This year Cameron and I decided to leap to our next hipster milestone and buy a record player for our apartment. I have wanted a record player for years now, but every time I saved up money to buy one and started to do some research I got overwhelmed with all the advice and choices and technicalities which eventually caused me to give up.
The trouble with buying gifts for your significant other when you are both mid 20s ish with decent living wages and no dependents is you end up buying yourself everything you really need and kinda want. That leaves a weird collection of potential gifts that you only kind of want, are completely impractical, or ridiculously expensive. For the last couple of years we have been solving this little debacle by buying airfare for fun trips or something nice for our apartment. It works like a charm, I highly recommend it. A glorious side affect of this scheme is that you don't feel too bad buying yourself little gifts since you know you won't be getting any from your SO. It really is a winning situation all around.
We decided early in December that this year our Christmas presents to each other would be a record player. Finally! We would tackle this seemingly daunting purchase together. Then we did nothing about it for weeks and we woke up and it was already Christmas Eve. We had done zero research and had mere hours left to make our Christmas dream a reality, so we hit the ground running. We headed right over to Dijital Fix on Valencia st. mostly because that was the first store that popped into Cameron's head. They had a smallish selection of record players which made our job much easier. There were several Crosley models that were cute, cheapish and in stock and then a few really serious looking set ups that I didn't want to get too close to for fear of breaking. We ended up choosing the Crosley Snap Turntable with built in speakers. Bam, onto the next store which obviously had to be Amoeba. We got our first taste of combing through record after record looking for gems. It all felt scandalous and exiting. We both had no idea if we had just made a completely impractical purchase and it was thrilling. We wound up back at our apartment with 10 records and a brand spanking new record player.
Crosley Snap Turntable
We spent the whole evening figuring out how to work the darn thing and unwrapping and listening to our vinyl albums one by one. It was a blast.
Looking back I wish I hadn't felt so intimidated about joining the world of vinyl. So, moving on here is my advice to anyone who is interested in owning a record player. Just jump right in and buy the darn thing. You'll figure it out as you go. Make sure you have a good mix of albums you know you will listen to over and over again(you'll know because you probably already listen to them digitally) and some random albums that will be surprising in probably both good and bad ways.
