Record Shopping

Though I did finally upgrade my car stereo last year, my setup for listening to music at home has been bleak for years.  It's never been good, really. 

The main piece of listening equipment (I can't justify calling it a "stereo") that served me for the last several years was purchased shortly after I moved to New York City.  I walked to the nearest electronics superstore I could find (not knowing the city very well), and bought the smallest, cheapest CD player that had built-in speakers.  A boom box, if you will.   It is tiny, cheap and it sounds terrible, but it survived for almost eight years.

Until I moved back to Texas, that is.  Now one of the speakers is on the fritz, so the little boom box is officially dead.  The death of my little radio prompted me the other night to plug my portable record player into my little computer speakers and break out some of my records for the first time since I moved. 

(What kind of record player do I own, you ask?  The Vestax Handy Trax Portable Turntable! It has a handle on the top, you know, in case I'm walking somewhere and need to bring my record player with me.  For the hundred bucks I paid for it at the time, it's been a decent little player.  I'd recommend it if you're looking for something compact and affordable - and don't forget, portable! - for your records.  You have records, right?)

I know the thought of this setup sounds perhaps even worse to you than the boom box arrangement, but it actually sounds really good!  I'll admit my standards are pretty low, but it's something about the concrete floors in my house that carries the sound well.  And really, a good song will still sound good on the crappiest of systems.  Or, it should.  Regardless of whether or not you're judging me right now, just know it was an upgrade for me and an excuse to go record shopping this weekend.

I ended up at End of an Ear on South 1st Street here in Austin.  They have a wide selection of new indie rock records, but I found myself wondering when vinyl got expensive again.  I feel like maybe two or three years ago you could buy a new LP for $9.99 from an indie label, but maybe I'm romanticizing the past?  In 2008 you'll pay anywhere from $12.99 to $19.99 for a new release on vinyl, which quickly shattered my "vinyl is so much cheaper" belief.  I should probably acknowledge that I haven't bought much music over the past three years while I was the Music Editor for SFist (promos galore!), so maybe I'm just now catching up with inflation.  And yes, I know it's a pricey gamble for labels to press vinyl these days, but boy am I glad for the ones that do.  At End of an Ear, I bought brazos' a city just as tall EP and Bill Callahan's Woke On A Whale Heart on CD, and on vinyl I bought Stevie Wonder's Talking Book and Tom Petty's Long After Dark.

On my way home, I passed by Cheapo on Lamar and decided to stop in and peruse their used vinyl selection.  Part of the fun of buying used vinyl, in my opinion, is the ability to (re)discover really great old albums on the cheap.  You can buy classic stuff often for just $1.99-5.99 so the stakes are pretty low if you don't like what you end up with.  It can be an adventurous pursuit.  Cheapo had a pretty extensive selection of used vinyl but their new vinyl offering was smaller than End of an Ear's.  At Cheapo I bought used vinyl copies of Sam Cooke's You Send Me and Englebert (yes, Humperdinck!)'s King of Hearts.  I purchased two new albums on vinyl too:  My Brightest Diamond's Bring Me The Workhorse and Bill Withers' Greatest Hits.  I'm thinking that I should have gone ahead and bought that Cameo record, but I bet it'll still be there when I go back.

Tomorrow (or the next time I post):  Why you, too, should own Bill Withers' Greatest Hits.