It's not that I'm nostalgic for hisses and pops.

Like I said, I love CDs.

But there was something about the care and feeding of vinyl that I miss.

You had to love them like you loved your music.

You had to wash their surfaces with Discwasher fluid and zap the static away with ion guns.

You had to place them in their inner condoms, covered with lyrics, before slipping them home in their flat, hard sleeves.

Stack them horizontally so they wouldn't warp.

Touch only their edges.

It appeals to some part of me - the anal-retentive part, no doubt.

But their lack of perfection, their demand for attention valued what was held inside their single groove so carefully cut onto a master disk somewhere in a hermetically sealed vault.

This music was dug into the surface, extracted with jewel-tipped cartridges on rumble-free surfaces.

Not floating before a laser's eyes, untouched by human hands.

Not bits and bytes arranged just so on a mirrored surface.

Not perfection, which is not art.

But imperfection, which is human.