An iconic symbol of nostalgia, a staple at pawnshops and thrift stores and the very first medium to store audio: the gramophone record. Today, vinyl records are seen as an archaic medium with a sound that is rife with pops and crackling. Many think they are played by collectors attempting to hear a bygone era, when music wasn’t ones and zeroes stored on hard drives and discs.

But vinyl records and gramophones (aka record players, turntables, etc.) are immediately recognizable symbols of antiquity that, in my opinion, are superior forms of auditory entertainment.

I have nothing against MP3s, CDs or any other forms of audio storage (I’m certainly not the “indie” type of person, who scoffs at popular culture in an attempt to form an identity in counterculture).

It’s just that the popular trend in the recording industry is to record music as low-quality as possible, with little or no dynamic range (the difference between the highest and lowest volumes in a piece of audio). This trend may or may not stem from the growing popularity of viral media and the “do-it-yourself” style that has taken over the Internet, where being a professional doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore.

A perfect example would be Soulja Boy’s music video to “Crank Dat,” in which it starts out as a parody of Internet fame (I cannot wait for the era in which Soulja Boy is so ingrained in American culture that Microsoft Word’s spellchecker no longer finds “Soulja” as being misspelled). The song didn’t need to be recorded well. Saying it did is like saying “The Blair Witch Project” needed a better cinematographer.

The point is, people have become used to audio that is loud to the point of being distorted, even at a reasonable volume (due to the fact that many audio levels are turned all the way up), and music that is completely one-dimensional with layer upon layer stacked on top of one another, producing either a cacophony or a flat, boring piece of music.

Thankfully, vinyl records are still around and still being manufactured. Some of you may be asking what the big difference is, seeing as how, since the heyday of vinyl, countless technological advances in the recording industry have been made.

While this may be true, these advances, like most other technological advances, have made music producers lazy, allowing them to churn out more and more substandard music like never before. Vinyl has a quality that cannot be successfully replicated by digital recording instruments (yet). As mentioned before, the music generally has a greater gap between highs and lows and possesses a “warmer” sound, not the harsh, electronic sounds mass-produced on compact discs.

These qualities may not be as pronounced on some records, as it really depends on the type of music being played. Classical music is an excellent example of the aforementioned benefits of vinyl.

With a more robust sound, and a greater range, vinyl provides the listener with a “truer” form of audio.

I do not dislike digitally recorded music whatsoever, but if you get the chance to purchase a record player, do so. It is money well spent.

Even if you aren’t a fan of music or are just an untrained listener, you can still detect and appreciate the subtleties present in vinyl records.