I grew up during the vinyl period, just as 78 rpm records were beginning to be replaced by 45 and 33.3 rpm records — we had fun destroying the very breakable 78s by flinging them like Frisbees, and I sure wish we hadn’t done that!

I’ll tell you, vinyl records had their drawbacks. They scratch easily, and because it is a physical medium, with a needle actually being dragged through a groove along the surface, you can hear every scratch loud and clear; that process also eventually wore the groove down, degrading the sound each time the record was played, producing a rumbling sound, plus hisses and pops. People who wanted clear sound learned to handle the records by the edge and never touch the surface, and if you intended to listen to the music often, you would tape it and listen to the tape thereby protecting the surface from extended wear.

You also had to periodically change the needle on the player due to wear, or sometimes the entire cartridge, in order to protect the surface of the records, and buy devices to wipe dust off the surface everytime you played the record. It could be rather expensive and tedious.

Also, if you moved around a lot (as I did, going from home to college, and house to house, and a job in this city to a job in that city), you had to cart around heavy boxes filled with your ever growing collection.

So I actually welcomed the day cassettes and 8-tracks, and then CDs, were introduced to replace the vinyl records. I never got rid of my vinyl record collection, but they now take up space in a closet and I rarely play them other than to record them to my computer.