Record Store Day

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

100% agreed. I was DELIGHTED to see the back of bloody LPs (tho I was lucky - I started collecting after the LP era, only ever had a dozen or so while at school)

Moi aussi. Except that I had accumulated a few hundred LPs.

I was beginning to lose patience in the early 80s, with the long wait for CDs. When they arrived in the shops, I bought my first CD (and a player) on Day One, and have never looked back. That first disc still plays flawlessly, as it did on that first occasion, when I was waiting for the snap-crackle-pop which never came.

[umslopogaas]

Concerning the £300 Martzy re-issue, I have a 2006 Rare Classical Record (that's LP record) Price Guide. It suggests the three mono LPs of Martzy playing Bach on the first label should sell for £3500, over a thousand quid each. I've only ever seen one sell on ebay and it went for £380 five years ago: much less than the guide indicates, but it may not have been in good nick.

I can see no point at all in paying £300 for an LP re-issue. The sound on the CD re-issue will be just as good, if not better, and the LP re-issue is most unlikely ever to become a collectors' item, because collectors want the originals. If I had three hundred quid to spare to spend on an LP, I'd save my pennies while I went hunting for the originals. Given their scarcity, I'll probably be saving my pennies for a very long time.

Incidentally, Martzy made a couple of other mono LPs, of Schubert, and the guide suggests they will cost £500 each. The lady must either be a very special violinist, or, judging by the rarity of her recordings, such a poor one that no-one bought her discs. But I suspect that the real reason these discs cost a fortune is that they sold in very small numbers. Solo violin music is quite an esoteric taste, and these discs were expensive at a time when people didnt have so much money as they do now. Given that the few that did sell then had to endure the often badly adjusted equipment that they were played on, it is not surprising that there are very few around today.

[Alain Maréchal]

Nostalgia humbug and bunkum.

I was wondering, Caliban, if you have replaced all those dangerously flammable grubby unhygienic and space-eating books with e-readers, or with newer editions?

I was considering a purchase of that Decca mono bumper box, but having realised that I have so many on vinyl, I played a few last night, and have decided to save my money. Anybody whose LPs have clicks and scratches has not been looking after them carefully.

[Nick Armstrong]

I was wondering, Caliban, if you have replaced all those dangerously flammable grubby unhygienic and space-eating books with e-readers, or with newer editions?

Substantial reductions were indeed made last summer. That said, I don't accept there's any sort of absolute parallel between LPs and books!

Anybody whose LPs have clicks and scratches has not been looking after them carefully.

Like the 'review copies' receiving their second playing on the radio this morning, with snap, crackle and pop in abundance?

[Bert Coules]

Anybody whose LPs have clicks and scratches has not been looking after them carefully.

Nonsense. When I bought the Decca Götterdämmerung I took it back, first to the shop and latterly to Decca's London HQ, three times because the surface noise was completely unacceptable. I'd sampled a single short passage on each disc and had had no opportunity to "look after" the set, carefully or otherwise.

Bert

[Alain Maréchal]

Obviously anything purchased "not fit for the purpose" should have been replaced immediately, but I recall very few. Everything else has been carefully looked after.

[Bert Coules]

Perhaps your definition of what is acceptable is not the same as mine. I never did end up with a vinyl set of that release that I considered anywhere near perfect.

Bert

[doversoul1]

So what was this slot about? Should I have realised that the definition of the word ‘store’ has changed? Or was this just another listener interaction? I can’t say I am terribly interested in what CDs complete strangers would buy.

[visualnickmos]

........That first disc still plays flawlessly, as it did on that first occasion, when I was waiting for the snap-crackle-pop which never came.

Pretty much my story, too.......

and wasn't that a fabulously enjoyable wait! The sheer novelty of quiet bits that actually were quiet..... apart from perhaps the odd shuffle of someone's foot, or a hint of a door closing somewhere just within mic range..... but no hissing, crackling, popping, or even the odd thwack..... LOVE cds....

[MickyD]

Pretty much my story, too.......

and wasn't that a fabulously enjoyable wait! The sheer novelty of quiet bits that actually were quiet..... apart from perhaps the odd shuffle of someone's foot, or a hint of a door closing somewhere just within mic range..... but no hissing, crackling, popping, or even the odd thwack..... LOVE cds....

Me too...how wonderful it was to banish those endless days of disappointment of returning home to play a new LP, only to find clicks, pops etc on its first playing...then the dismal business of having to lug them immediately back to the shop for a replacement, which could quite probably have the same problem.

[Pianoman]

That's why ventures like Britannia Music or the Squires Gate Library must have welcomed CD like the second coming - I had to return virtually every other LP to those outfits as unplayable, and even when I kept the odd one that seemed ok, it later miraculously developed a click in the the most annoying places as if by magic..

[umslopogaas]

I've collected LPs for many years and while I regularly buy CDs and completely agree they are a superior medium - almost impossible to damage and you can play them in the car, to name but two reasons - I would come to the defence of the LP. Providing it is undamaged, by scratches or tracking distortion, and if it has been cleaned on a Monks cleaning machine or similar, it provides what to my ears is a perfectly acceptable sound, which in its later, digital years was indistinguishable from CDs except for the inevitable odd pop and crackle.

The main problem with LPs these days is that it is very hard to find worthwhile items in good nick, and when you do you often have to pay a lot for them. I'm not in the thousand pounds a disc Martzy league mentioned earlier, but I have been known to pay fifty quid for a nice SAX Columbia. Fortunately for my bank balance, fifty quid Columbias dont turn up very often.

Re. surface noise, I was once told that the 1970s oil crisis had a lot to do with it. Up till then, LPs were made of pure vinyl, which is virtually silent. Then in the oil crisis the price of vinyl shot up, and to keep the price stable the companies started diluting it with filler. I dont know what the filler was, but it is easy to imagine that it made the surfaces noisier. I can vouch for the fact that, if you can find good copies, nineteen fifties and sixties LPs have very quiet surfaces. If you dont agree, yours may need a clean: a couple of scrubs on a Monks machine can make a remarkable difference (two may be needed, sometimes one just makes things worse, because it dislodges the dirt but doesnt remove it).

[Bert Coules]

Umslopogaas, most of my purchases of new LPs date from the sixties and later, but the ones I've acquired secondhand and which were released in earlier eras certainly bear out what you say. The disks got thinner too, over the years (though they'd always varied in that respect from manufacturer to manufacturer), which surely also affected the sound.

Bert

[Barbirollians]

I have always felt that the benefits of vinyl were much more apparent in popular music and jazz where the snap crackle and pop is less relevant and the ambience more .

[umslopogaas]

They certainly did get thinner in the late sixties and seventies, which made them much more prone to warping, another reason why LPs got a bad reputation at that time.