An Online Museum of Recorded Sound · Est. Gallery of the Vinyl Century
The Groove Almanac is a collector’s field guide to the machines, the music formats, and the rooms where America listened — from Edison’s tinfoil experiment to the record store down the street.
1877 tinfoil 1948 the LP 1958 stereo 1978 the peak 2025 the revival
Enter the exhibit ↓Walk the collection in order, or use the era selector to jump straight to the decade you remember best. Every exhibit is an original long-read — researched, written, and curated for people who still believe an album is something you hold.
Showing all 9 exhibits in the permanent collection.
Exhibit No. 01
Before vinyl, before shellac, sound lived on spinning cylinders of wax — and a nation heard itself for the very first time.
Read the exhibit
Exhibit No. 02
Three minutes a side, a steel needle, and a beetle’s resin: the fragile discs that carried jazz, blues, and swing into the parlor.
Read the exhibit
Exhibit No. 03
In 1948 Columbia unveiled the LP. RCA answered with the 45. For two glorious, confusing years, America’s turntables went to war.
Read the exhibit
Exhibit No. 04
Vacuum tubes glowing in the den, speaker cabinets the size of iceboxes — how the 1950s hi-fi craze turned listening into a hobby.
Read the exhibit
Exhibit No. 05
It glowed like a cathedral window in the corner of every diner — and for a nickel, it made the whole room dance.
Read the exhibit
Exhibit No. 06
Two channels, one revelation. The stereo LP redrew the map of the living room and changed how records were made forever.
Read the exhibit
Exhibit No. 07
Listening booths, knowing clerks, and Saturday afternoons lost in the bins — inside the decade when the record store was the town square.
Read the exhibit
Exhibit No. 08
Written off in the CD age, vinyl just posted its 19th straight year of growth and its first billion-dollar year since 1983. Here’s why.
Read the exhibit
Exhibit No. 09
Handling, cleaning, storing, grading: a working collector’s guide to keeping fifty-year-old records playing for fifty more.
Read the exhibit
$1B+
U.S. vinyl revenue in 2025 — the format’s first billion-dollar year since 1983.
46.8M
LPs shipped in the U.S. in 2025, up 9.3% over the year before.
19
Consecutive years of U.S. vinyl growth — a streak older than the smartphone.
3×
Vinyl now earns roughly triple the revenue of the compact disc that once “replaced” it.
Source: Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 2025 year-end revenue report.
Ask any collector how it began and you’ll hear the same story with different furniture: a grandparent’s console in the basement, a garage-sale turntable, a shoebox of 45s that survived every move. The machines in these pages aren’t museum pieces because they’re old — they’re museum pieces because they still work, some of them a century on.
That’s the quiet argument of this whole almanac: recorded sound was built to last, and the people who loved it built well. Start with the first exhibit and walk the century in order — or skip straight to the revival to see how the story loops back on itself, like a locked groove at the end of a side.
