It's a sonic revolution: IPhone hip, but sound is still uninspiring

Here's one thing the iPhone can't do: spin vinyl.

And while that mobile phone looks like Apple Inc.'s most interesting iPod to date, it will suffer from an ailment that plagues every digital music player — uninspiring sound.

So, in one of the more interesting comebacks in today's world of compressed music files and fingernail-size speakers jammed into your ears, the format of choice during the Reagan administration has become popular again, to a point, for a simple reason: vinyl sounds better.

More specifically, vinyl represents a listening experience. You sit on an easy chair or a comfy couch between two speakers the size of moving boxes, drop the needle on the record and just listen. While listening, you admire the original artwork on the cover, follow along with lyrics printed on the album's sleeve or laugh at the big hair in the compilation of concert pictures decorating the inside gatefold.

That's why millions of people, myself included, became music fans.

Then I got a job, a multidisc CD player and never again thought of getting up every 20 minutes to flip an album over. Today, I could drive from Hollywood, Fla., to Homer, Alaska, listening to my iPod and never hear the same song twice.

Yet that iPod, despite the wonderfully convenient storage that holds a lifetime of shifting musical tastes, has never sounded as rich as the music of my youth. And it never will because in order to fit 20,000 songs on a device smaller than a cigarette pack, compromises were made.

Notably, the song files are severely compressed. Try this test and you will hear what I'm saying: Play a favorite CD on any player — a home system, a portable CD player, your car — then play the same music on an iPod amplified through the same speakers. The iPod will sound like AM radio by comparison.

Yes, Apple's iTunes store now sells some songs at a higher quality, for more money, and you could always load music from a CD onto an iPod at a higher bit rate — bigger file, better quality. Some people do this, but it minimizes the iPod's greatest attribute, storage. Also, I do believe higher-quality headphones make a difference.

Ever since the advent of the compact disc, audiophiles have said vinyl records, with their analog technology, provide warmer, more fulfilling sound. Frankly, to my ear, there wasn't a big enough difference in sound quality to abandon the convenience of the CD.