I'm doing five hours (three shows) every weekend on a local college station, KNWT 89.1 FM Cody, Wyoming. The station is fairly new, having been on the air just over a year. When the equipment was purchased for the station, turntables were ruled out for a couple reasons:
-Space required
-Most of today's college students have no experience with vinyl or would be inclined to play it
Over 95% of the music I play on my shows is derived from my vinyl and shellac collection. The rest is from CD, Cassette, or R2R tape. I do not use MP3, although that is routine procedure for most of the other considerably younger DJs.
I transfer records and tapes to WAV files at 44.1/16 resolution and then assemble shows at my home studio. All voiceovers are done with a RODE NT-1 microphone. I save the shows as large WAV files and they're loaded onto the radio station's PC, and then scheduled to play automatically at the scheduled time. That is the only way I could manage to do three shows every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and still have a normal home life.
So although I'm not actually 'spinning vinyl' live on the radio, my shows definitely have the sound and feel of it. A few dogmatic anti-digital 'purists' might disagree, but to my ears it's nearly impossible to distinguish a well done vinyl-to-digital-transfer from actual playback.
The biggest difference I hear in vinyl versus CD/digital is due to terrible compression of music in recent years in the name of the "loudness wars." Some of the CDs I own are awful sounding 'brick-walls-of-sound' lacking the dynamic range and listenability of a well done recording on vinyl. I've had to just give up on using some of the music in my collection for this reason, thus a greater reliance on vinyl in my shows.
