Rewind the years at a listening session for LP lovers in Mumbai's antiSOCIAL

Roycin Dsouza right at a vinyl listening sessionRewind the years Go back in time to the 60s and early 70s Imagine youre a rock n roll or jazz fan with bushy sideburns and a wardrobe full of flared pants who feels like listening to his favourite LP What do you do You take the record carefully out of its album sleeve place it with precision on your turntable and then sit back on your sofa if youre at home or shake a leg with friends if youre at a partyFastforward now to the late 90s Vinyls have given way to cassettes which too are ceding relevance to CDs So you decide to get rid of your records because given their size they are eating up too much space on your shelf A friend offers to take them off you since he remains a vinyl enthusiast and so you tell him Here you go take the whole lot if you want even So Near So Far which is your favourite jazz LPAlbum covers for LPsThat friend would be someone like Sunil Sampat 74 or mdash given the year you were born in mdash Roycin Dsouza 26 They represent two different generations of vinyl collectors and this Sunday Dsouza is bringing back an initiative he started a little over a year ago called Drop the NeedleIt aims to give the members of the small community a space where they can engage in their hobby There is no agenda behind the event Dsouza says adding Its more of an informal meetup where the idea is to make people leave their homes and exchange records apart from knowledge and listen to some musicSunil SampatThat excites Sampat when we inform him about the event I am hoping that with volumes increasing post the 2000s and prices coming down as they should there will be more and more young people buying vinyls he says But it all depends on the corporate companies he adds Theyve put us in a Catch22 situation mdash if you buy a highend turntable the record labels are saying that youll have to buy an expensive LP to not damage it Its like buying a Ferrari which you cant run on Goodyear tyres So youd have to opt for MichelinDsouza seconds that Many labels are only selling records to make a quick buck Plus the whole hipster search for LPs as much as it has increased sales and demand has made records overpriced a bit like it is with truffles he saysParticipants at a gathering of vinyl enthusiastsHe adds Also younger people have started picking up lowquality records for the sake of owning one They are the same people who buy an iPhone just for the sake of owning an iPhone without caring about its specificationsSo what does all of this bode for the future of vinyls Sampat and Dsouza have differing views on this question The older collector is more hopeful the younger one less so I see the trend dropping in a few years Dsouza says before explaining A lot of dedicated vinyl collectors arent happy with the new releases because the firms behind them dont care about how they are produced as long as people keep buyingBut Sampat says When the history of recorded music is finally written it will be with the use of vinyls Cassettes are gone CDs are going and music on your computer might get corrupted So as far as preserving and archiving music is concerned a vinyl is the best medium As for me they have become the vehicle by way of which I preserve my library of music which he says includes a copy of Joe Hendersons So Near So Far which he had acquired in the 90s