Gordon Stevenson: Just For The Record Owner on the revival of vinyl records

New Zealand is experiencing a vinyl revival, a new generation getting hooked on the old-school technology. 

It’s not just the cities experiencing the boom, Napier’s ‘Just For The Record’ filled with customers. 

Gordon Stevenson, the store’s owner, told Mike Hosking that there’s very few artists that aren’t on vinyl these days.  

He said that vinyl sounds considerably better than digital mediums, as the conversion from analogue to digital back to analogue degrades the music, and you can lose up to 40% of the music.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It seems that vinyl revival is real. A lot of

(00:03):
noises past couple of years, as I'm sure you're aware
around vinyl records, who's buying them? The fact they've never
died out now Gordon Stevenson runs NAPY is just for
the record business apparently is booming and Gordon's with it's mate.
How are you?

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Oh'm extremely well, thank you?

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Good? Are you online or retail or both? We both okay?
And so how do you sell most of them? Is
it all online or people come in and have a
little flick through?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Probably the majority is online, but we do a regional
around and we've actually got a store around garage at home,
so it works quite nicely. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
And how many in the garage?

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Well, how about for thirty forty thou?

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Do they warp in the sun? Because mine warped. I
used to have a vinyl collection and it just the
whole thing warped, and I was heartbroken.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
I can understand that because they're very difficult to direct
to a perfecture, they are warp But yes they do
if we keep them out of the sun.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Good stuff. What do you pay for a vinyl album
these days? Roughly?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
That varies because the records aren't just records. There's various
quality of records. We start at realistically about fifty dollars
and go through about four hundred.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
See that's interesting, isn't because fifty is more than the CD,
and it's certainly more expensive than streaming.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yes, and it sounds considerably better too.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Ah, so there's my great fascination, Gordon. When the CD
came along, as you'll well remember, the fixation was, oh,
it's so good that sound, and so we became fixated
with the quality of the sound. And yet when streaming
came along, no one seems to care about that anymore.
And the sound is crap.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Oh grin Tyley, you know you can, you can losing
up to forty percent of the music. I can't see
the logic of that at all.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
But then again, the vinyl sound is different to a CD,
and could you argue not quite as good or would
we get into faciity.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
I think fistic caps are coming up very quickly. No,
vinyl sounds considerably better. Because digital scenario, we can't listen
to a digital signal. It's got to be converted from
analog where we listen to it, then converted to digital
and then come back to analog so we can hear it.
All those steps to degrade the music.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Do you see an increasing variety of artists in vinyl nowadays?
Is that growing as well?

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Dramatically good? I mean, to be honest, there's very few
artists that aren't on vinyl. I mean, for example, yesterday
or today we're releasing Pat Freddy's dropped new album. But
then the other interest thing, of course, is on the
other end of the scale. We've got The Animals with
the Animals, which is celebrating the sixtieth anniversary has just

(02:38):
been released on yellow vinyl.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
No way, And of course you need a turntable, yes,
we do. Can you get turntables easily, very easily? Oh,
last time I looked at it was sort of they
had one or two and they were a bit cool
but trendy, and I thought quite expensive.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Well realistically, I mean I was in a Harvey Normand
yesterday and I was totally devastated because they had two
absolutely rubbish turntables. You go to a specialist. There's lots
and lots of good quality products around and some of
them are reasonable. I think you canpend a lot of
money on the turntable as same as you can spend
a lot of money on a CD player.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
I guess, So what do you pay for a turntable? Roughly?

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Oh, realistically you get have half decent about one thousand
dollars upwards. There's not a lot of money today, there's
twenty twenty four.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
Oh god, but there you go, Gordon. You tell jeez,
I thought we're in the cost of living crisis. But
my apologies, it's not unlike Gordon seas and Gordon must
be right. Paying fifty backs for a year records, fifty
record a thousand for your turntable. Then you need another record.
Spotify subscriptions starting to sound pretty damn reasonable. Then you
need two records and that's one hundred dollars, and after
a while you get sick of that. You need three records.

(03:48):
But you can't beat the vin And that part is true.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to
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Speaker 1 (03:54):
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