Uma opinião muito válida

Da newsletter semanal da Record Collector, um ponto em defesa do vinil, que eu partilho.

Também já me vi olhado como um lunático por defender o disco preto, um fulano raro, no mínimo. Nada que me afecte, mas tenho visto as pessoas "normais" mudarem de opinião muitas vezes, a maior parte das vezes sem se aperceberem e sem se darem conta das razões das posições que defendem. Sempre foi assim, sempre assim será. A memória é um instrumento  poderosíssimo, a maior parte das vezes incómodo. Quando as posições passadas se tornam incómodas (mesmo que devidamente registadas sem margem para dúvida), entram em cena as teorias de interpretação da história. Mas isso já é muita filosofia para um tema tão simples...

I’ve got friends who regard me as a lunatic for buying records. They can’t understand why I’d want to clutter up the house with sheets of black plastic encased in cardboard. After all, why not invest in an MP3 player and free up 40 acres of floor space occupied by vinyl? Actually, I am not the sort of idiot who thinks a laptop is another name for a cat. And I do own an MP3 player, but it’s full of vinyl that I’ve ‘ripped’ on to it – what’s the point? But sometimes there’s an advantage in being a Luddite. The newspaper – yes, an old-fashioned paper, not an cyberspace transmission – tells me that PlayStations have been under cyber attack, and that the Blackberry has been knackered for days owing to some wee glitch. I am glad to report that my portable entertainment system (no, no, not that one missus) of two Technics SL 1200s, a mixer and a prohibitively weighty box of 45s is still fully functional. It might not be completely convenient to carry with me on the daily commute but at least it doesn’t depend on anything other than 240 volts delivered via a 13 amp plug to work. As someone once said of The Troggs, it’s so far behind, it’s in front. In fact, some experts in technology believe that vinyl will be the last survivor of our musical era: it is delivered by mechanical means and long after the current computer musical formats have been made redundant and CDs have disintegrated, someone will be able to create the means to play these funny bits of black plastic to hear what it was shook our groove thang back in the early 2000s. The future is apparently vinyl. Who’d have thought it...