Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013

Raleigh events, store show vinyl’s back in style

Record sales event, local store show trend

They won’t play on a car stereo, can’t hold more than an hour of music and need to be cleaned regularly. But none of those inconveniences seem to slow the continued resurgence of vinyl records.

These days, records often outnumber CDs in music stores – and that’s in the stores that still offer compact discs. Digital music players helped thin the number of record stores during the past decade.

Record collectors think music sounds better using technology that’s nearly a century old.

“I think vinyl is very warm, the sound is very big,” said Raleigh artist Kirk Adam. “If you have clean vinyl, there’s nothing that can compare.”

Greg Rollins prefers the analog sound of vinyl to CDs and MP3s. “You can get a feeling with a record that you don’t get with a CD,” he said. “The nature of the digital process, things get compressed and get knocked out of whack.”

Adam recently started an organization called The Record Krate that will hold its first record exchange Sunday. Adam and other collectors will set up tables at Deep South The Bar downtown, selling their latest finds to fellow vinyl enthusiasts. DJ Nick Speaks will spin tunes from his vinyl collection.

Many musicians today release their work on vinyl, but the sought-after titles at Sunday’s event will likely be decades old. Collectors look for bargains from people unloading dusty stacks of music. They’ll then sell whatever doesn’t fit their tastes to get cash for more records.

“I go to junk stores, estate sales,” Adam said. “I check Craigslist. I ask people, ‘hey, got any records?’ ”

Rollins has turned his passion for record collecting into a full-time business. This month, his In The Groove Records shop at Glenwood South’s Carter Building will celebrate its first anniversary. At 49, Rollins grew up with vinyl at his dad’s record store. But some of his customers are teenagers who never even owned CDs.

“This past Christmas, I could tell a lot of record players and turntables were under the tree for the kids,” Rollins said. “The older generation, some of them are trying to get back the stuff they had when they were younger.”

Record enthusiasts are also drawn to the cover designs – an aspect of music packaging that’s often lost these days.

“It’s the square foot of art thing,” Rollins said. “You really get the impact of what the artists were trying to do with their cover art.”

And as record collecting continues to grow, cassette tapes are also starting to come back from the audio dead. Adam expects to see tapes show up at the record exchange. When Rollins expands to a bigger space, he hopes to add the 1980s staple to his shelves.

“I’m waiting for the momentum to start gathering on that,” he said. “I feel it coming.”