Both Elisabeth (Podcasting News publisher) and I are Macheads and iPod freaks. We’re iPhone early adopters and have been advocating podcasting and new media platforms for music for years.

But, we’ve still got a vinyl music collection around, a couple of turntables and a little parallel universe of analog music that we still love.

So, country music artist Shelby Lynne’s essay on Vinyl vs iPod over at Huffington Post rings a chord:

I grew up listening to….vinyl. I have discovered that having a vinyl collection is so much cooler than having an iPod. Now, I have an iPod and I admit they are genius especially for travel and convenience. But they aren‚Äôt really any fun.

I don’t call up my friends and say “Hey why don’t y’all come over and bring your computers and let’s have a party”? Hell no! I say bring pot, wine and vinyl.

That’s sexy. It’s really a great excuse to get together and listen to music. Everybody takes a turn looking through the collection and it’s interesting to see what each person plays. The vinyl way is just me. I think if if we all listen to more music together, it really doesn’t matter how we do it.

Music will save us all just like it always has. We feed our souls with it. Vinyl just creates a little more discussion for us. You get to look at the covers, the liner notes, sometimes the lyrics are included. Plus you can roll a doobie on it. That’s hard on an iPod.

I‚Äôm not much of a country music fan, but you can‚Äôt argue with the fact that there’s a wonderful tactile sense to vinyl that hasn’t been duplicated in the world of digital music, and that hasn’t been replaced, either.