Welcome To The Vinyl Experience!

To read archived articles on VINYL BASICS, Vinyl News and other Paul Cavalconte musings, visit the 1019RXP home page, click on The Experience, then RXP Blogs, and finally Paul's Blog...

25 years after the advent of the CD promised “perfect sound forever”, an alternate technology is showing gains while CD sales cave to digital downloads, and music fans boil their bulky hard-media music collections down into I Pod stew. The technology on the rise was the very one displaced by the CD market in the first place.

The “technology” is Vinyl LP playback—back, and arguably better than ever!

Record album sales (including 7 and 12 inch singles) are on the rise, Here at The Vinyl Experience feature page, look for special articles devoted entirely to loving music through LP playback.

As a lifelong enthusiast and collector, I will gather all you need to know about following this fun and rewarding branch of The Rock Experience.

-I’ll summarize new releases and reissues, with details not just about the music, but the packaging and pressing quality.

-I’ll help de-mystify the specifics of playback, and show you tricks and techniques for spinning records on a budget. (See the "Basics" Blog-post articles)

A new generation of music fans crave a more intimate, involving relationship with recorded sound. Most indie and alternative contemporary rock artists insist on vinyl releases, along with standard digital. Big labels are showing new pride in their classic catalogs, offering new vinyl product for the first time in decades, taking greater care than ever before in reissuing treasured titles in deluxe packages, touting better quality mastering and pressing of the record itself, and enhanced detail in artwork reproduction.

Hobbyists are discovering the arcane joys of vintage Hi Fi, while modern manufacturers are meeting that growing market head-on with new turntable, cartridge and preamplifier products that improve on classic designs. E-Bay crackles with high-roller auctions of collectible discs that spin astronomical sums. Yes, some sixty years after Columbia unveiled the first commercial 33 1/3 vinyl long-player, records are hot, sexy and here to stay!