Like anyone possessing superior musical taste, I saw High Fidelity upon its 2000 release and thought immediately –

“You get me.”

So much of the movie and Nick Hornby’s original book has wormed its way into my life since then.  I’ll try to spare you in this blog from endless quotations of this titanic cinematic achievement – that will get old real fast.  However: today I have to lead off this post with a quote from Barry, lecturing his customer on Echo and the Bunnymen: “The Killing Moon” EP – it’s almost impossible to find – especially on CD. Yet another cruel trick they played on all the dumbasses who got rid of their turntables.”

I am not one of those dumbasses.  I’ve been spinning vinyl since before college.  And while I will admit a flirtation with other formats (I reliably “saved” many of my LPs by dubbing them to cassette, then wearing those out in whatever car or Walkman I was driving), and YES I BOUGHT A LOT OF CDs, the light on my turntable never dimmed.

When I got to college, I was lucky enough to have, as my second roommate (and good friend) someone who knew folks (with employee discounts) at Acoustic Research in Canton, MA.  AR made a suspended turntable that they sold for 99 bucks.  WITH a cartridge.  The thing with suspended turntables is that they’re WAY better isolated from the vibrations that would otherwise pollute your cartridge with low-frequency sludge and random footdrops. (the very expensive but wonderful Linn Sondek is the purest distillation of the AR concept.)  I LOVED that cheapo AR – it was built like a tank and nothing short of picking the deck up and shaking it like a cocktail shaker could make that thing skip.

So when, a couple of years out of college, AR released a vastly improved (and much sexier) version of their turntable, I  fastidiously put away my spare change to buy it, with the best arm (Linn Basik Plus) and cartridge (the classic Shure V-15 VMR) I could afford.  I’ve had it ever since:

Yeah, we’ve been through a lot together.  I even tracked down an old radio shop in Chicago a couple of years ago that sold me enough new old stock replacement styli for my Shure to keep me pretty much set for life.  But getting a dream “deck” is not when my music consumption really spiked.  More on that in my next post on Thursday.