Fridays tend to be the days that I think about music. I think that it is because you are looking forward to the weekend and it is kind of a day to celebrate. Back when I was working, I would create a playlist that would capture my mood or summarize the week. And I would open it up for other team members to add their selections.

I mentioned it previously, but my nephew gave my wife a record player for Mother’s Day (a story for another day). I believe that I have a few records at my parents house, but they were out of town. So last weekend, we looked up a record store in a nearby town. We probably browsed for around an hour.

I have been interested in the vinyl re-revolution. I am old enough to remember and even have records. I started thinking about the format changes and theory of Occam’s razor. I will summarize in that changes tend to go to the extreme. So, vinyl begot 8-track (because it was more potable) back to vinyl to cassette to CD and then digital download. Each change vacillated between clearer audio or more control or more portable formats.

There are still a lot of records around. The problem is that like all album collections, there are two or three songs that I am interested in, the rest I can take or leave. I also dont have a lot of time to sit around and really listen to full albums. So, I think the perfect tests are new releases of ‘best of’ type collections (of old music). I also think that for records, I want music to belong to the era that they were originally produce.

We tried the new record player. It is one of those all in one, suitcase types. It was definitely an nostalgic experience. I had one as a kid that took a lot of abuse. We listened to most of all of our new purchases. We did have some difficulty with all of the used records, When I look at them by eye I dont see a problem, so I suspect that it is the quality of the player itself.

I hooked the player up to the receiver to try and get the full audio experience. Because this is one of the all in one units, the phono amplifier and the record player didn’t get along too well. I could hear the much richer undertones, but a lot of scratches and feedback and noise. I switched the input to the CD port and the sound was much clearer, but there was no low end to the music.

I did a comparison from vinyl to YouTube video and I have to say that I much preferred the sound quality to the digital version versus the record. That being said, I am going to blame all of the problems on the player and not the format or the records themselves. This has lead me into looking for a reasonably priced record player that I can hook up to the receiver for a better test.

I have been thinking about having Friday’s as my music day on this platform. So, today I am going to put together a playlist for my recent vinyl purchases.