The 8 best vintage turntables and what to look out for when buying second hand: …Buying a vintage turntable is a great option. For many, a budget for any sort of hi-fi is a low priority. Once the bills are paid, it can be virtually impossible to purchase a new, top quality hi-fi system. Going vintage can offer quality at a low cost. Others may have spent a bundle on a new deck but have little in reserve for that second system that would be ideal for a study, bedroom or spare room. Some might even want to revisit younger days when the then ‘new’ turntables were objects of desire and now they can afford to purchase one, or even two of these classic designs. Below, we have listed our Top 8 vintage purchases, but before you run off to your local second-hand store or eBay account, pause for thought.

Characters and music star in The Music Shop: Rachel Joyce’s The Music Shop (Random House, 2017, 307 pages) takes place in England and tells the story of Frank, an eccentric owner of a dingy record store, and Ilse Brauchmann, a young German woman who wanders into the shop and soon asks Frank to teach her what he knows about music. Surrounding these two figures are a collection of Frank’s eccentric friends and fellow store owners: Kit, Frank’s young assistant who has a penchant for breaking everything he touches; Father Anthony, a fallen priest who operates a nearby religious articles store; Maud, the scowling, bitter tattoo artist who secretly loves Frank; a pair of undertakers; Pete the barman; and Peg, Frank’s dead mother. And then there is the music.

The End of Owning Music: How CDs and Downloads Died. Physical formats are cratering, but vinyl’s niche is growing. Jack White and other experts explain the future of listening. As streaming gives the music industry its biggest profits in a decade, the CD business continues to plunge. CD sales have fallen 80 percent in the past decade, from roughly 450 million to 89 million. Since Tesla began manufacturing cars without CD players, other companies like Ford and Toyota have recently followed. Downloads – once seen as the CD’s replacement – have plummeted 58 percent since peaking in 2012, their profits now even smaller than physical sales. Artists have taken note; Bruce Springsteen released his latest box set, The Album Collection Vol. 2, 1987-1996, exclusively on vinyl, with no CD option, unlike 2014’s Vol. 1. “It’s a streaming world and a vinyl world with a quickly diminishing CD,” says Daniel Glass, president of Glassnote Records, indie-label home of Mumford & Sons and Phoenix.

Call Me By Your Name Soundtrack Releasing On Peach-Scented Vinyl: One of the more memorable scenes in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name is the one where Timothee Chalamet has sex with a peach. It’s kind of sweet in the context of the film. Later this summer, the movie soundtrack will be pressed on peach-scented and -colored vinyl, which, in the context of the film, is kind of gross. 7,777 copies of the “peach season” edition will be released. The soundtrack features songs by Sufjan Stevens, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Giorgio Mororder, and the Psychedelic Furs, among others. Call Me By Your Name “peach season” edition is out 8/3 through peach harvest season via Music On Vinyl.

Even Walls Fall Down: The Last Days of Cincinnati’s Ultrasuede Recording Studio: Plastic Ants entered Ultrasuede Studio to pay tribute to Tom Petty’s brilliance and soon found themselves mourning the loss of the recording space itself. Ants singer/songwriter Robert Cherry shares a behind-the-scenes look at an Ultrasuede session and documents the last days of one of Cincinnati’s longest-running music institutions — and its subsequent rebirth. Plus, check out the world premiere of the music video for Plastic Ants’ cover of Tom Petty’s ‘Walls,’ which (fittingly, as you’ll read) was one of the last songs recorded at Ultrasuede’s longtime space in Camp Washington.

Colorado Springs, CO | Independent Records closes downtown location: The Independent Records & Video network of shops has long been a musical fixture in Colorado Springs, as anyone who still enjoys buying physical media surely knows. But as far as local musicians go, the record stores have been more than just a place to cop new releases or rare LPs; they have functioned as a sort of hub for musicians and music junkies alike…Given Independent Records’ inextricable connection to the local music community, as well as its fairly iconic status, news traveled quickly of the downtown location closing its doors after a 38-year run overlooking Acacia Park. And just as quickly the local music community was aflood with memories.

Berkeley, CA | Amoeba Music Is Now Selling Weed: California has legalized weed, which means that lots of businesses are making the drug a little bit more accessible to the public. But this ‘seed’ of this idea was planted years earlier. It turns out that Amoeba’s co-founders, Marc Weinstein and Dave Prinz, came up with the idea to combine the famed Northern California record shop with a pot shop in 2012. That’s roughly when they started noticing a decline in sales. “Music, in some ways, is such an uplifting product for humans,” Weinstein recently told Billboard. “And we thought, weed is just another inspirational product that we can get behind with our hearts and souls.”

Moby is selling off his personal record collection for charity: The sale on online marketplace Reverb LP will include Moby’s personal copies of nearly every one of his own records, along with hundreds of 12-inches he used as a DJ early on his career. His collection is said to be heavy on techno, house and hip-hop from the ’80s and ’90s, with many of the records featuring handwritten markers Moby added to help him during his DJ sets. “These are all the records that I bought and loved and played and carried all around the world,” the artist explains in a video promoting the sale. “I would rather you have them than me, because if you have them, you’ll play them, you’ll love them, and the money will go to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. So everybody wins. Well, except me, because now I don’t have any records.”

Cleveland, OH | Cleveland’s Music Saves record shop finds new life with online store and pop-up events: It’s nearly impossible to think of the Waterloo Arts District without the image of the iconic Music Saves sign glowing next to its Beachland Ballroom neighbor. But at the end of 2017, owner Melanie Hershberger knew it was time to close the door on the record shop’s day-to-day operations. Luckily for music fans in Cleveland (and beyond), the song isn’t over. This June, Music Saves launched an online store. For fans of Hershberger’s sharp curation of records that were always stocked at the shop, you’ll find a wide selection of indie, rock, folk, electronic and more online. Music can be shipped to your doorstep or picked up at the shop at 15801 Waterloo Road.

How the Rolling Stones’ Massive New Vinyl Box Came Together: “…I didn’t have any original master tapes for this. The management of the band archived everything digitally a few years back, and I was loaned a hard drive – they said, “You can have this for 24 hours; take anything you need off of it, and then it has to come back.” They had several high-resolution transfers of each album, or at least high-resolution where the source was analog tape, which was most of it. They just said, “Take your pick, and work with whichever transfer you feel is better with you.” I’d have liked to have got hold of the tape, but old analog tape is starting to get quite fragile, especially the stuff from the late Seventies and early Eighties, because the tape was not great…”