Vinyl records make a return

I don't know ... I think it would be kind of awesome to own only one record and have it be a 180 gram edition of Velvet Underground and Nico and only listen to it on a shitty portable with built-in speakers.

damn, that guy has some awesome records. I guess he probably paid serious money for all of that though. funny because I sort of snobbily don't consider that serious cratedigging, but whatever.

i don't really think there's a way in which Egon can't be considered a serious crate-digger. read the notes to stones throw's sixteen corners compilation, for starters.

yeah, I didn't read the whole thing. at first it sounded like dealers just bring him records they know he'll like but now I see I misread.

Nostalgia-->audiophilia--->received nostalgia.

its hard to avoid SOME level of nostalgia if you are looking at and using something that is 50 or 60 years old. or even 40 or 30 years old. but for me, the thrill is playing that old thing and hearing new sounds in the present. its very much a now thing for me. some people definitely try and evoke the past and that's their primary relationship with old things. or they want to be reminded of the past. their own or an earlier past. there are always going to be people who prize things based on age. and who will insist, sometimes ignorantly, that the old or the new is the best. we should just avoid those people altogether. my own bias toward analog and tape and records and older recording techniques, older microphones(!), older studios, and older mixing boards is based on the variety of religious experience i have witnessed over the years. i can play 50 records (or a hundred or a thousand) and they can all sound wildly different! how they were recorded, how they were pressed, when and where they were recorded, what the room was like, what gear was used, what mics, etc, etc, and on and on forever all play a part in why they sound so different. granted, i've got history on my side. over a hundred years of recordings. but out of every 100 CDs i play, i might hear one or two that are genuinely striking. sound-wise. and they are usually the ones that were worked on endlessly and hundreds of hours of time and effort went in to making them. whereas some of the greatest records i've ever heard, again sonically, were made in a couple of hours on the cheap. there is a digital uniformity that my chaotic brain rebels against. actual noises that you hear in real life are not free of distortion or separated from other ambient noises/sounds. you don't hear things in a vacuum. and i guess i've never really understood people who wanted to divorce musical sounds from the ambient hum that is all around us. one of the great joys of listening to old records for me is actually hearing the room that the music is being played in. the reverberations. the echo. 78s and 50's-era records are good for this. old jazz. it increases my feeling of intimacy with the music and makes me feel closer to the people playing it. and its a different feeling completely than the feeling i get listening to the clear reallyreallyclose fidelity of a digital recording. which can often be lysergic in its closeness. you can hear someone's uvula flapping in the breeze. i can see why people dig that though. tech-wise. geek-wise. that ultrahuman clearness. like HD or blu-ray. i appreciate it more when i'm listening to sound artists or electro-acoustic music. very trippy. can be a little jarring if its just some acoustic folk record and i'm sitting inside someone's guitar or throat. i appreciate a little distancing. and that's what i think people mean by warmness when they talk about records. voices have more glow on tape? i dunno. its certainly possible to make a pretty accurate recording of the human voice on tape. maybe its like the difference between old tube televisions and new flat screens. when everyone had tubes, you would walk down the street at night and little electric fireplaces beamed out of windows. the windows would actually glow. you could see what people were watching. you could hear the sound outside a window loud and clear. with flatscreens the flatness is supreme. you don't get the glow. you can walk by a hundred of them and never have your eye drawn to the picture. they are easy to ignore and hide. same with digital muzak and radio. very easy to tune out. the uniform levels don't engage the ear. nothing leaps out. having said all that, i absolutely LOVE the possibilities within the world of electronic/dance/rap and digital sound. and that, to me, is the greatest stuff to listen to on cd. that tooclose and ultra-clear vocal sound you can get with a computer is stunning when applied to rap. talk about hard to ignore and jarring and visceral. when i take off a record and put on a rap cd its like a bomb has gone off. and that's a good thing. and i've already talked a lot about my undying love for those Kompakt CDs that ILM made me buy years ago. they IMMEDIATELY draw you in. they are definitely a gold standard for me. no doubt anyone here could name a dozen other labels who have achieved similar results and created amazing sound over the last 20 years. warp, mego, etc. whoever. i've also mentioned that when i put a kompakt cd on in the store almost everyone without exception who walks in the store asks me what i'm playing. they quickly become addicted. because it sounds so undeniably good! and cool! and it IS sound that leaps out at you and is 3D in an amazing textural way. so the uses (and sci-fi potential) for digi sound are endless. and i'm gonna guess that in 20 years we won't know what hit us. binaural blu-ray friggin' death ray ridiculousness, i'm guessing. but whatever comes will always be - it can't help but be - DIFFERENT from magnetic tape and all manner of electrical recordings of the distant past. there's something for everyone. my own nostalgic defense is this: bad digital recordings are often just that, bad. and sometimes, to me, unlistenable. bad analog recordings, or cheap or amateurish recordings, often have SOME sort of charming or idiosyncratic quality that can make them either endearing in their badness (muffed use of fx or just dementedly poor placement of microphones) or even addictively listenable from a sound collector/lover perspective (nasty guitar distortion, epic echo abuse, etc.). and when analog recordings on vinyl are great - and arguably they reached their height all the way back in the 1950's - i think they rival any art or art form that the 20th century had to offer.

blood hell.
thats a lot of words.

I'm looking forward to reading that post

Speaking Of Old Vinyl Records, Here's My Father's Day Playlist For Tomorrow

Right on, Scott. My theory about why I can't listen to the Magic Transistor site for more than an hour at a time: it's all direct from vinyl. Yes, I'm a vinyl wuss. Such rich, aromatic, twilight tides So far I'm hooked on the far left channel: early 60s-to-early 70s, European and American r&b and related (incl Northern Soul and garageness) with some rock (Love's or Arthur Lee's "Everybody's Gotta Live"["because everybody's gotta die"]). Anyway that's the orientation when I've approached. Elsewhere on there, we get Krautrock, UK L.Cohen rivals, lots more from them days.

i'm not saying you can't go too far though...

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/942564_10151663506842165_922860171_n.jpg

i don't have a link to the article, but a friend mentioned that the queens album that hit #1 last week had something like 20% of its sales through vinyl, which seems like a large portion.

Yeah, but these days you only need to sell like 75 records to hit #1.

i was working at their label for two weeks when the queens of the stone age record shipped and can verify shipping TONS of vinyl. also note, however, that there are THREE DIFFERENT VINYL FORMATS, and many people bought at least two of them. i don't have any numbers in front of me. but if there had been only one format and no reason to buy two or three copies, i imagine the percentage would be, i dunno, more like 15%?

(ballpark estimate there.)

yeah, was gonna say, they went some lengths to make the vinyl for that desirable.

lol
Is It Ok to Buy Records at Urban Outfitters?

an Instagram contest where users submitted pictures of Sub Pop-themed temporary tattoos.

local t.v. news guy came in and said he wanted to do a story in my store about turntables and vinyl. i told him to go away.

Did you explain to him why at all?

not really. i did say that i wasn't ready. but that was just off the top of my head. but not far from the truth. i'm tired and i look like crap and my store - in my eyes anyway - looks terrible. probably looks fine to other people. he really didn't want to leave. he kept saying i'd be doing him a big favor. what i wanted to say and didn't say was that he would have done me a big favor by calling a day or two beforehand and letting me get ready and then maybe i would have. but i'm just cranky really. and i hate t.v. news.

plus he was just a doofus with one of those haircuts. i wanted him out.

"One local proprietor refused to speak with us, and angrily told us to leave his store."

he asked if he could film the OUTSIDE of the store and i said he could do whatever he wanted on the street. haha! i'm easing into my old crank role quite nicely on main street in greenfield.

don't tell maria about this though. she'd kill me. but she's out of town. otherwise i would have let her do it. she's a camera hog.

ppl with cameras who think they can do whatever they want whenever they want = pet peeve

was he just on the street for another story that fell through and looking for a replacement bit? so weird they didn't call first.

having dealt with obnoxious tv news anchors in the past, I feel yr pain scott

i told him to go to northampton or amherst and he said it had to be in this county for some reason. a real locavore. that's why i need maria here. she's my buffer. she talks to the people who don't want to buy records. and sometimes they outnumber the people who want to buy records in a day.

she talks to all the incredulous baby boomers. i put my FAQ up by the door so that i don't have to talk to them, but they never read it.

New Protomartyr and Heliotropes albums both seem to be available only digitally and on vinyl.

I love that FAQ!

Did he say what the angle of the story was? Was it the usual "Remember these? Kids're buyin' 'em!" thing?

thanks. i tried to be clear and concise and kinda funny but not rude or anything with the FAQ. i wasn't rude to the t.v. guy either. i said no thank you like 50 times.

no, no angle. just mentioned turntables and vinyl. i think someone just sent him out to get a story on it. he was young.

Darn, I'd love to see the FAQ!

pretty sure that FAQ has been posted here before - seem to recall having several chuckles about it.

http://skotrok.blogspot.com/2012/05/john-doe-jr-used-records-books-faq.html

"New Protomartyr and Heliotropes albums both seem to be available only digitally and on vinyl."

I wanted to do this with my album but was talked into doing CDs by the label. But I have a feeling that own't be the case for the next one. We are doing 250 vinyl copies though. It was expensive but it was worth it judging by the test pressings.

"New Protomartyr and Heliotropes albums both seem to be available only digitally and on vinyl."

dance music to thread

http://www.reddit.com/r/Vinyl

How does this place make you feel?

Some thread titles:

- Picked up a new record [Youth Lagoon] this past weekend. What do you guys think?

- every day i wake up and ask myself why isn't the mario 64 soundtrack pressed onto vinyl

- Vinyl Is a Music Choice: The Right One (http://www.thestreet.com/story/12543788/1/vinyl-is-a-music-choice-the-right-one.html)

- Anyone else pumped for record store day?

what's the vegas over/under on how many more years we'll keep reading this same story over and over: 4? 5?

― M@tt He1ges0n, Monday, August 18, 2008 8:27 AM (5 years ago)

Responding to that article?

tbf, vinyl is making an extraordinarily incremental and prolonged comeback

nah just though it was appropriate xp

like it's not just like vinyl is "back" again every few years, it's a little bit more "back" every few years.

agreed.

when I was buying records at a newer all-vinyl store in VA last week the owner told me that somebody comes in at least once a day asking where they can buy turntables. Two people did exactly that in the 30 minutes I was browsing.

I heard Bed Bath Beyond has a pretty rad one for like 40 bucks.

Picked up the Lorde album on vinyl at a vvv suburban megamall this week, admittedly only other vinyl they had ws that superdeluxe new Blue Lines, but still

reading about DACs and "computer audio" last weekend almost made me want to chuck it all and go 100% vinyl/cassette