I’m a big supporter of vinyl and not just because I’m a DJ. Even if I hung my headphones up tomorrow, I’d still be hitting up record stores for my music. As convenient as it is to just download an mp3, I still prefer a physical thing that I can hold and read the liner notes or look at the artwork.

Unfortunately, over the past decade, record stores have been on a steady decline and fewer artists and labels are offering vinyl copies of their releases. The only way to counter that trend is to increase sales and to that end I hope to get you, an all digital purveyor of music, to cross over into the analog world.

This will be a guide to getting into the wide world of wax; the pros and cons of vinyl, what gear you need and where to get it, how to store and take care of your collection, and where to buy your records. In the interest of getting more people into vinyl at the lowest possible cost, this is geared towards the casual listener and not the audiophile (a person who has sex with audio waves). I’m aware there is better equipment than what I’m talking about and I’m not going into frequency ranges or tubes or any technical minutiae. I’m keeping this as simple as possible.

So read on and come over to the dark side (or picture disc side if you’re into that sort of thing.

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