vinyl-record.jpg

This bowl is the proper use for old vinyl records.

(Photo by Cathy Miller)

Upon reading that vinyl records are making a comeback with young hipsters, I’d suggest a quick reality check before we all skip merrily hand in hand down the road of revisionist history:

Vinyl records are horrible. Whether LPs or their baby versions, 45s, it makes no difference.

They are a fragile, defective-prone technology virtually unchanged since Thomas Edison captured his recitation of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" onto a wax cylinder.

Lusting for their return is like getting sentimental over cotton-filament light bulbs: You’re certainly welcome to take a stab at it, but don’t expect a lot of company.

Perhaps the sound fidelity of a vinyl record was truly superior, but that argument lasted only until it left the store.

After that, it was straight downhill, as your beloved purchase acquired scratches, dust and skips.

After six months, your album would be so dinged that "Kicks Just Keep Getting Harder to Find" was indistinguishable from Edison reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

In the aggregate, albums were so heavy that moving any collection from one apartment to another was downright hernia-producing.

If you stacked them atop of one another, you couldn’t reach those on the bottom. You could store them straight up and down, like books on a shelf, but if they leaned at even the slightest angle, they became warped. That would turn almost any genre of music into the soundtrack for some NASA experiment to induce motion sickness, as the needle bobbed up and down like a buoy at high tide.

They actually melted on occasion, such as if you left them in your truck too long. (Waiting for some hernia-free fellow to lug them up to your new apartment, for example.)

True, album covers were often works of art, which makes us wonder why CD-makers never chose to market them in large, colorful album-sized covers instead of impenetrable shrink-wrapped plastic.

You think few people share this disdain for vinyl? The facts would suggest otherwise.

Here’s the first hint: When it became clear CDs would push aside albums, you did not hear any Baby-Boomer-patented hue and cry about the loss of high fidelity from the good old days.

(And bear in mind this is a generation that can still get sentimental over "Petticoat Junction." Petticoat Junction!)

Instead, Boomers mostly fretted until their favorite oldies recordings were reissued on CDs. They may have kept their album covers, but they happily ditched the records inside.

Second hint: When hip-hop DJs began using old records for their new form of percussion, nobody huffed and puffed about the destruction of a perfectly good album. Instead, the reaction was somewhere betweeen "Knock yourself out" and "Would you like to use mine?"

Third, the purchasers of the vinyl albums these days are mostly college kids, says the New York Times. Translation: The generations most familiar with albums don’t want any part of them.

But it’s a free market economy, in which vinyl fans are welcome to acquire as many old-school records as they’d like.

Just don’t expect the rest of us to help move ’em to that new apartment.

RELATED COVERAGE

• Vinyl enthusiasts form club in Jersey City to celebrate LPs, 45s

• More Kathleen O'Brien columns

FOLLOW THE STAR-LEDGER: TWITTER | FACEBOOK