I remember it fondly: the day my conversion to vinyl began. I was twelve. It was a Sunday and I had finished an amazing one and a half hours of watching a very pink Molly Ringwald as Andy Walsh in Pretty in Pink. She was popular in The Breakfast Club. She felt forgotten in Sixteen Candles. But in Pretty in Pink, Molly was distinct, quirky and original. Regardless of whether you think her self-made pink prom dress is hideous or worthy of the red carpet, through my adolescent eyes, Andy Walsh was rocking my world with her fashion sense, her spunky attitude and, in particular, her neat after school job at the Trax record store.

As I watched, over and over, my favorite scene in which Andy’s best and obsessed friend, Duckie, played by Jon Cryer, slides into Trax and perfectly lip synchs to Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness”, dancing among the records, I felt nostalgic. After all, Redding released “Try A Little Tenderness,” in 1966 and Duckie is a high school student in the ‘80s. The only thing truly separating us is a Y and an X—a generational Y and X, to be precise. “Try A Little Tenderness” carried both of us to an earlier time of hippies, disco clubs and Mod culture.

I pictured myself lying on my bed, my feet on my pillow, my head almost hanging off the opposite edge of the frame, staring at the ceiling while listening to an Otis Redding record burst through my heavy stereo headphones. About a month later, I bought a vintage Columbia record player. It smelled like aged leather and I rushed to the nearest record store to purchase a “sacrificial” record to play that afternoon. I received a sign. Vinyl and I were truly meant to be. In the store’s soul section, I found Otis Redding’s 1966 record Complete and Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul.

After rushing home, I positioned the record player on my bedside table, plopped the record on the turntable, reclined on my bed just the way I envisioned it and waited for the needle to drop. My ears widened as the needle tapped the dense black wax, drawing out the buried baselines and drum beats. I was hearing a whole new “She Put the Hurt on Me” and the classic “Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa.” The sound hypnotized me and I was engrossed by the image: the spinning record, its blurring and fading grooves, and the slight addition of the static “snap crackle and pop” sounds.

Don’t get me wrong. Digital music is great in its own right, but vinyl continues to be my preferred medium with its robust and refined analog sound quality. This sound simply can’t be reproduced by CD or MP3 recordings. The grooves in the vinyl are carved into the wax and imitate the original waveform of the music so no aspect of the original sound is missing. There is an additional quality to vinyl that involves the physical experience you go through. Listening to music on wax mesmerizes your senses—your fingers circling the grooves of the record, closely examining the cover artwork and following the endless spinning on the turntable like a spectator at a tennis match, with their eyes locked on the moving tennis ball. This all contributes to the intimate and exciting experience of vinyl sound.

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