Oh my god, I get it now. By “it,” I mean vinyl records. Over the past few months, I may have developed a bit of an addiction to collecting vinyls. This isn’t the healthiest habit. Vinyls are incredibly expensive, and you could probably find some of these songs for free on YouTube or on a streaming service, right? That’s what I thought at first. While I was born around the “vinyl revival” generation and I’ve always been aware that vinyls are considered “cool” by hipsters, I was always confused as to why. The advances in CD and later streaming technology seemed to make vinyls obsolete. Both of these have far better sound quality than vinyls, so what was the point in buying them?
But now, having listened to vinyl records being played for the first time, I finally understand their allure. Yes, by the numbers, vinyls have worse sound reproduction and more noise. But when you put a record onto a turntable, it’s a drastically different experience. It’s genuinely hard to explain with words—you just have to hear it for yourself.
Compared to streaming or even, to some extent, a CD, the vocals seem to be more echoey—especially if you’re listening through headphones, they seem to be echoing around a huge room. The percussion, too, feels sharper and more distinct. I would describe the sound as feeling more … three-dimensional, for lack of a better word. All of this, I believe, comes from the physicality of the vinyl format. The microscopic grooves on the vinyl record the sound waves exactly as they were recorded. The sound waves are etched into its very physical being. Absolutely no data gets lost in translation.
Granted, this analog system does have a few drawbacks. There will always be some moments which serve as unpleasant reminders that the sound you are listening to is coming from a physical object. Record skipping is an obvious problem—even accidentally bumping against the turntable can cause the needle to jump—as is surface noise, if you haven’t cleaned your records. But I think these flaws only serve to make vinyls MORE authentic than their counterparts—especially streaming services.
The problems with your song aren’t coming from packets going missing through your shitty 4G coverage—they’re coming from your turntable, your needle, your disk, something physically present in the room with you. It’s a problem that you can (usually) reach out and address by yourself, not wait on some corporate overlord or some menial programmer in Silicon Valley to fix.
Indeed, every aspect of listening to vinyl is a physical experience. With a streaming service, all you have to do is touch the brightly-colored icon on your phone and a song will instantly start playing for you. Convenient? Sure, but putting on a record feels more satisfying. You must physically take the record out of the sleeve and out of the plastic bag, slowly, making sure that the record does not fall onto the floor or get any scratches. Then you set the record down onto the turntable. What I like to do is to take a microfiber cloth and gently brush away any specks of dust I see before hitting “play.” Once you’re finished listening, you have to put the record back into the plastic, which for me, a vinyl noob, is the hardest part of the whole process. You kind of have to wrangle it in—again, making sure not to damage the record in any way. Then you lower the plastic back into the sleeve, making sure that the plastic doesn’t get wrinkled or folded and take up too much space inside. The process is a bit tedious. It’s ritualistic. It forces you to slow down.
In my mind, that is the most important part. At the risk of sounding like a boomer—or worse, a philosophy major—let me ramble incoherently as to why.
We live in a society that prizes convenience over literally everything else. We prize convenience so much that we don’t care what happens to the physical. Instead of leaving our houses, we can survive off of Amazon and DoorDash orders and never interact with anyone. We can scroll endlessly through algorithms designed to profit off of range and negativity and never make any meaningful changes. Stuck on homework? Why not ask ChatGPT? In the year of our Lord 2025, even works of art can be churned out with the push of a button. A lot of people are worried about the rise of generative AI slop, and with good reason too. When everything is just the touch of your fingertips away, you start to care less. Things feel less authentic, less real. Less meaningful.
How do we cure this? By slowing down, by embracing the process over the result.
I think the Japanese tea ceremony is the perfect example of this. It’s an excessively formalized, ritualistic and incredibly inefficient way of serving drinks. Every action is prescribed. Every movement, formulaic. Everything from the preparation of the tea, the compliments of the guests, the arrangement of every tiny object in the tea room, is planned to perfection. Now, normally when people are drinking tea, they don’t go to all of this expense. But that’s far from the point. The point is for you to slow down; for you to appreciate every detail and moment of the experience. This is what makes the tea ceremony infinitely more meaningful than your average three p.m. cuppa.
While I haven’t partaken in a Japanese tea ceremony, I do know what I’m talking about. I experienced a similar feeling when developing film photos in high school. With a digital camera and even a cell phone, taking a photo has never been easier—all you have to do is push the button and a fully-formed image is ready to show to the world. But for a film camera, that process gets a little bit more complicated. Taking the shot is just step one in a long process that includes developing the roll, blowing up the shot in an enlarger and finally making the finished print. Using the enlarger is one of the most important steps in the entire process—a slight difference in the lenses or the light level can result in dramatically different pictures.
It’s probably no exaggeration to say that I’ve spent hours trying to develop a single print. But that process has also made it more meaningful. It’s made me more familiar with every detail of my shots, from the composition to the lighting to the focus. It’s a vastly different experience than just uploading an Instagram selfie—I felt a sense of pride, of attachment to each print that I made.
And that, as I have come to realize, is why playing vinyl records just feels so much different. Unlike listening to a song on YouTube, there are no layers of abstraction. No layers of distance between you and the experience. Just like a tea ceremony or a developing print, it’s an experience, an activity, that you must do with purpose and intention—not just mindlessly pushing buttons whenever you want to hear a song.
I know people always complain about boomer jokes that basically boil down to an idiot child saying shit like, “Father, I cannot click the book!” But whenever I play my vinyls, I can actually feel the pain of millions of boomers. I can actually understand what our generation has disposed of and what we have lost in our day-to-day experiences. I get it, now.
This would normally be the part of the article where I invite you to take the “red pill” and buy as many vinyls as possible. I can’t do that here. Vinyl collecting, as mentioned before, is hideously expensive, and my parents have already begun to complain about how much I’m spending on “junk” records. Unless you are a shopaholic, like me, please try to save your hard-earned money. But at the very least, try to understand why so many people think collecting vinyls is cool, why vinyls have begun to outsell CDs in the physical music market, and why they mean so much to people.
