In the TV show Supernatural, the very first episode (set in the year 2005), established Dean’s character as a classic rock fan, who is also in love with his classic car, and his classic car’s cassette player. When his brother Sam jokes about how old fashioned his tapes are, Dean doesn’t really give a damn. Plus, a couple of seasons later, Dean sees that Sam has put an iPod to his car and he really is freaked out. Not that he is freaked out by technology in general, but he …

Pop, crackle, hiss… No, this isn’t the sound of the new b-grade Rice Crispies.
The music-buying public, deeply enamoured with digital downloads, is abandoning the compact disc in droves, but one physical medium is staging a tiny comeback.  Amid otherwise gloomy music sales numbers released by Nielsen this week, vinyl record sales doubled compared with the year before.
In 2008, 1.88 million vinyl albums were purchased, more than in any other year since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991. The previous record was in 2000, when 1.5 million LP albums …