20 Minutes and the iPod Backlash

It's raining in San Diego. We've spent the day inside, reading and listening to music. We have listened to nothing but records. I'm up every 20 minutes or so to turn the record over or change it. I like this experience. It makes music-listening intentional. I select the record, look at the cover, take it out of its jacket, put it on the turntable, and listen to 20 minutes of music by the same artist or artists.

I also like shuffle on iTunes, but it's different. Shuffle is great because you don't know what's coming next--listening is full of revelatory surprises. Under critical listening, it can sound superb. And it's very easy to use shuffle for background when you're doing other things.

But record-listening is unique. It's very analog--you are putting on a black disc with grooves that cause a stylus to vibrate to the tune of the music. If you want to be totally analog, you can send that through tube amplifiers to your speakers, and there's not a single conversion of the signal to ons-and-offs or ones-and-zeroes. Transistor amplification uses ons-and-offs, while tube amplification depends on waves, like a theramin, translating small waves into bigger waves.

More important is the tactile and visual nature of records--touching and looking at the cover art, feeling the disc, watching the turntable spin. It's a many-faceted experience, all supporting listening to music.

I think lots of folks are discovering this, which is why record and turntable sales are growing again, and why so many artists are releasing new music on EPs and LPs.

It makes life good.