Covet: Spin Me Right 'Round

Photo by Todd Dionne

When Paul Ha, the new director of MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, relocated from St. Louis to a small Cambridge condo, he had to downsize his record collection, keeping just a few hundred LPs for their aesthetic value. “The artwork on a record—as opposed to a CD—is so vastly superior,” he says. It wasn’t the first time he’d been forced to lighten his load. When he moved from New York to take a job at the Yale Art Gallery in 2001, he gave away about 1,500 albums. Ideally, Ha would love to spin his remaining vinyl on a vintage Technics SL-1200 ($450, available at Guitar Center)—not an audiophile turntable, he says, but a “workhorse that has been a standby for music lovers for the past 40 years.”