Opinion

Vinyl sales keep on climbing. They topped £177 million in the UK in 2023 – seven times higher than ten years ago. The figures come from ERA (which by linguistic contortion is short for the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association). ERA chief executive officer Kim Bayley couples the vinyl climb with ‘the remarkable return of HMV, now back in its Oxford Street home’.

Colleague Steve Harris previously dug deep into HMV’s history [HFN Apr ’24], so I’ll only give a brief recap here. HMV was born at 363 Oxford Street in 1921, went bust in 2019, was rescued by Canadian Doug Putnam and came home in time for Christmas 2023. Putnam also owns the little Fopp book and music store near Cambridge Circus, theatrical home to Harry Potter. He must be doing something right because HMV just made £5.3 million profit. And HMV now accounts for over half of all vinyl sales across the UK.

Rack ’em Up
I recently paid HMV Oxford Street a visit. The immediate feel is of a Japanese store. The ground floor is stuffed with racks of fluffy toys, and the usual muso t-shirts. Rock, pop and jazz CDs and LPs are in the basement, along with a big selection of mainly vinyl technology. There were a few decent decks, eg, from Lenco, but player prices start at £70 for a three-speed deck and £100 for a briefcase turntable combined with amp and speakers. As a recording engineer told me: ‘Usually the USB digital transfer and Bluetooth in the player render any possible advantage of vinyl below zero’.

HMV talks about stocking over 20,000 vinyl albums and CDs. The disc racks do indeed bulge but there are often multiple copies of the same title. The vinyl prices are very high, often justified by heavyweight pressings and impressive sleeve design. For example, £60 for John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and £40 for Evenings At The Village Gate; £55 for Oscar Peterson’s Very Tall. One group of racks offers a choice of three LPs (Lana Del Ray, Beverley Knight, New Model Army, Human League, Taylor Swift et al) for £55. It’s not hard to see how HMV is fuelling vinyl sales and revenue.

There was very little CD playback hardware on offer, however. It is now difficult to buy a mid-range CD player, anywhere. There are plenty of ‘kitchen radio’ CD players for £100 or less but the audio quality through built-in speakers is dire. Top-end CD players are, of course, readily available at many hundreds, but good luck finding an affordable CD player with a decent onboard DAC or S/PDIF output for use in a bedroom, kitchen or den.

Computer ROM drives will play music CDs, but very few home computers now come with an optical drive. It’s possible to buy a ‘portable’ ROM drive with USB connector for a computer, for as little as £20. Audio quality then depends on the DAC in the computer and is unlikely to be high. Anyways, it’s hardly convenient to fire up a computer before playing a song.

Yet there is a very simple workaround.Although DVD needs a 650nm laser (to read the smaller video pits), for economy of factory production the optics in a DVD player will usually handle two wavelengths, 650nm for DVD and 780nm for CD. So most DVD players will play CDs.

A new vinyl pressing of Coltrane’s Evenings At The Village Gate for £40

Silver Disc Saviour
For the time being, at least, it is possible to find a DVD player, either new online or from a charity shop, for around £20 or £30. There will usually be no strip display to show track info but there will be push button controls to open/close the tray, play, skip tracks, etc. DVD players almost always come with a remote control, too.

The audio output will usually be a stereo pair of line-level RCA phono jacks. Sound quality from the player’s DAC may not be ‘hi-fi’ but almost certainly better than what’s on offer from a cheap-as-chips kitchen CD radio – and a lot better than some of the junk-quality vinyl players currently fuelling the LP boom.