From the Publisher

To those of you who have read some of my earlier publisher’s letters, you may know music has always been an important part of my life, and record collecting is a big part of my appreciation of music. It’s something that’s in my DNA.

In the late 1940s, my dad was the lead singer and upright bass player in a big band based in Kansas City. He was also a passionate record collector and audiophile. He had a collection of over 10,000 vinyl LPs in impeccable condition, filed neatly in his music room, including Miles Davis 78s that he played on his Thorens turntable through a McIntosh stereo system. My mom was a modern dance major who also loved music. Over the years, I have been amazed at how we consume music has changed over the years and, in my opinion, not always for the better.

When I was a toddler, I had a record player in a box where I spun 45 and 78 recordings by Captain Kangaroo and Popeye. I would play them so much that I would frequently burn out the tubes in the unit. When I was nine, my dad gave me his copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band because, being a jazz guy, he didn’t like it. From then on, I started collecting my own records. The first was Rubber Soul by the Beatles, purchased at the Cain-Sloan department store in Green Hills for $3.64. After purchasing a new album, I would slap it on the turntable, and while listening to it, read every liner note and stare intently at the album cover while listening to the album from start to finish. That was my way of absorbing the whole experience because they weren’t making music videos back then!

When I was at Duke and low on album-purchasing funds, I used to take a dollar meal ticket, buy a Coke for 20 cents, and pocket the change. I would do this enough times until I had enough money to splurge on whatever new release I was jonesing for and drive nine miles down the road to score the album at School Kids Records in Chapel Hill. I eventually accumulated a sizeable collection of over 1,000 vinyl albums.

I was slow to adapt when CDs came along as I was very committed to my vinyl ritual. I didn’t buy a CD player until 1990, after which I spent the first few years replacing the vinyl versions of my favorite albums with their CD counterpart. When I first listened to Sgt. Pepper’s on CD, I could hear instrument parts that I had never heard before. I recently learned from a conversation with Henry Juszkiewicz, former CEO of Gibson Guitar (and an old boss), that when an album is mastered for vinyl, they remove certain low frequencies; otherwise, these low frequencies would make the needle jump off the record. Hence, you are losing some sound quality with vinyl. At this point, I probably have over 1,500 CDs, and my collection continues to grow thanks to Amazon—I still miss the old record/CD stores like HMV and Tower Records, where I could spend hours going through their inventory.

Today, with Apple Music and Spotify, you don’t have to buy albums anymore. You can stream them for free or for a small membership fee. For me, it’s just not as fun as owning the physical album with the photos and the liner notes—I appreciate actually holding it in my hands. With streaming, when a song is compressed into an MP3 file, some information is truncated to save file size, so there is some loss of sound quality, particularly in the dynamic range. I appreciate that vinyl has been making a big comeback in recent years. Some people say the sound is warmer than CDs. However, I still prefer the sound quality of CDs, and I still buy them so I can own the music. Guess I’m old-fashioned in that way, and I’m fine with that.