up to over 60G of music files, You have a better a dynamic range than any domestic analog format, higher quality and freq range plus no losses due to the media wear and tear. And you can choose many encoding options today that are completely lossless for optimum quality.

I can’t see a single reason to go to analog unless you’re the type that prefers single ended triode valves and those in that camp… well

Then you had your mid-life crisis last week!

We recently bought a Bose wave system and it's amazing.