Feeling vindicated

I still have hundreds of old vinyl phonograph records and the crates filled with them are among the heaviest, most unwieldy non-furniture objects to haul down from the attic and into the Smart Move vaults in our driveway.

I'm sure my wife would love to see those albums kicked to the curb and not make the trip to Arkansas. But there is a hell of a lot of music there that has never been available on CD or from the iTunes store or any other online MP3 source.

It's stuff I'm loathe to part with, especially since I learned that I can buy a USB turntable and MP3 conversion software for a little more than $100. And, the software will filter out the hisses and pops and other surface imperfections from a vinyl album.

And I was further encouraged today when I discovered an Aug. 29 Gary Krakow column on MSNBC, in which he wrote that vinyl albums are making a comeback of sorts among serious audiophiles.

"LPs," Krakow wrote, "contain close to 100 percent of the uncompressed music information as originally recorded. CDs contain only about half of that recorded information. And compressed music files are left with only a small percentage of the information that's on a CD."

The reason most people can't tell a difference from an LP to a CD to an MP3 is that most of the information that gets eliminated when music goes digital involves frequencies that are outside the normal range of human hearing. Presumably, you dog can discern digital from analog much easier than you can.

Turntable sales, Krakow says, are on the rise again and Circuit City has more than 10,000 LP titles on their website, even though you can't buy a vinyl album in any of their stores.

I don't think anyone seriously expects the pendulum to swing all the way back to the analog side, largely because of the extreme convenience of digital music from the standpoints of storage, marketing and delivery. But I do feel somewhat vindicated in hanging onto my record collection that includes discs that go back as far as 50 (yikes!) years.

Now the challenge is to carve out the time to digitize all of that music so I can put into Shuffle rotation on my iPod.

This is about one-third of the collection.