CDs may fade away, but vinyl is here to stay

Always on the hunt, Sean Evoy is digging for treasure at a used-record store in Fremont.

Pack rat by nature, retro at heart, the skinny 24-year-old looks to add another piece of vinyl to his collection of 3,000 records.

"I want more. It's not enough. There's always room for filler."

Flipping through Jive Time Records' clearance bin, he pulls out a Chuck Berry LP featuring excerpts from a live performance and cover art that screams 1972. Berry "goes off on this record," says Evoy, who finds peace in listening to an LP all the way through vs. skipping through tracks on a CD or MP3 player.

"Music," Evoy says, cradling the edges of the album cover, "should be this big."

Conference information

The 40th annual conference of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections runs through Saturday at Seattle's Red Lion Hotel, 1415 Fifth Ave. You are welcome to attend, but be warned: Most sessions are esoteric.

A few, though, sound accessible: "Elektra Records and the Development of Album Cover Art, 1951 to 1970" (Emerald Room, 11:45 a.m. Friday).

"Unintelligible at Any Speed: 'Louie, Louie,' the FBI and the Pacific Northwest" (Emerald Room, 3:15 p.m. Friday).

Day passes are $30 for students, $45 for ARSC members and $55 for nonmembers.

Your best bet might be to sit in on the "Collectors' Roundtable" Friday from 8 p.m. to midnight at the hotel's Terrace Garden. It's free.

For more on the conference, see www.arsc-audio.org.

Big, as in 12 inches diameter.

In this shuffle-play age of music downloads, where hi-fi equipment sales have cratered and the CD edges toward passé, vinyl records have staying power.

A subculture of obsessives who prefer to buy and listen to music the old-fashioned way is large enough to sustain several record stores in Seattle that carry large selections of vinyl, used and new. Part of the thrill is in scoring someone else's throwaway. Yet some new releases also come out on LP, with record labels marketing to younger consumers who weren't born when vinyl was in its heyday.

"I can tell you personally — and every real record collector would agree with me — that when you lay a record on the turntable, put the stylus in the groove and start playing the disc, there's something spiritual that happens," says Kurt Nauck of suburban Houston, who is in Seattle this week for a conference of about 175 record collectors and scholars who work to preserve sound recordings in all their various forms and formats.

"Something in the subconscious is triggered that you just don't get from sticking a CD in the player. The level of enjoyment is vastly multiplied by actually having to play a record. And the sound truly is much better."

When CDs usurped vinyl in the late 1980s as the format of choice, sound quality was a selling point. The ever-clever record companies even encouraged consumers to dump their vinyl and rebuy the same records on CD.

The shiny silver discs could be played over and over without developing the pops and hisses that afflicted overplayed vinyl. And they wouldn't scratch — at least not as easily.

But there was a loss in sound quality that audiophiles could discern. Vinyl, they still insist, sounds warmer.

Comparing CDs to vinyl is like comparing digital photos to film. If a digital photo is blown up large enough, the image is lost and all that remains are a bunch of pixels.

It's similar with sound, says Nauck, a dealer of vintage records. "Music may sound great through an iPod when you're working out in the gym or walking down the street, but when you sit down in a room with a decent sound system and compare the MP3 file to a CD or vinyl record, the sound quality is not even close.

"I suppose it's the dumbing down that we see in every other aspect of our society. People are made to accept an inferior product."

Piecing together history

Peter Blecha's obsession with vinyl began as a kid in Olympia, where he spent his allowance on Top-40 45-rpm singles.

While attending the University of Washington, he spent a lot of time and money in used-record stores, where he met friends with similar eccentricities. He dropped out of college to form bands with some of those same guys.

"We'd stand around in the stores and play records for each other for hours," says Blecha, now 49, who is helping promote this week's conference. "It was a salon atmosphere, complete with the cheering and jeering of the listening public."

Blecha's niche was Pacific Northwest music. He found value in rare records that others perceived as worthless, taking buying trips through small towns and returning with full boxes of stuff.

Local record-store owners set aside inventory for him, knowing no one else would be interested in recordings by an accordion trio from Ballard, a hillbilly band from Spokane or a jazz band from Poulsbo.

"I felt like there was a lost history and I was piecing it together through the records I was collecting," Blecha says.

He amassed 20,000 Pacific Northwest music artifacts — split between records and other ephemera — before selling his collection to Experience Music Project, where he was helping Paul Allen plan the museum.

"Part of the fun of collecting was entertaining yourself for cheap," says Blecha, who was EMP's senior curator before leaving in 2002.

"What other activity can you return from with something tangible that you bought for a nickel? I'd sit down with friends and we'd listen to 1001 Strings play the worst songs ever recorded. We'd laugh, toss it aside and go on to the next one."

Small percentage of sales

At a show featuring Portland's Kind of Like Spitting, a young fan, maybe 15, scanned the merchandise table, noticing the band's latest album released on 12-inch vinyl.

"Is this a calendar?" he asked.

The story is relayed third hand by Josh Rosenfeld, co-founder of Barsuk Records, a Seattle-based label that offers much of its catalog on vinyl.

"There's an aesthetic hierarchy to music," he says, "with vinyl at the top, followed by CD and then the sound file."

But that doesn't translate into sales. Rosenfeld says vinyl rarely amounts to 5 percent of a record's total sales, and with bigger sellers, it is usually less than 1 percent.

With consumers downloading music, single track by single track, and storing their collections on computer, Rosenfeld worries that "when cover art and the album goes away, it starts to feel like music is nothing more than a commodity. And then the specialness of it goes away."

Hobby turns to business

David Day earned his grooves in the '80s working for local record stores, but lost interest in records with the rise of CDs.

"CDs always have seemed more disposable to me," he says. "A CD will end up under your car seat. You would never treat a vinyl record like that."

The bug bit him again in the late '90s, when he began collecting vinyl as a hobby. To offset his guilt for spending so much on music, he began buying rare records to sell later.

He had a good eye. Buyers would line up outside his car at the Fremont Sunday Market before he could set up his table. Five years ago he opened Jive Time Records, which emphasizes vinyl but also sells used CDs and DVDs.

"As much as I'd like to be all vinyl, I can't afford to be that exclusive," Day says.

His customers range from DJs looking to sample sounds to music lovers wanting to reconnect with their youth to hipsters interested in exposing themselves to classic rock, new wave or old-school soul. Jive Time carries music from the sublime (a Roxy Music bootleg featuring Brian Eno for $29.99) to the ridiculous (Culture Club's "Colour By Numbers" for 99 cents).

Day says he tries to keep prices low so customers can experience the thrill of discovering or rediscovering music.

But if they are too low, he could get cleaned out by dealers who sell on eBay. Although eBay has created a virtual community of record collectors, Day says he can't imagine a time when record stores no longer exist.

"It's part of the experience of learning about music," he says. "There's a social aspect to it."

Nauck, the conference manager, predicts that although vinyl will always be around, it will never again be the preferred format.

"It's a lot more fun to ride a horse than it is to drive a car," he says, "but I don't see us going back to horses any time soon."

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com