On a recent night, strewn across my living room carpet was an array of audio parts of a rather historic nature: a platter, a drive belt, a tone arm and cartridge, a counterweight, and an anti-skating weight. As I surveyed the spread, slightly daunted, I wondered whether this is how it might have felt to enter a blacksmith’s workshop, or perhaps the chambers of an ancient alchemist.

I was, it’s true, assembling a newly acquired turntable, and savoring the ironies, in 2015, of the entire exercise. A box of old LPs, retrieved from an unholy corner of my basement, sat nearby. Also nearby was a Mac that I have sedulously loaded over the years with many gigabytes of digital music. Was it me, or did the computer’s sleep light seem to be pulsing above the entire scene with a vague air of suspicion?

• Quality Canadian Record Pressing 12-inch black vinyl record pressing

Not to worry, as the disclaimer should read: No aluminum unibodies would be harmed in this experiment. But it was nonetheless a thrill to be hooking up a turntable once more — and for reasons beyond nostalgia for albums past. In fact, vinyl LPs — that supposedly rickety sound technology of yore — have for the last several years been declining to accept the verdict on their own obsolescence.

Instead, they have made an improbable return in a wide array of pop genres. And now, finally, this trend is starting to arrive on classical shores. For the first time in decades, one of the major classical labels has begun pressing single albums again on vinyl, both new releases and, mostly, reissues from its back catalog. Others appear to be testing the waters. But there’s no mistaking it: Classical vinyl is new again.

Let’s take a moment to allow our iOS-addled brains to register this strange fact. Wasn’t history supposed to be heading in the other direction? Stores devoted to CDs — the technology that was supposed to supersede vinyl — have themselves all but vanished from the urban landscape. Even digital downloads are being edged out by cloud-based streaming services such as Spotify, with the fantasy they purvey of infinite choice. (Jorge Luis Borges, by the way, came to the idea a long time ago, and called it “The Library of Babel.”)