This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
What is the best sound in popular music? I’d forgotten the answer to this until very recently, but I’ve been reminded: it’s the quiet “pop” of the needle settling into the groove of a vinyl record, the faint crackle of anticipation before the song begins. That’s the sound that makes my heart leap and my face beam.
It’s possible that this opinion will wear off with familiarity but, as I write this, I’m playing music on a turntable for the first time in years — well, decades actually — and I can’t think of many things that could make me happier.
The record, if you’re interested, is side 4 of a 1973 pressing of Howlin’ Wolf Volume 3, and it sounds better to me than the most finickety lossless digital audio I’ve been able to extract from Spotify.
My conversion to hardcore analogue audiophile has been both complete, and very sudden. If you’d asked me about this at any point before the equipment was installed, my position would have been that having a turntable was an extremely inessential luxury: nice to have, but highly optional. When the idea of getting one came up in the course of a home renovation, I mostly said yes because it was a way to use an awkward cupboard.
But as soon as everything was set up and I was back to the careful rigmarole of it all — choosing a record, sliding it from its sleeve, gently holding it so my stretched fingers only touched the edge and the label, resting it on the turntable, delicately placing the needle, hearing the faint whisper of music rising from the record’s surface — I was rapt. I remembered that I love all of this, and that this was the way I fell in love with music.
I grew up in a house full of vinyl, to my mum’s annoyance. The family joke is that she owns one record (it’s by Squeeze). Everything else is my dad’s, and from my earliest memories, “everything else” occupied most of the garage and a whole bedroom. I think I understood that “record room” was not an amenity every family had, but it never struck me as an unreasonable use of space.
Why would it, when music was obviously the most important thing in the world? At weekends, I would sometimes accompany my dad on trips to car boot sales and charity shops. I learned how to inspect the gorgeous glossy black discs for warping and scratches; I learned that a notch cut into a sleeve meant it had been remaindered, and a wide hole punched in the centre of a record meant it had once sat in a jukebox.
I also learned that records were fragile things, to be treated with respect. It was a momentous day in my small life when I was first allowed to operate the hi-fi by myself, although the record room remained technically out of bounds until I was a teenager, as much for my safety as for the records: one badly stacked banana box (the perfect size for storing 12-inches) could have been the end of me.
At some point, my dad decided (or maybe my mum insisted) that some of the records had to go. Because he had started buying up other people’s collections to expand his own, the vinyl had begun to grow wildly out of control.
The solution: start his own market stall. Record collecting was now a “self-funding hobby”. After he was made redundant, he bought a white van and made the records his job, vacating the record room and taking on a lock-up.
Soon after I moved out, torrenting became a thing, and I took so fiercely (and criminally) to the abundance on offer that I didn’t miss having a turntable. From the early 2000s, I could find almost any music in the world, without having to root through boxes of dusty vinyl. When legal streaming arrived, I even stopped buying CDs. My CD player broke; I never got around to replacing it. What could I possibly be missing by going fully digital?
Well, a lot actually. I’m not here to make any claims about the “warmth” of vinyl’s audio quality, or the greater fidelity of physical media. I don’t know if any of that is true, and in any case, my ears are probably too blasted from years of headphones at full volume for me to be a reliable judge. But I do believe in the magic of objects and the importance of ritual. I’d just let myself act, for years, as though I didn’t.
Last year, my dad retired, and before he sold his stock, he invited me to pick out as much as I could carry for my own incipient collection. I wandered the lock-up in a gluttonous daze, piling myself up with records. The complete works of Roxy! A copy of Rumours! Occasionally, dad would appear with something he knew I just had to have: a clutch of Fairports, some Chess Records compilations.
I could have listened to (almost) any of this music whenever I liked on Spotify, of course. But the truth is: I didn’t, because when there’s too much to choose from, you forget what you’re looking for. Nothing is rare, but nothing is valuable either. Vinyl (unless you have a record room, I suppose) forces you to be selective in your library; it demands concentration. I’m so happy to have it back.
