The Record Player

My hipster credibility has wained quite a bit since I became a husband and father, and by and large that’s been a good thing. At the very least, this has kept me from making some unwise facial hair decisions. Nevertheless, I’ve been wanting to get a record player for the past couple of years, and I finally did it. Here she is:

It’s the Audio-Technica LP60, which is pretty well regarded as a starter turntable. I also got some Edifier powered speakers so that, you know, I could hear the music.

Right away, I ordered Stadium Cake, by Oh Pep! on vinyl. However, it was going to take a while to arrive, so I went to Half Price Books and picked up a $3 copy of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, so I’d have something to listen to once the record player got here. It came on a Friday, the boys and I set it up, and we were all more excited than usual to hear Vivaldi.

There’s something special about placing a physical record on the turntable, watching the needle move into position, and hearing the crackles as it gets ready to start. I get a similar feeling putting a cassette in a tape deck, or inserting a Gameboy cartridge. I would chalk it up to nostalgia, but I never really played records as a kid, so I don’t have nostalgia for them. I just think they’re neat.

We didn’t make it all the way through The Four Seasons. Instead, the kids and I piled into the car and went back to Half Price to see what else we could find. We had a blast looking through the record section – a section that I have never more than glanced at, because there was no point. I told the kids I’d buy them something if it wasn’t too much, so here’s what we got:

Kaeta wanted a brand new Taylor Swift album that cost $40, so we clearly have different ideas of what “not too much” means. In any case, we came home and listened to Jonah’s Alabama album all the way through, dancing around and really enjoying ourselves.

Before the record player arrived, Jonah asked me why I wanted one. He was wondering what was better about them. But I told him, really, not much is better. New records cost way more, the players aren’t portable, you can’t skip tracks, and you have to flip them over halfway through. I told him I really couldn’t explain why I wanted one, but I just did, and I had for a long time. (Some people say they sound better, but I’m not sure. The only thing that I can say is definitively better is the album art.)

Now, though, I understand it better. As I sat on the floor pouring over the jumbled stacks of vinyl, I realized that a big reason I wanted the record player was so I could shop for records. Digging through piles of records at Half Price was just like flipping through racks and racks of used CDs at Hastings when I was a kid. It’s something I love and miss from the days before everything went digital.

The other reason is indefineable, but my kids got it. If I loaded up that same Alabama album in Spotify and played it on my phone, they would have listened to less than one song before going off to do something else, or I would have tapped “next” through half the songs. Instead, we all hung out together, enjoying the music, commenting on it, dancing to it, looking on the sleeve to see what the next song is called, and so on. So much of the time, digital music is consumed through earbuds, alone. This was communal, and I look forward to getting into it more.