[Closed] buying vinyl records

Please buy Abraxas by Santana and She Sells Sanctuary 12 inch.

Those pressings were immense. The sound seemed to wrap itself around your ribcage.

Not new I know but, charity shops? I was in... Oxfam I think, in York the other day. They had shitloads.

I cannot comprehend why anyone would want to buy new vinyl in 2019 (or indeed since about 1983), but each to their own.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/24z326LLDrF8s584HfzN8Lm/6-ways-to-make-the-most-of-record-store-day-2019
From a record shop?

Discogs?

I do miss a Porky Primecut.

I get mine from Ben & Teddy at the most excellent Tasty Records in Altrincham

https://twitter.com/tasty_records

https://www.instagram.com/tastyrecords/

I cannot comprehend why anyone would want to buy new vinyl in 2019

Because you might like vinyl and might want to support the artist? Most of my new vinyl buying is from up and coming bands.

Get mine from Juno.co.uk, Amazon and Bandcamp.
Never had a damaged one turn up.

Buying new/used from any of the main UK dealers I've never had a problem with packaging.

Buying used from private sellers on eBay has been hit and miss in both description and packing - I steer clear of this now.

For overseas eBay I've used these a fair bit (and they sell through Amazon too)...
http://www.ebaystores.co.uk/all-your-music/Music-/_i.html?_fsub=2201956010&_sid=602541910&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322
...lead times can be from 1 to 3 weeks though.

As said private ebay sellers can be a bit hit and miss. But saying that I'm posting this whilst listening to Judy Collins "So early in Spring". Under a fiver posted and needed a really good clean but perfectly listenable 😎

Love that cartoon - the record player was a present, I'd not have bought one for myself but I'm giving it a go 🙂 I'm definitely not into all that 100quid for a directional cable BS

The reason I ask is that on the odd occasion that a new album comes out and I want to buy it (which isn't very often nowadays) I'll probably see if it's on vinyl, there's a new Raconteurs album coming out soon so I'll have a look for that.

I'll definitely be poking around the charity shops to see if there's anything decent (but looking at Oxfam online the prices aren't cheap, they are clearly doing their research on the values of stuff)

Charity shops and recycling centres were a goldmine 10 years ago, but that ship has long sailed.
143 dogeared copies of Mantovani and James last? Yes please.

Discogs is good for 2nd hand stuff - generally more trustworthy than ebay I've found, as most sellers are themselves vinyl collectors/fans.

Most charity shops have the same - Best of ABBA, The carpenters, Perry Como etc, usually in appalling condition.
I did find a Best of Bob Dylan a month or so ago in mint condition for 99p, so I bought that.

is it really 15/20quid per record for new releases?

Pretty much, but it can get more expensive for new vinyl when the sickness kicks in. I buy some new vinyl and tend to go for the more expensive colour option if available because.......well, no reason really, fear of missing out probably.

I tend to use Amazon, juno.co.uk but mostly Normans Records if i'm buying new stuff because I usually can't get into the big smoke that often.

Second hand, Oxfam and any charity shops that happen to have vinyl. Although be wary of Oxfam, I know it's a charity but some of their pricing on pretty bad pressings or questionable condition for easily found stuff online has been astronomical of late. Probably because of the resurgence in popularity.

Of course, the main online church of records has to be Discogs, I've got more than one bargain off their and always been impressed when someone states something as Mint. Everything i've gotten so far described as Mint has basically be New

Where are you and what do you like?

ok I genuinely did not know that tomorrow is record shop day !!!

Most of my LP purchases are second hand and preferably from shops - part of the fun is looking through racks of albums.

"I’m definitely not into all that 100quid for a directional cable BS " No you should be getting decent cable, not cheap rubbish 🙂

Took all mine to the tip yonks ago, Abraxas by Santana too.

Ziipy: I live in Manchester and I like all kinds of stuff but I have a sneaking suspicion that the vinyl won't fit into the rucksac I use for commuting on the bike so I will probably end up buying online. Kids are the wrong age to just drag into town for record shops.

ok I genuinely did not know that tomorrow is record shop day !!!

Literally the worst day of the year to buy records! Few years back it was good, now an excuse to sell overpriced crap re-releases on the premise that they have some kind of extra value as limited editions. It’s turned into a right rip off.

I'm with Cougar on this, vinyl these days is just a bandwagon powered by on trend cash. There is so much snobism about your hifi setup and what colour splatter version you have of your repress on 180g wax.
Yes I have vinyl from the 90s (some are actually worth £100+), because I hated cassettes, couldn't afford a CD player and happened to have a decent-ish Sony turntable and amp setup.
The ONLY thing I missed about vinyl are the covers and the sleeve inserts. Everything else is just a faff.

Few years back it was good, now an excuse to sell overpriced crap re-releases on the premise that they have some kind of extra value as limited editions. It’s turned into a right rip off.

Sadly I largely agree. However, I'll still be out tomorrow morning as there are a few interesting (to me at least) releases amongst all the repackaged, widely available for the last 40 years £10.00 7" singles!!

Because you might like vinyl

That's the bit I don't understand.

and might want to support the artist?

Don't they sell CDs?

http://hhv.de/ have regular sales and offers and lots of new,old,limited edition represses etc.Postage was the same for 1 or 10 iirc.
There's lots of US labels who put good stuff out but the postage and duty kill it.

and might want to support the artist?

Don’t they sell CDs?

A lot of the time, no. Particularly with singles & eps. Apparently it can often be cheaper and easier for DIY record labels & unsigned bands to have small runs (in the hundreds) of vinyl produced than the same numbers of cds.

Don’t they sell CDs?

I don't buy CDs! 🙂

Manchester. Try King Bee in Chorlton, Sifters in Didsbury, Reel Around the Fountain in Stretford Arndale or any of the City Center record shops such as Piccadilly Records and loads more in the NQ...

I mostly buy from 2 sources
1/ direct from the merch stall at gigs, especially at the smaller venues
2/ local independent record shops,

I've always had vinyl lying around simply because that was the format back then. I regret the cassette years as they're all ****ed now but the vinyl still plays, some of it very well. I've just put Fog On the Tyne on, it's about 30% heavier than later vinyls. it sounded dirty so I put it under the tap with some washing up liqiud and gave it brush. It's going round wet (which probably isn't a good idea on a nearly 50-year-old Garrard turntable) and sounds fine. Objectively it's poor compared with digital, there's a lack of very deep bass and the treble has a grain too - because that's how vinly sounds, there's a colour to it which I quite like and in guitar language: a degree of compression. It's not like having the band in the room.

Ian Dury now, not the best vinyl, I won't put the Pretenders first album on because that's always sounded super compressed and muddy, there were some pretty poor masters back then. The later vinyls were made from recycled discs which had tiny fragments of record label in the mix and were sometimes really noisy. The latest pressings aparently use virgin vinyl so should be better than the 80s rubbish.

In the posing stakes it does get a reaction "putain t'as le premier des Sex Pistols !" and so have how many million others? Much more fun is when someone comments on how good the sound is to plug in a Telecaster into a 100W Marshal half stack and play a few riffs (in a 4x4 living room). However good your Hi-Fi it's shit compared to the real thing, it's amusing seeing people screw their faces up and stick their fingers in their ears.

So Cougar is right.

Don't get me wrong,

I understand the appeal of vinyl at a certain level. It's a tangible thing, the artwork can be gorgeous and there's something very tactile and ritualistic about slipping the disc out of the dust cover, cleaning the playing surface, lining up the needle etc. I guess it's a bit like a Chinese tea ceremony. And it promotes listening to albums, an art form lost on the Spotify generation. I just think that any pretence that it "sounds better" is nostalgic self-delusion, you could recreate the effect of records simply by listening to a lossless audio file whilst frying chips and having someone Hoover upstairs.

I like Laserdiscs for the same reason, I have a small collection of them. There's just something nice about them, they're lovely things. But to argue that they're superior to DVDs even, let alone Blu-Ray or modern streaming, would be a nonsense.

I understand the appeal of vinyl at a certain level. It’s a tangible thing, the artwork can be gorgeous and there’s something very tactile and ritualistic about slipping the disc out of the dust cover, cleaning the playing surface, lining up the needle etc. I guess it’s a bit like a Chinese tea ceremony.

I spent several hours in dark rooms with people only playing vinyl, not one of them popped on the entire album 🤪

you may have heard of this new phenomenon

And tonight something equally epoch-making is taking place. See? They're applauding the DJ. Not the music, not the musician, not the creator, but the medium. This is it. The birth of rave culture. The beatification of the beat. The dance age. This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing. Welcome to Madchester.

I spent several hours in dark rooms with people only playing vinyl, not one of them popped on the entire album 🤪

I once went to an audiophile thing where they played DSotM in its entirety. Dark room, acoustically engineered room, several grand's worth of Naim turntable and amps and shizzle. It was almost but not quite as good as my CD player.

you may have heard of this new phenomenon

Yeah, I thought that was shite as well.

ah the classic STW doesn't get other people thing 😉

you should probably avoid 6 music tomorrow, they will be playing a lot of vinyl there and maybe talking about it too

Interesting that record shop day is all about vinyl, not just supporting the shop regardless of format. And yes vinyl is inferior to CD I've never doubted that : ) but the record player was a present so I'll get a few for giggles.right time to have a look on discogs

And bloody hell a Tele into a 100w plexi in a living room sounds like a nightmare ! And I own a Tele...

Which brings us nicely to valve amps. The reason guitarists like them is that the more you increase the voltage across the valves the dirtier and more coloured the sound becomes, so why do hi-fi buffs like them? It seems odd calling an amp with which the sound quality varies with gain "hi-fi" - low volume thin, high volume thick and warm, very high volume compressed and increasingly dirty. My first record player amp was valve and in the ignorance of youth I thought that it was the speaker that was breaking up when I turned it up so I tried a bigger speaker - which started breaking up at exactly the same volume because it was the valves getting dirty as the gain (volume knob) was increased.

The 100w plexi (which is rated at 100w clean but gives about 180w when cranked) is something of a dinosaur now there are Kempers but like vinyl it's a bit of a ritual. Cable it all up, turn on on standby and wait for a while for it to warm up, check guitar volume is off then standby off master up, step a couple of metres away from the amp, turn up guitar - there's that buzz that varies as you move around with the strings muted that tells you it's going to be very good and very loud.

and is it really 15/20quid per record for new releases?

And the rest - I’ve seen new pressings of old albums going for £35! I’ve just looked online, and found Pink Floyd’s ‘Relics’ album, 2018 release on 180gm vinyl, for £21.90. The irony in that is overwhelming, my original 1971 copy had a sticker on it, saying ‘Pay no more than 99p for this album!’

Ian Dury now, not the best vinyl, I won’t put the Pretenders first album on because that’s always sounded super compressed and muddy, there were some pretty poor masters back then. The later vinyls were made from recycled discs which had tiny fragments of record label in the mix and were sometimes really noisy. The latest pressings aparently use virgin vinyl so should be better than the 80s rubbish.

So very, very true! I had an old album, can’t remember what it was now, but there were little white flecks in it, and if you looked through a magnifying glass you could see they were bits of paper from the labels of recycled albums, the just ground up the whole thing, didn’t bother punching the label out. Of course, every time the stylus hit one of those bits, it’d jump, because there’s no groove, only paper.
When Peter Gabriel released his fourth solo album in 1982, I took four, possibly five copies back to the shop, because the background noise was intolerable, there were no quiet passages at all.
I bought the cd as soon as it came out and recorded it onto a chrome tape to listen at home, because the only CD player I had access to was in the hifi shop I worked in on Saturdays. Kept buying cd’s from then on, until I could afford one about a year later. By that time I had a reasonable collection to play on it.
Still got it, a Denon. Never bought another vinyl album, the quality was utter shite all through the 80’s and 90’s, it’s only in recent years the quality has improved.
Sleeper were selling their new album at their Bristol gig tonight, £20 for vinyl, £10 for cd, and £5 for cassette...
I bought the cd.

I have one record for it.

Well that's plenty, it's more kit you need to be buying not more vinyl. Going out and buying more records is as stupid as going ot riding instead of spending all your time working on the what bike bike next conundrum or researching upgrades.

Which brings us nicely to valve amps. The reason guitarists like them is that the more you increase the voltage across the valves the dirtier and more coloured the sound becomes, so why do hi-fi buffs like them?

They make a pleasant, warm sound (pleasant not accurate) when starting to go into distortion. Not the type you hear as a dirty sound (which with old classic guitar amps is often down to the valve rectified power supply not being able to provide adequate power to the power amp stage, rather than distortion create by the amp circuity), but a subtle compression of the transients.

So vinyl and valves make nice, warm, cuddly companions, but they aren't accurate. Depends what sort of sound you are after.

They make a pleasant, warm sound (pleasant not accurate) when starting to go into distortion.

Which will happen at just one sweet spot volume, a bit like riding a single speed, nearly always in the wrong gear. For most of my playing I use modelling guitar amps because they sound OK at any volume. Even on stage it's rare I play at volumes where the valve amps come into their sweet spot so use a 200e second-hand Fender Mustang which sounds fine at non-painful volumes.

Some amps have undersized power supplies but upmarket Fenders, Marshalls and Mesas have pefectly adequate transformers.

The power supply in my Fender Bassbreaker 45 head is enormous and definitely supplies more than enough clean power (the amp weighs 15kgs and tips heavily to the transformer end). The distortion comes from overdriving preamp valve gain and power amp valve gain. You can play with preamp and poweramp gain independantly so get a good feel for the colour and grain added by each set of valves for a given level of gain.

On the Marshall the different channels do have have circuits to add distortion but it's still the saturating preamp valves and power amp valves that gives the characteristic cranked sound.

Edit: the Bassbreaker 45 is pretty much a copy of a Marshall JTM 45 but with PCBs rather than hand-wired components which means it's about half the price. Ironic as the Marshal was pretty much a copy of Fender's Bassman.

Full explanation here, I've got teh same rig 😉

ah the classic STW doesn’t get other people thing 😉

That's reasonable though isn't it? I'm not ragging on anyone for liking it, I just don't really understand it beyond the reasons I listed.

you should probably avoid 6 music tomorrow, they will be playing a lot of vinyl there and maybe talking about it too

Thanks for the PSA.

I use Google Play when in my van or out and about and at home if it's just background music. Ive only recently started to pay for Play as both of my kids wanted to listen to their own music and that's the best value way for us. I'm lucky that there are still a lot of record shops in Edinburgh so I'll still buy cheap CD's. Artists I really love I'll buy on vinyl, if I'm feeling a bit skint I'll buy the CD. The streaming services pay so little to the artists I can't not buy a physical copy of the music I love, doesn't seem right not too. The point of all this is I can't really say one sounds better than the other, unless the vinyl is dirty or damaged. But if I put a record on I'm more likely to sit down and really take it in. After listening to the new John Prine album for a while I bought the vinyl version. On first listen I thought I could hear a lot more detail but listening to the digital version I think I just hadn't been paying enough attention.

On first listen I thought I could hear a lot more detail but listening to the digital version I think I just hadn’t been paying enough attention.

I wonder if perhaps that's a big part of it.

There's a world of difference between putting some music on and actually listening to music. Maybe records promote the latter?

I remember circa 2000, I'd just got a new amp and decided to try it out by sticking some headphones on, lying on the floor in a darkened room and playing a CD I'd listened to countless times. I heard a load of new stuff that I'd never noticed before. "Wow," I thought, "this amp is ace!" But since then I still hear the same bits on subsequent plays, I'd just never really listened before.