New Kind of Post: Vinyl Pickups

My family listened almost exclusively to vinyl until sometime in the early 90's, when our record player broke. I knew that it was never getting repaired when my dad bought an Alanis Morissette cassette tape. He'd never bought cassettes, outside of a random Michelle Shocked or Melissa Etheridge--man, now that I think about it, early 90's my dad definitely had a type. I used my paycheck the next year to get a CD player...and that seemed to be the end of my record listening existence.
And yet...we had all this music sitting in the cupboard that we weren't listening to. The thought of it drove me mad...all that Creedence, Who, Beatles, Neil Young and countless others just sitting there, gathering dust. Eventually, when I went off to college, the thought occurred to me to fix the old turntable. Every time I went back to my parents' house, I'd go into the dusty cabinet and thumb through the old LP's. Finally, I decided to blow an entire paycheck on getting the record player functional again..and yet, it still just didn't want to work correctly. The volume wouldn't go up past a whisper. This deck was insanely expensive in the 70's, when my parents were rolling in short-lived oil money. I forgot that even happened until I typed it. Now the old family turntable was just an obscure tangle of wires and circuits I couldn't make heads or tails of.
A couple years later, I got married and forgot about the whole thing...or so I thought.
Apparently, I was complaining about my turntable situation without knowing it, because one of my brother-in-laws rather astutely gifted me a new record player for Christmas a couple years later.
His timing was impeccable. Though I spent the first few months of record player ownership Ebaying missing pieces to my old family collection, i.e. old U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen albums, I soon realized that the world was on the cusp of a record renaissance. My local music store, The Compact Disc Store (RIP), had started stocking just as many vinyls as CD's. My disposable income suddenly had a new home (I burnt a lot on tattoos and comics, too...man, I must have been swimming in cash).
That was more than a decade ago. My LP purchasing habits have ebbed and flowed, but as I've now completely ditched CD's as a format (thanks, Jeep Renegade), my record-purchasing is once again experiencing the latter. As I primarily purchase digital music, and don't live in a mansion with unlimited space, I like to know beforehand if a record purchase is worth my while. If the packaging isn't nice, and the record doesn't sound any more special than the digital files I could otherwise be downloading, what's the point? Sometimes, though...okay, let's be honest, a lot of the time, my purchases are spontaneous. A lot of the fun is in seeing if the LP Version of an album measures up...and thus, I think it will be fun to blog about the experience. Also, maybe it will let any random googlers know if a particular record I've purchased is worth their while.
Let's face it, it's been a decade, and the vinyl rebirth boom is proving to be no fad...in fact, it's still growing. Few things are worse for a collector than buying an LP that turns out to be packaged lazily, and mixed poorly. Let's do this, The Nicsperiment!
Coming soon, The Nicsperiment "Vinyl Pickups." It's content diversification, man!