It's easy for the cynicism to kick in: quirky manual operation, delicate scratch-prone media, a limited selection of music, and no portability option. If you already have thousands of your favorite songs on your iPod, why bother with vinyl records? The answer is, quite simply, you don't know what you're missing.

Why vinyl sounds better than CDs and MP3s is an ongoing debate, but we think it's a question of resolution of fine detail. Real, live sound has infinite resolution, but digitalized music contains a finite number of samples. For CDs, it's 44,100 samples per second. That might like an adequate number of samples to reconstruct the sound of a piano or a guitar, but when you stop and consider that the distinctive sound of every instrument and the human voice is produced by a fundamental frequency and a complex series of higher-frequency harmonics, you might see that's where digital falls down on the job. The number of samples available to faithfully reproduce the shimmer of a cymbal or the sweetness of a violin are too few. That accounts for digital's harshness compared to sample-free analog, which can capture music's harmonics with ease. In recent years, more obscure digital formats--SACD, DVD-Audio, and lossless digital codecs such as FLAC--have narrowed the sound-quality gap with analog to the point at which only golden-eared audiophiles could even hope to hear the difference.

Be that as it may, LPs retain a retro appeal and a visceral aural aesthetic that an endless stream of bits and bytes will never be able to equal. Rather than fade away and die like 8-track, audio cassettes, and (soon) VHS videotapes, the vinyl market seems to be on track to maintain--and even expand--its boutique appeal as the best way for discriminating listeners to enjoy music.