“WE’RE analogue human beings.

“Every instrument we play is analogue, every note we sing is analogue and the sound that comes out of the speakers is analogue.”

Get Sean Tanner onto the subject of vinyl records, and the 28-year-old instantly becomes a mine of quotable quotes.

“You can burn a CD at home and you can make an MP3 at home, but the sound of a record is the only thing you can’t produce at home.

“It’s the sound first and foremost – nothing can compare to it.

“I love the feel and smell of a record, the artwork on the cover and the confidence it takes to put an album on. There’s no skipping tracks – I think something has been lost with shuffles and random.

“I love the ceremony of playing a record – if you don’t treat a record right, it’s ruined. “They’re historic and they hold their value because they’re historic – they’re a little bit of the moment when they were recorded.”

Swindon went for a long, long time without a specialist vinyl record shop, but all that changed on Saturday at noon, when Sean opened a new business called Love Vinyl in the tented market.

Classics of genres ranging from hip-hop to funk, from electronica to soul and from rock to blues await rediscovery for prices starting at a couple of pounds and rising to... well, rather more than that in the case some of the rarest items.

For the completist there are special editions, coloured vinyl, alternate covers and promotional items, and each can be not only examined but also played on the in-house deck before purchase. Sean’s only rule about stock is that it should be good enough for him to be happy to play it for all to hear.

Love Vinyl also sells tickets for gigs at the Vic in Old Town, and there are plans to sell new vinyl by bands from the local area and beyond.

The venture comes at a time when vinyl, having been written off by industry commentators more than 20 years ago, is in the midst of a resurgence.

An increasing numbers of music lovers buy MP3s for their portable players and vinyl for their home systems. Suggest today that cds, once thought to be the killers of vinyl, will in fact end up being killed by it, and few people in the know will disagree.

Yes, digital sound sometimes seems more detailed. This is readily apparent to anybody who’s heard, for example, John Lennon’s weary expletive on a CD or MP3 of Hey Jude, or a person being shushed for scraping their chair on the studio floor during the long piano note at the end of A Day in the Life.

Vinyl fans, however, say this detail comes at the expense of warmth, that chopping art into a series of ones and zeroes causes its humanity to bleed away.

This is all good news for bands and labels putting out vinyl – and also good news for people like Sean, who track down the best of the old stuff and find new homes for it. Sean used to work in insurance, but global economic belt tightening left him in need of another way to make a living.

As a lifelong lover of music on vinyl, as well as having contacts among hard-core record collectors and dealers, it didn’t take him long to decide on his next move.

“I’ve been a fan of records for a long time,” he said, “and I think I’m reasonably knowledgeable about them.

“I saw that the tented market was offering fantastic deals and decided it was worth a punt.

I checked out wholesalers, called in favours from family and friends, and so far it’s been fantastic.

“Swindon was desperately lacking a vinyl store. There are lots of collectors here and some of them are really serious – people with ten, twenty or thirty thousand records.

The opening day on Saturday was a real success. We had live music from Good Things Happen in Bad Towns and they were fantastic.”

The store will be open from Monday to Saturday 9.30am-5.30pm.

Sean can be reached at lovevinyl@yahoo.co.uk.