Vinyl, Schmynal.

I try to stay modern.

I'm holding onto the Internet, online stuff, and my iPhone with all 8 fingernails in an effort to keep up with those goddamned kids who find this stuff so simple that they can walk, text, drive, and talk on their phone at the same time.  By the way, if you think you can ... you cannot.

I'm with you on a lot of this junk.  The whole "text instead of call" thing is right up my alley.  When my phone rings, I dread picking it up. "Just text me, or send an e-mail," is my usual response.  And this comes from a person who grew up on rotary dial phones and looking for change to use the phone when I was away from home. How quickly I learned your ways, Millennials.

The one thing I cannot join you in is this movement back to vinyl records.  I don't remember what year it was, but at some point, somebody (probably Sony) invented the Compact Disc player.  I was so excited.  No longer would I have to store giant 12-inch recordings and care for them like an elderly parent - constantly cleaning them and looking after them to insure that there wasn't too much dust around, lest they lost their qualities.  What a giant pain in the ass it was.

Along came the CD.   A small, plastic disc that only required placing it back in the case that it came in.  It would sound the same today as it sounded 50 years from now - if it survived the trip.  

My favorite music was the sort of thing that had quiet passages and subtle changes in mood that we could not hear on vinyl because the record would pop and scratch.  

When I heard of this magical thing called the CD player, the first thing I did was go out and buy CDs.  Kate Bush's "The Dreaming" and King Crimson's "Lark's Tongues in Aspic" were my first purchases.  I had a half-dozen CDs before I had a CD player.  That's how excited I was.

My wish of noiseless music was granted. I didn't have to worry if the record I brought home was warped and/or it would skip, and I had to clean it endlessly or place a penny on the tone arm to make it play.  What a relief!  I bought Beethoven's 5th Symphony and a few other classical music CDs before I finally sprung for the $129 (in 1980s money) for a CD player. I reveled in the purity of the sound.  It was beautiful.  Quiet passages were quiet, and there was nothing that sounded like you were listening to music around a campfire.
I listen to stuff on CD and mp3 that I heard originally on vinyl and WISH that I could have had this format in the 1970s.  Egad, no maintenance, no care.  What a life.

Until...

These bloody Millennials figured out that, for some reason, vinyl sounded ... I don't know ... pure to them, or some damned thing.  They were too young to remember the toils of record buying and maintenance.  To them, the vinyl experience was akin to riding a Penny-farthing and thinking, "This is how cycling is supposed to be." No, it fucking isn't.  We found a better way.

The sad thing is that the marketing pressure is so deep that vinyl pressing factories have been re-staffed, and there is a resurgence of the crap.  New bands are releasing stuff on vinyl to appease this group of nincompoops who think that vinyl has some magic.  No, it fucking doesn't.
I love my Apple Music and my mp3s.  Quality loss? I don't think so.  Not compared to the scratch-scratch-skip of those fucking vinyl albums.  I'll keep my entire music collection on an SD card, thank you.

I can't wait for them to want to go back to rotary-dial telephones, bathing on Saturdays, cooking food in conventional ovens, starting cars with a crank, ... well, you get the picture.  There is a better way, and it's sad that some people are too young to appreciate the efforts that their ancestors went through just to be able to listen to music
I'm on my 4th incarnation: Vinyl, CD, cassette, (8-track - if you count that disaster) and now, mp3. I'm done, and it gets better because it gets ... well, better.

Perhaps they would like to go back to standing in line for concert tickets on Saturday mornings, too?  Well, no. That would cut into their sitting around time.

Get a grip, gang. It's way better now.