Few days ago I glanced nostalgically at a stack of vinyl disks. My neighbors are redecorating and they put the LPs outside in the yard. I’ve started to check their covers with their worn off corners, one by one. They reminded me of something for long time forgotten. Now, it’s so easy to have a playlist with hundreds of songs. You can have almost anything you want, and still, it seems that there’s something missing. Those old discs looked so precious, and I would never compare them with few MP3 files. LPs are authentic. Looking at one of them that is twenty or thirty years old makes you wonder “How many of those are still around?” I had few LPs at home, and once in a while I was thinking that I would like to hear them again. I called Mrs. Stoicescu, the neighbor, asked her if I could have them and ended up leaving with a handful of LPs. Now, since I had some discs, I rushed into the store and bought a turntable. I was very curious to hear it again, to compare. I’ve heard many times that LPs are the best. There is something, I can’t strongly affirm that technically LPs are better or not. I can only say that the LP’s sound is closer to my heart. There’s “something” about that sound, something warm that makes you love it. Some are saying that LPs have a specific “distortion”, and that LPs fans actually love that distortion to which they got accustomed. Possible, but I would not call it distortion. I haven’t listened LPs for more than 10 years, and after the digital experience in the meantime, I like it better. There are probably many reasons. The new songs are excessively masterized, and it’s very seldom you hear the naturalness of the songs recorded on old vinyl disc. And then, the big dispute about the way data is stored. Sound waves are propagated through air analogically and are received by our ears analogically as well. The CD started the digital age. Sound is converted in a long sequence of 0 and 1 and stored after. Practically the analogical data is split and only snapshots are stored. The more frequent the snapshots, the better the sound quality. The quality of CD is 44100 snapshots per second on 16 bits, meaning that every snapshot can be converted in any of the 65536 possible values, more than enough, one could say. Theoretically there is sufficient data, and our ears should not perceive the difference. On the LPs, where sound is stored analogically, there much more data than on the CD, but the advocates of digital sound consider it useless since it cannot be heard. I am a little reluctant and I would not say that if we can’t hear it we don’t perceive it. Nevertheless, this dispute between digital and analog could go on forever. The fact is that for few days I enjoy that sweet sound of the old music on LPs and I cannot stop. In this moment I don’t even want to hear about CD, MP3, Ipod, ITunes or Winamp.