Crosley’s designers targeted vinyl as a retro trend and made its turntables objects, rather than mere music players. Its arrival in supermarkets is the latest move in the US brand’s canny exploitation of the vinyl revival. From May, the Crosley Cruiser will be a permanent fixture nationwide.
Best vinyl player 2016 portable#
After the portable record player arrived in shops in the run up to Record Store Day 2016 – priced at £80 – sales outperformed expectations by 28%. In March, Sainsbury’s responded to “the unstoppable demand for vinyl in the UK” by selling LPs for the first time since the 1980s and stocking Crosley Cruiser turntables in 171 of their stores. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images ‘The cute vintage shape and feminine colours appeal to women’ By Harriet Gibsone Market appeal: a selection of Crosley record players at a US trade fair. So the record player that is perfect for a nine-year-old girl is gathering dust until such time as some music a nine-year-old girl might want to listen to becomes available for it, while the Sonos in the kitchen still reverberates to the sound of that drippy, solipsistic little berk whining about taking a pill in Ibiza. I bought her a load of secondhand pop singles that I thought might appeal, but she doesn’t want to play Buffalo Stance by Neneh Cherry or Tainted Love by Soft Cell, or at least not yet: she quite rightly wants to play her own music. I’d mistakenly assumed that record labels still stuck singles out on 7in – I had even envisaged a rather thrilling world of limited-edition coloured-vinyl singles and picture discs – but it turns out the much-touted vinyl revival hasn’t reached the arena of top 40 pop. It was that none of the music my daughter likes is actually available on vinyl, something neither of us had bothered to check. He regarded this not as a blight that impaired his enjoyment of his record collection, but something of a bonus: if he taped you the Stone Roses’s album, it would fit on one side of a C90, not cut off before the end of I Am the Resurrection.Īs it turned out, the problem with the whole enterprise wasn’t the Crosley’s admittedly awful sound quality or, indeed, its shoddy build (the tone arm and cartridge are so flimsy that I had to stick a 10p piece to the top of the cartridge to stop it jumping all the time). Later, my mate had a terrible Amstrad midi system that played everything too fast. It must have sounded awful, but I don’t remember how it sounded, because I was a kid, not a middle-aged hi-fi buff: I just remember the music. I have really fond memories of my first record player, and that was thoroughly knackered, one of those ancient all-in-one players that stacked singles up on a giant spindle. I wasn’t bothered by the dire presentiments about the Crosley’s sound quality. They don’t need setting up: you just plug it in and it plays. They are colourful and immediately appealing: they look like fun, in a way that hi-fi equipment seldom does. While I agree that anyone who spends 30 quid on a new vinyl album, then plays it on a turntable that doesn’t cost much more than that is completely nuts, a Crosley seemed ideal as nine-year-old girl’s first record player. Still, the less I have to endure the disheartening oeuvre of Meghan Trainor and her current passion, an apparently interminable parade of drippy, solipsistic singer-songwriter berks – one of whom actually appears to have written a song whinging about, of all things, taking a pill in Ibiza – the better. I am proud of the fact that she has her own tastes: I have never tried to influence what she likes. In addition, anything that serves to confine my eldest daughter’s taste in music to her bedroom is money well spent, as far as I am concerned.
So I liked the idea of her saving up her pocket money to buy “vinyls”, as the young people persist in calling them: she seemed more likely to spend money on something tangible, rather than a download.
0 kommentar(er)
