I don’t think I’ve listened to any kind of vinyl since sometime around 1984, when I bought my first ever CD player. Back then, just before the CD player turned up, the old butchers block in my room that passed itself off as a record player would screech and fart as it carved its way through the grooves of my vinyl album collection and scraped my 45’s flat. I’d never listened to a high-end hi-fi before and had absolutely no idea how this stuff should have sounded.

So when the CD came along I was blown away, I’d discovered sonic heaven! No crackles, clicks, lumps, bumps or jumps. No hum, rumble or feedback. I could play it in my room, in my car and on a walkman. There was no B Side to flip and I could skip tracks with the push of a button. I could smear it in kebab juice, use it as an ashtray, throw it around in the car and it would still play!

Pro-Ject Debut Carbon Evo Vinyl Turntable

Before I knew it, I was standing in my local hi-fi shop pointing at shiny electronic things with slidey drawers I couldn’t afford and buttons I didn’t understand. So I bought some. A nice little Yamaha CD Player and Amp paired up to a couple of Mordaunt Short MS10’s. I’d discovered heaven!

Which, of course, immediately led to all kinds of Inflammable Material such as Exodus, New Boots & Panties, Dark Side Of The Moon and of course, Never Mind the Bollocks being carelessly frisbeed from my bedroom floor back into random sleeves and covers as I re-tuned my senses into the crystal clear new world of digital tunes.

In the 10 years or so that followed, the only thing that changed was the kit. I’d ‘popped’ the Mordaunts a few too many times and a friend offered me a pair of Yamaha Studio NS-10M Studio monitors for £30! Then a few years later the CD player started misbehaving so I upgraded the hardware to a Yamaha AX-9 amp and matching CD player. And then a couple of years after that, I somehow managed to swap a gnarly old armchair for a pair of KEF Reference 104/2 floor-standing speakers – deal of the century!

Then of course, CD’s evolved into MP3’s and the internet came along. Apple gave us iTunes, the iPod and 5000 songs in our pockets. We’d sacrificed quality for quantity – streaming hi-dynamic, lo-fi shite from servers half a world away, over the phone. Endless conveniently curated playlists randomly stream through the background of our lives, never listened to, just heard. Lossless audio has helped, and Yamaha and KEF do a pretty good job of making it sound as good as I think I’d heard before – but I wasn’t sure.

Analogue Vinyl Turntable

I had started thinking again about vinyl a couple of years ago, just about the same time as everyone else. In anticipation, I even grabbed a couple of signed Public Image Ltd albums after seeing them at The Cheese & Grain just before lockdown, and they’ve been sat on my shelf as a constant, nudging reminder ever since. And of course, all that lovely thirty-something year old hard-wired analogue tech in my sitting room was aching for it’s finishing touch.

As I sit here writing this, I’m listing to Dark Side of the Moon, digitally re-mastered. It’s playing on a one-week old Pro-Ject Debut Carbon Evo turntable – a Christmas present to myself, with a little help from a special friend. Dark Side is my favourite album of all time, Pink Floyd my favourite band and Great Gig In The Sky my favourite track. So it seemed only right that the turntable should pop its cherry on the dark side.

Holy shit! I’ve listened to that album a thousand times, tirelessly. But never like this. Big, fat, deep, soft, round, warm and bright. The KEFs never really got along with digital, they’d need a good twist on the loud knob before coming to life, relying on the Yamaha monitors to take care of things at low volume. But the vinyl fires those bad-boys up straight away, I have no idea why, but what an amazing difference!

Technology has brought analogue audio into a bright new era, it’s the 2.0 version of what once was. Forget any rose-tinted nostalgic idioms you may be clinging onto from the past. This is 21st Century heavy-weight, deep-grooved, carbon-fibre tech, scraped by diamonds, balanced on sapphires, sent through gold-plated copper wires, pumped up and pulsed out through big fat cones. It’s sonic viagra.

Vinyl Album Turntable

Digital is great, it serves a purpose. It’s accessible, clean, convenient, disposable, slick and sharp. My issue with it is that it has devalued music, we shuffle it, skip and delete it. We download so much of it that we just don’t have enough time to appreciate and absorb it. There are no sleeve notes or tangible artwork. It lives in the ether, not on your shelf. We don’t even own it anymore, we simply rent it.

Analogue 2.0 is more than just a vinyl blast from the past, it’s a best-of-both-worlds combination of old-school grooves tangled up with current technological advances. It’s different from anything that has come before, it’s genuinely new and fresh. Even the album covers have had a millennial update, with screen-printed artwork, soft-touch finishes, full-on sleeve notes, inserts and goodies.

So where do we go from here? We’ve taken one huge step backwards, grabbed some stuff and then taken two even bigger steps forward. And it’s very cool. I feel like a kid again, but with a little more respect and understanding this time round. Who knows what the future has in store for us now? Spatial analogue maybe, or even some kind of new holographic format?

Whatever it is, it’ll never match the feeling of dropping a needle on an old favourite LP, settling back in the chair with the album cover, a glass of wine and getting lost in time and space. Just like we did more than forty years ago.

Only better.