Taking a spin with vinyl

PORTLAND, Ore.

It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain. This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.’s latest release, “Accelerate,” inadvertently entered the “LP” code instead. Soon boxes of the big vinyl discs showed up at several stores.

Some sent them back, but a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.

The Portland-based company, owned by the Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. As a result, Fred Meyer is testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. Based on the response so far, the company says it plans to roll out vinyl in July in all its stores that sell music.

Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores, and music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.

The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album. However, musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well on vinyl, the company says.

“It’s not just a nostalgia thing,” says Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. “The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound.”

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, manufacturers’ shipments of LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Meanwhile, shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period, to 511 million, as they lost ground to digital formats.

The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound to many people.

Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound - though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog.

Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats also weakens the quality.

It’s not just about the sound, though. Audiophiles say they also want the format’s overall experience - the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.

“I think music products should be more than just music,” says Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan standing outside one of Portland’s larger independent music stores.

The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up, and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.

The LP isn’t going to muscle out CDs or iPod in the foreseeable future.

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