New spin: collectors playing it again with vintage vinyl.

STEVE Alpern hit the mother lode when he paid $2,000 for a storage bin--even though he didn't know the exact contents.

Alpern, who owns Atomic Records in Burbank, takes that kind of gamble at estate and storage sales every week, and most often they don't pay off. But this time the bin turned out to have been owned by a man who had worked in a music store in the 1950s. It had more than 4,000 rare jazz records, in perfect condition no less.

"It's a treasure hunt," said Alpern, who has since sold every one of the records for $10 to $500. "It's more about searching than finding. Even if it's not your taste, (it) makes up for a year of agony of finding nothing."

It may be the age of CDs, portable iPods, satellite radio and online music, but at least one throwback to the age of scratchy, low-fidelity analog recordings is thriving: used record stores, also known as vintage vinyl shops.

Atomic Records is one of a dozen or so such stores in the Los Angeles area that manage to stay in business--the kind of shops that were highlighted in the 2000 film "High Fidelity." "It's like a disease," admitted Anthony Joseph, who already owns 10,000 mostly jazz records but was shopping recently for some more at the Record Collector in Hollywood.

Single-minded pursuit

Joseph is typical of the customers willing to drive for miles--or even fly to different countries--to rummage through dusty bins in search of hard-to-find records. An artist who happened to be visiting from London, Joseph says he seeks out vinyl records for their distinct sound, as well as the thrill of the chase.

Record shop owners classify vinyl hounds into several categories: audio snobs who relish the distinct sound of vinyl records (they claim the quality is superior to CDs); collectors who like the cover artwork; other collectors who want recordings of an artist's quintessential performances; and DJs who want to sample songs for their gigs.

Of particular interest are 1950's- and 60's-era jazz recordings by independent labels that often just pressed a few thousand copies of any recording.

The value of the records is set primarily by their rarity. A used but widely available recording of Thelonious Monk may go for as little as $10, while the psychedelic soundtrack of the 1960s cult classic movie "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda as a space nymph, might go for $30 to $50.

Then there are the really rare finds, such as a Blue Note Records recording of 1950s jazz great Hank Mobley, or a 1950 recording of Romanian violinist Georges Enesco playing a series of Bach Sonatas. Albums like those can cost $5,000 or more.

"With super-rare records, the sound quality or the music taste becomes irrelevant," said Record Collector owner Sandy Chase.

The Holy Grail of vintage albums is the "Butcher" record, a version of the Beatles' "Yesterday and Today" released in the U.S. with a plain paper cover because of its controversial cover art. One copy was auctioned online for $38,000.

Finding score music

To be sure, digital music dwarfs vinyl in volume and value. Some 767 million CDs worth $11.4 billion were shipped to U.S. retailers in 2004, up about 2 percent from the prior year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Meanwhile, just 1.3 million LPs were shipped last year, a 10-year low, and 12 percent lower than in 2003.

But those figures belie the trade in used or vintage records, with serious collectors buying five thousand records at a time if they take a liking to an estate lot or other acquisition.

Chase opened his shop in 1974 with the 6,000 records he collected professionally as a concert violinist. Much of his business comes from archivists, film music composers and record label representatives looking for older music to re-release on CD.

He says he helped Francis Ford Coppola find music for the score of his film "Raging Bull" and counts among his customers over the years Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson--Chase helped them both find old R&B records.

He said his biggest customer was the legendary method acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who Chase assisted in amassing a private collection of at least 50,000 jazz and classical recordings.

Chase determines the price of an album on the spot, since he says their values shift depending on rarity and desirability--and besides, price stickers damage the covers. "The adhesive is acid-based and it tears up the covers and destroys the net worth," he said.

Chase has done well enough over the past 30 years to purchase the building he moved into in 1999, doubling the size of his shop to 3,400 square feet. He also has a warehouse with a quarter-million records. Chase buys more than he sells (he estimates his inventory to be worth $25 million), but notes that a rare record can often be sold at multiples of what he paid, especially after it's sat on his shelf for years.

"We have half a million records, and we incubate them, we hold onto them, and they only go up in value and sell them bit by bit," Chase said.

Consider Alpern's profits on his estate sale. He said he spent $2,000 and got 4,000 records, which he estimates he sold off for an average of $50 each. That would gross $200,000, or 100 times what he paid for it.

Record collecting thrives in L.A. because so much of the music industry has been based here, and the remnants of record collections and inventories trickle down to restock the vintage shops, said Jim Philbrook, editor and publisher of Record Convention News.

Both Alpern and Chase attribute the interest in part to a Japanese thirst for Americana, including old jazz, country and rock music. The stores have frequent visits from music store owners from Japan buying hundreds or thousands of records at a time.

"The value of a lot of records is driven up by Japanese collectors," said Alpern, who co-founded Atomic with his brother Rick and a partner nine years ago. "It determines in part which records we'll take in and which we'll reject."

But what's really at play is passion. Chase refuses to carry CDs, believing they are inferior to old-fashioned vinyl, which he maintains can carry an unlimited amount of harmonic information. "CDs are like the antichrist to me," he said.