NEW YORK The far corner of the main floor of J&R Music looks familiar to anybody old enough to have scratched a record by accident. There are boxes full of albums by the likes of Miles Davis and the Beach Boys that could be in any musty attic in America.

But this is no music morgue; it is more like a life-support unit for a medium that has managed to avoid extinction, despite numerous predictions to the contrary. Bins above the boxes hold new records - freshly pressed albums of classic rock, as well as vinyl versions of the latest releases from new pop stars like Lady Gaga.

And with the resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable has been reborn.

J&R Music carries 21 different turntables at prices from $85 to $875. Some are traditional analog record players; others are designed to connect to computers for converting music to digital files.

Rachelle Friedman, co-owner of J&R, said the store is selling more vinyl and turntables than in at least a decade, fueled largely by growing demand from the iPod generation.

"It's all these kids that are really ramping up their vinyl collections," Friedman said. "New customers are discovering the quality of the sound. They're discovering liner notes and graphics."

In many instances, the vinyl album of today is thicker and sounds better than those of the 1960s and '70s.

Sales of vinyl have climbed steadily for several years, tromping on the notion that the rebound was just a fad. Through late November, more than 2.1 million vinyl records had been sold in 2009, an increase of more than 35 percent in a year, according to Nielsen Soundscan. That total, though it represents less than 1percent of all album sales, including CDs and digital downloads, is the highest for vinyl records in any year since Nielsen began tracking them in 1991.

Sales of CDs, meanwhile, have been falling fast, displaced by the downloading of digital files of songs from services like iTunes.

Not all of the turntables sold these days are designed to do anything so old-school as spinning actual records. A few models are still made for that purpose, many of them with cables that connect to computers so the music can be transferred to portable devices. But others simply allow users to simulate the manipulation of records while songs they are mixing are fed from iPods.

Interest from younger listeners is what convinced music industry executives that vinyl had staying power this time around. As more record labels added vinyl versions of new releases, the industry had to scramble to find places to press discs, said Mike Jbara, president and chief executive of the sales and distribution division of Warner Music Group.