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Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ.

The phenomenon here in the northwest US is driven more by tech habits and demographics than by vinyl fad

I find the music source market and habits fascinating.
1) What I am seeing here in the northwest is people abandoning cds, not to go to vinyl, but to go to full on download music sources or streaming listening. There is a lot of buzz about vinyl, but its a minor force in the market. With the huge data capacity of mobile phones and computers now, I think a lot of folks with old cds download their old cds and never look at them again.

2) People who listened to some of the music you describe are getting old, perhaps like you and I, some of them really old. Some of them are dumping old stuff getting ready to move to their retirement lifestyle, or trying to simplify so they can be ready if they have to move somewhere because of age. Those people are not moving back to vinyl in any significant way here.

The vast majority of people who developed their listening habits in the begining of the cd/digital age have almost no attachment to the musical information storage unit as a cult object,unlike someone like me, who never even got even medium quality cd player.

I'm not saying there aren't many people becoming attached to vinyl for its wonderful musical or fetish object properties or because of some fad that gets them to simultaneously buy awful turntables, or the even smaller number *returning* to vinyl due to fashion, but I'm certain it has very little impact on what is driving the cds into the thrift stores. (plentiful and fairly cheap dvds in thrift stores is driven by this streaming thing too, I think)

I had a friend a bit older than I who got a turntable about 10 years ago so he and his wife could listen *again* to their 200 or more albums from the 70s. (This friend had several years earlier put aside his respectable Altec Santana speakers for some plastic pioneer bookshelf speakers...) I got him going with a new p-mount cart for his table from his basement. Then from some acquaintance he bought a $1200 Music Hall table used for around $700, which he was very proud of. This table he placed on built-in shelf with jiggling sliding kitchen cabinet rollers for sliding it out to listen too. Up until they moved to the midwest for job reasons they used it maybe once a month, at most, and never bought a new lp. Maybe they've bought some since, but I don't think they would have abandoned their cds for that.

Any way, anecdotes and observations from one corner of the globe...





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