Jim: Vinyl is pressing the 'eject button' as you slide in the cassette with a satisfying click and rewind to the song and ....no wait.....

Vinyl is lovingly spending a little bit extra for a piece of art, tearing off the shrink wrapping as you inspect the cover which is large enough to touch and feel and see without reading glasses and open the gatefold and smell the smell of 'new album'. You carefully remove the LP from the inner sleeve and mount it on the turntable. You hear the slight crackling of the outer grooves which elicits a Pavlovian salivary response of anticipation of the opening bars of the first song. As the song plays you pick up the cover and look at the imagery and decipher their meaning. You do the same with the lyrics and credits. You are bathed in the triple sensation of visual, poetic and musical artistic expression. This is value. This is quality of life. This is living.

.........or instead you could check out a track from it on yer iPod.

Bruce: My earliest recollection is with my parents and brothers in town (Glasgow) buying The Beatles, a Hard Days Night single from Lewis's, a big, now long gone department store. This would be mid sixties, with me aged 5 or 6. I remember it because some geezer broke into the car, which was parked in Queen Street, and had a big polis man standing next to it on our (rather sad) return.

My first album was courtesy of a £1 record voucher I won playing snooker! The shop was Virgin, in Argyle Street Glasgow, and on entering the emporium I remember the tropical smoke, wafting around the store, the hippie guys with long hair lounging on bean bags, I was scared.

"What can I get for this Mister"?, as I handed up my wee voucher.

The guy kindly pointed me to the Who budget backtrack series on Track Records and I had early Who material. Back home setting up the dining room chairs and bashing the hell out of them with a pair of regal Tip E's. Not cigarettes, drum sticks.

It would be 1972, or so, I was hooked, onto the Alice Cooper album School's Out, with the cover made up like a desk.

John: Vinyl is about involvement and engagement with the whole work of art that is the album. It's about making the commitment to put that piece of vinyl onto that turntable and knowing that as soon as that stylus gently lands on the vinyl, you'll be listening to the whole thing.

You won't easily be listening to half a track before pressing the track skip button. There isn't one.

It's about that commitment to engage in the whole experience. It demands all of your senses.

Vinyl is the original multimedia experience.
Aural pleasure from the music.
Tactile pleasure from the the feel of the sleeve.
Visual pleasure from the properly adult sized artwork.
Olfactory pleasure from the new album smell all the way through to the old album smell.

No compromises. Everything about it is like it is, because that's how the artist wanted it and that's how the medium allows it to be.

Music and artwork allowed to breathe.

Joe: Like most people who are old enough to remember, I bought loads of vinyl during the 70's and 80's. There was a place in Glasgow called "Listen" where I would head most Saturdays to look through their vast collection of LP's.

They always played stuff in the shop that most people had never heard before and the album being played was placed where everyone could see it. They also had 4 small booths with headphones where you could ask to listen to an album before deciding whether to buy it.

I have a number of vinyl LP's that I bought mainly because I liked the cover and I suppose back then you would never admit if it was awful.

Getting the Memorex cleaner out to wipe the surface before playing it was a ritual and you did take care of your stuff back then.

I had a programme on my computer that makes CD's sound like vinyl though its not a patch on the real thing.

Happy days indeed.

Mark: I grew up with vinyl and I would listen to albums for hours on end with no distractions other than the covers and taking in every part of them, artwork, lyrics, layout, who was mentioned on them.

I discovered some great bands after buying albums in second hand stores based purely on the cover. The covers created a mood to go with the music and were big enough to look cool even just lying around the place.

While there is still and always will be great music produced, the whole experience of vinyl records and covers has a special magic which, for me, can never be fully reproduced in newer formats.