My first experience with vinyl in the modern age came in 1994, when Pearl Jam released “Spin The Black Circle” as the first single from their highly anticipated third album Vitalogy. I never really liked Pearl Jam – not then, not now – but the media kept telling the 12-year-old me that I loved them, so I tried to. It’s a lightning fast, raging song that’s about as close to hardcore as Pearl Jam ever got, and Eddie Vedder growls the lyrics from what sounds like the darkest part of his soul. “See this needle, see my hand / Drop drop droppin’ it down oh so gently… You’re so warm / Oh, the ritual / When I lay down your crooked arm.” Clearly this song is about heroin, I thought. I mean, needles. Seattle. “The ritual”. But what’s the black circle? Something about Satan? As a big fan of Danzig – then and now – I was extremely disappointed that this dark, evil song was actually about playing records, an activity that sounded about as fun to me as mopping floors. Big, bulky, impossible to listen to on the go, easily scratched and ruined… why would anyone listen to a record when CDs were readily available?

My second experience with vinyl in the modern age came in 1999, when Trent Reznor decided to release the Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile with two bonus tracks available only on the vinyl edition. Though I had no idea why my favorite musician would release two songs on the laserdisc of the music medium, I must have them, the 17-year-old me thought. I went to a local indie record store and had them special order the record for me, and when it arrived two weeks later I broke out my childhood Fisher Price record player I used for read-along GI Joe and Thundercats books when I was 4 years old. Since I was accustomed to immediately skipping forward to the songs I wanted to hear on the CD version, I couldn’t believe I had to listen to a whole side of a record to get to one of the vinyl-only songs at the end of Side E. Having procured and heard the rare songs, my completist lizard brain was soothed, and I filed the record away on a shelf never to be listened to again.

In college I started getting into music that was made before I was born. The sounds of my teens started to fade into the background as I discovered David Bowie, The Stooges, Roxy Music, Curtis Mayfield, The Velvet Underground, The Rolling Stones… I listened to their CDs on my trusty Discman so much that my hair had permanent headphone indentations. I loved these albums, and I loved their vibrant covers. The tiny CD versions didn’t do them justice, so whenever I’d see one of my favorite albums in a thrift store, I’d pick it up. It was great to see the artwork blown up to its original size, and to own the albums in their original incarnations. I still didn’t listen to them, though. Over the years, my wife had accumulated an even larger collection of records through thrift store digging, so I thought a perfect birthday gift last year would be a turntable so she could finally enjoy them.

In the months since then, we have completely rediscovered our favorite music. Hearing classic albums the way they were originally heard makes a world of difference to me. In the digital age, music has become something we hurriedly collect and never really appreciate. We load MP3s onto our iPods and listen to the same couple of songs over and over again. We see our CDs as nuisances that we stash away into closets out of our way. Records, on the other hand, force us to pay attention to the song cycle that the artist intended. Ziggy Stardust is one of my favorite albums, and I’ve probably listened to it on my iPod a thousand times. But when I recently found a beat up copy of the original LP for $2 that I didn’t even think would play, it sounded better than I’d ever heard it before: cleaner, warmer, even more majestic. The strings in “Five Years” sounded like they were in my living room. The guitar solo at the end of “Moonage Daydream” soared to interstellar heights. And I was forced to listen to the moodier middle of the record, which I always used to skip over to get to the title track and “Suffragette City”. It was a tremendous experience, and I’ve felt the same way with other favorites I’m rediscovering on vinyl, like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, Scott Walker’s Scott 4 and the Stones’ Sticky Fingers. I won’t say they sound better, but they definitely sound different. Most of all, they sound accurate; these were records designed to be heard as records, and I feel like I’m going back in time to hear my favorite albums the way they sounded before I was born.

That’s not even mentioning how much fun it is shopping for records. Independent record stores when I was a teenager were stocked with all the same CDs as Best Buy. When you’re shopping for records, however, there’s no telling what you’ll find from store to store. Sure, there are letdowns (I recently found a gorgeous copy of Bowie’s Young Americans that was scratched all to hell once I got it home), but the treasure hunt aspect of used record shopping can’t be beat when you find that perfect Songs of Leonard Cohen or Candy-O for a buck. And I’m very encouraged that I’m not the only one rediscovering the joy of record shopping or vinyl as a viable music format. I dropped into my favorite record store Sunday morning to find three people buying Them Crooked Vultures’ debut record on vinyl after seeing them on Saturday Night Live the night before. While the music industry crumbles, vinyl sales continually rise double digits, and though they’re meager numbers overall (about 2.5 million records to 76.4 million digital albums), it’s a bright spot for independent record stores that are responsible for 66% of vinyl sales.

Now I’m wondering if one day I’ll cast aside my Blu-ray collection for the warm, flickering glow of VHS.