I was born in the 80’s so I never really had the chance to listen to records growing up. By the time I developed my diverse taste in music, CDs were all the rage and my father had put most of his vinyl collection away. Over the years, I’ve become more of an audiophile and decided to begin listening to vinyl records. I purchased my first turntable (a Technics SL1200 MK2) and was floored by the sound. From that point on, I was completely hooked and began to buy lots of new LPs from my favorite artists. After a month or so, I began searching for vinyl on Craigslist and came across an ad for over a hundred old 78rpm LPs for a mere $20.

TWENTY DOLLARS.

At 20 cents a record I couldnt go wrong and immediately called the seller.

The conversation went something like this:

“Hello?”

“Hi! I’m Ryan, the guy that was interested in your 78rpm records. Are they still around?”

“Oh yes they’re still for sale. You sound like a younger guy though. A lot of the music is oldies and mellow stuff. It’s none of that “boom boom” loud stuff.”

“Haha, oh that’s okay. I’m still interested in seeing it though!”

I drove out to Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver) to have a look and Harriette, a middle aged Asian woman greeted me at the door. The records were in her rec room, stored in a dusty, musty smelling trunk. I peered in and flipped through the records, recognizing a few – Frank Sinatra and Perry Como – but that was it. Many of the records were in good shape with stored sleeves and album booklets. Others were caked in dust and looked like they needed a good cleaning before playing.

Harriette had a puzzled look on her face that said, “Why in the world could a guy in his mid 20’s want an old box of records”.

Finally she said, “What do you plan to do with these records? They’re so old! Oh I know! You’re going to record them on your computer and sell the CDs!”

I wasn’t planning on selling them but will definitely be listening and archiving them to MP3.

With my new purchase, we’ll be doing a new feature on this blog featuring one song a week from this record find, but unfortunately I’ll be limited to what I can post due to copyright laws. I currently don’t have a proper record player or recording setup to play these on, but in about 3 weeks time I hope to have that sorted out. These 78rpm records can’t be played on most conventional players because they need to be spun at 78rpm (as opposed to 33rpm & 45rpm for normal records). I’ve done plenty of research on how I’ll be playing these and will share my findings in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!