This year, tons and tons of people will be bringing in the new year, not blasting tunes through a high-end audio system tricked out with all the latest Bluetooth tech and wifi capabilities, but rather with a $50 turntable.
Don’t get me wrong, the Jensen JTA-230 is quite the steal. For the price of a reasonable pair of sneakers, you get basic features like tone adjustment and pitch control, making it ideal for people want to dabble with vinyl but aren’t ready to sink too much cash into the elder medium.
But the fact that a turntable beat out a wifi-connected Sonos speaker, or really any other home audio product, is staggering and is just another piece of evidence that vinyl is no longer the niche obsession of aging audiophiles. British retailer HMV also said earlier this month that they’d sold one turntable a minute during the ramp up to Christmas.
With the expectation that Panasonic is going to revive the legendary Technics turntable—possibly at next week’s CES—it looks like 2016 could be the best year for vinyl in decades.