Los Angeles - What goes around, comes around.

In a music industry struggling to cope with the disruptive forces of the digital age, the latest fad among avant-garde hipsters may take you by surprise. Turned off by the sterility, homogeneity and downright poor sound of digital tracks, the iPod generation is rediscovering the pleasures of vinyl records.

Evidence for the revolution can be gleaned in the racks of the plucky local record stores that have survived the rise of the MP3. In many such stores it can seem like the 1980s all over again as long- haired youths in scruffy jeans flip through stacks of records, pausing to admire the artwork, gleefully reading the album notes, and often haggling with the salesman for a better price on a used disc.

"It's put the magic back into music for me," said student Lorin Webber, 22, as he cascaded through a rack of records at Amoeba Music in San Francisco, one of the largest independent record stores in the US. "There's something about putting that needle in a vinyl groove and hearing that tiny crackle and those rich tones. It makes the music live in a way that it never can in digital."

Webber is far from alone in his new found passion. New vinyl sales nearly doubled from 990,000 in 2007 to 1.88 million last year, according to the most recent report from Nielsen SoundScan. It's the format's highest sales total since the company began tracking in 1991, when vinyl records had already been superseded by the new-fangled compact disc, which itself has since fallen victim to the rise of the MP3.

That sales figure is almost certainly an underestimate. According to Nielsen, almost two-thirds of vinyl records are sold by independent record stores which do not usually report their sales to the tracking firm.

The figure also doesn't account for the trade that occurs on sites like Craigslist and eBay, where collectors and aficionados hawk their prized collections. While sales of LPs as they're still sometimes called - for those too young to know, that's short for long-playing - are still miniscule compared to MP3 downloads, some vinyl converts swear they could never return to the digital mode despite its obvious conveniences.

One recent advertiser on Craigslist was seeking a turntable, and offered in return some essential tools of his digital generation - an xBox 360 game, an old iPod or a cellphone. "i hate how stereos and iPods 'n all that jazz wrecks the quality of music! its so terrible! (SIC)," said the seller.

Record companies and retail giants are well aware of the trend. Electronics chain Best Buy, which is the third largest music seller in the US, recently announced plans to devote room in all their 1,020 US stores to the nostalgic discs, saying a test programme in several stores had proved successful.

But don't get carried away, warns Alex Wolfe, the editor-in-chief of Information Week and a self-confessed audiophile and vinyl lover. He doesn't think that the old-fashioned platters will ever amount to much more than a small niche.

"Records are fun to play, even with scratches and their short running time," he wrote recently. "What vinyl will never do is reclaim its place as the best medium for music reproduction. Only the most retro stereophile won't admit that digital offers a more faithful, non-degraded rendering of the input signal." (dpa)