Sales have increased by a staggering 80 percent for the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Bernard Holland's view is more of a straight nostalgia approach. Sounds an awful lot like the way old timers talk about listening to radio before the advent of television. In order to really get behind this view, you need to accept on some level that vinyl gives the listener less than CDs do. After a decade of digital lies and deception, people are starting to think for themselves again.
Surround is different though, really different.
Vacuum tubes have been in the news lately as well. Gingrich held a tube triumphantly aloft in his recent celebration of the Contract With America. Republicans in general have been having a field day at the expense of the lowly vacuum tube. While his comments were no doubt intended to be derisive, I think that it puts a comforting, homey face on the bureaucracy to imagine air traffic controllers sifting through piles of Tandy products as we trackers so often do. I was getting worried about the valuable federal vacuum tube contracts going to a country like Poland, even if it isn't exactly communist anymore.