LPs Are Dead

Andvinyly.com makes your afterlife more...rockin'.

The company offers you the chance to press your ashes into a vinyl recording that "your loved ones will cherish for generations". Whether you record a personal message or just press it so that the pops and crackles of your ashes come through in stereo, every disc is the soundtrack to your life. James Hague (of the National Portrait Gallery) will paint your portrait in acrylic and ash for the cover, and the basic package is 30 records.

Deep Grooves

Chris Supranowitz, a researcher at The Insitute of Optics at the University of Rochester who counts quantum optics, the trapping of atoms, dark states and entanglement amongst his interests, decided to look at the grooves of a vinyl record using the institute's electron microscope.

Here is a shot of a number of record grooves (the dark bits are the top of the grooves, i.e. the uncut vinyl):

The grooves magnified 500x - the little bumps are dust on the record:

And here's a single groove even closer still, magnified 1000 times:

Chris also did the pits in a CD - here's what they look like, just for contrast:

He also created a blue/red 3-dimensional image of the record groove. If you have a pair of old school 3-D glasses, take a look:

Better Buy

Best Buy is giving vinyl a spin (ow, that pun hurts).

The consumer-electronics giant, which happens also to be the third-largest music seller behind Apple's iTunes and Wal-Mart, is considering devoting (a whole) eight square feet of merchandising space in all of its 1,020 stores solely to vinyl. That only equates to slightly under 200 albums, but after a successful test in 100 of its stores the format which represents 5% of Best Buy's music sales is growing while CD sales continue to shrink. Vinyl sales grew 15% year-over-year in 2007 and 89% in 2008. The 1.9 million vinyl albums purchased last year were the most since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991, and this year is shaping up to be even better, with 670,000 vinyl albums sold through mid-April. By contrast, CD sales have fallen at a roughly 20% clip for the past few years.

To be sure, the growth in vinyl, even when combined with digital sales, isn't enough to offset the decline in CD sales, but it does show that consumers and nostalgic nerds like myself haven't abandoned the format. And the fact that a retailer of Best Buy's size is willing to expand vinyl offerings is an positive for the beleaguered music industry. A typical Best Buy store features about 16 to 20 square feet of music merchandise and displays about 8,000 CDs.

Hoping to capitalize on the renewed interest in vinyl, all of the major record labels have combed through their catalogs to remaster and re-release marquee titles with their original artwork and packaging. Compared with a CD, vinyl costs more to make and retails for a higher price -- $22.95 vs. around $13.99 for a CD -- but has lower margins. Companies like Atlantic and EMI Capitol say extending their catalog and the profits made from vinyl warrant producing the format. The situation is the reverse for Best Buy, but the margins on vinyl sales are still "healthy enough" to mitigate the risk that comes along with not being able to return unsold inventory like it can with CDs.

LP Cover Lover

Now that I'm into spinning platters, I see a lot of odd things when looking for records I want. And so has LP Cover Lover, which collects some of the classic and confused album art of the vinyl era. If they look this good, imagine how they sound.

Crate Digging - Don't Do It!

This is a great set of Gorey-esque illustrations about record collectors and vinyl fans, which I am slightly now one of.