Records have quite a long history, having been invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Edison's phonograph was clumsy and inconvenient, but it was his first successful invention. One year after its invention, America's recorded music industry also sprang up. As the records of the day were cylindrical and made of wax, they were known as "wax cylinders." However, the invention came a little too early, as the record and needle couldn't be made to work together reliably. Edison, feeling that the phonograph had no commercial value, turned his attention elsewhere and abandoned it.

By the 1920s, when radio came on the scene, phonograph players and records had been improved upon. It was then that flat discs--today's phonograph records--were developed. The earliest ones were played at 78 revolutions per minute, and the first players of high sound quality were made in 1925.

The phonograph was a post-Industrial-Revolution invention, and from the wax cylinder to the shellac, and later vinyl, disc, it was a leisure item of the middle class. Japan began a process of Westernization in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration, and the Japanese gentry took to Western trends. When the Japanese colonized Taiwan in 1895, those trends came with them. In the early twentieth century, a small minority of Taiwanese also began to take interest in records. The rich sound and refined strains of recorded classical music fit the tastes of these elites.

Ho Wan-lan, a music writer who's followed the history of vinyl records, says that analog audio technology was at its peak in the 1960s and 1970s. That fact, along with the number of masters of the classical music world who were active at that time, including conductor Herbert von Karajan and pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, meant that the period was the glory days of vinyl. The meeting of the recording and music worlds at that time left an unprecedented legacy that cannot be bested in terms of quality or quantity.

Just what is the appeal of vinyl? Ho believes that the answer to that question is analog, as it is the direct recording of sound waves onto records. The original sound is reproduced in the thickness and depth of the grooves and there is not much loss--not like CDs, in which the sound is converted into zeros and ones readable by a computer. Strictly speaking, CDs only create a digital reproduction of the sound. MP3s are compressed to keep file sizes small and thus are even more lossy.

Liu Ming-chen, editor in chief of AudioArt magazine and master vinyl collector, says that the record is physically big yet small in capacity, it's not very portable, and it's easily warped or scratched, so in the late twentieth century it lost its place as the medium of choice for mainstream music to the compact disc. But now, only 20 years later, the CD is under severe threat from the MP3.

On the other hand, the record was not in as much jeopardy of disappearing as people thought. Passionate music fans embraced it and kept it alive.

Liu says that in the homes of old music fans you'll often hear the lush sounds of 50-year-old records being played. "Though CDs were advertised as having 'perfect sound forever,' who knows if we'll be able to say the same for them in 50 years?"