Arts & Entertainment

Because the record had been stowed in the basement for so many years, when Zamabataro and his brother played it, it sounded aged.

“You could really hear the dust,” says Zamabataro. “It wasn’t a perfect recording, and I just thought that was really cool how it sounded old.”

Since then, Zamabataro’s father has replaced his records with a CD player and surround-sound, but the younger Zamabataro hasn’t lost his interest in vinyl. He inherited his father’s collection and started one of his own — now at 100 records and counting. Zamabataro, now 21, still plays the records on the same player his father once used (though he did have to replace the needle).

Zamabataro isn’t alone in his fascination with the once almost-extinct musical medium. Over the past three or four years, younger collectors have been growing in numbers, and older collectors have remained loyal all along. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), shipments of vinyl records have been increasing since 2007, with shipments nearly tripling from 1.3 million records in 2007 to 3.2 million in 2009 — a 41 percent increase.

On the flip side, only 900,000 vinyl albums were shipped in 2006, the lowest amount in the past 10 years, according to RIAA. At that time, it looked like the end was near.

“Probably in the late ’80s, early ’90s, people were real infatuated with CDs so a lot of them were getting rid of their vinyl,” says George Betovich, owner of Checkered Records in Canton. “Major labels decided, without consulting independent record stores, that they weren’t going to press any more vinyl.”

Betovich says that even though this drought continued for almost a decade, he never stopped buying and selling records — even though he wasn’t selling nearly as many as he does now.

Then something strange happened: Small labels started to release vinyl. Next, some of the major labels got the message and started issuing vinyl again. And now, as Phil Peachock, owner of Spin More Records in Kent, says, “Vinyl is back with a vengeance.”

According to Betovich, one of the reasons vinyl is back is because many Millennials who grew up downloading free music from the Internet are realizing that “compressed” sound can’t compare to the real thing. It also helps that some of those same teens are discovering their parents’ record collections (and classic rock, says Betovich, was recorded to be played on grooves of a vinyl record — so it just sounds better that way).