COLORED VINYL: CLASSIC OR DUD

i like colored vinyl, it's fun

i see colonel poo already offered up the same opinion so there you have it, scientifically proven.

recently discovered that The Police - Synchronicity is on subtle colored vinyl, you have to hold it up to a light to tell the diff. I have purple and aquamarine copies.

thats more than a coincidence

If colored vinyl makes the bad sound, maybe this is why I never got into Spacemen 3.

never sure what side to take in the colored vinyl vs supposedly pure black debate. black is dyed too, right? if the vinyl quality and mastering are good, and if the pressing plant knows what it's doing, colored vinyl can sound great - just as good as black or clear or whatever. if not, then not. i get the impression that, for a long time, colored vinyl was seen and often pressed as a novelty and thus not always produced to terribly high standards. as a result, it got a rep for being cruddy that still persists, valid or not.

white vinyl pressings from less quality-obsessed companies do often seem to be noisy as hell, but there's all kinds of shitty-sounding records out there nowadays, so...

yeah in all honesty if it's virgin vinyl and mastered/pressed well the noise difference will be minimal to none

although the noisiest record i have is a white vinyl one - john dowie's 'it's hard to be an egg' - makes a flexi sound like mfsl

hmm i'm both contradicting and repeating myself in one post, i'll just get me record bag & go

the police's music is of such poor quality that recording any of their music to black vinyl will tinge it slightly purple or aquamarine

a bunch of late 80s & 90s records, from the tail end of the major label vinyl era, are pressed on ridiculously thin wax, like super floppy and quasi-translucent. especially "nice price" or foreign pressings. if you hold them up to the light they look grey, brown or purplish. i mean, that's my guess. or maybe they were just getting super subtle with the colored vinyl thing at that point.

love this Liars 10". red with black shards.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/102/298458877_f0a0bcfdba.jpg

mine doesn't have as much white in it

"george" by beyond the wizards sleeve is kinda tie-dyed looking

white and clear are the biggest bitch to cue up and find songs

^DJ Pro-tip

the only two coloured vinyl i have (boris and merzbow "rock dream" purple vinyl and andrew wk "close calls with brick walls" variety of different colours iirc) sound terrible.

i have friends that are VERY anti-colored vinyl because the sound quality is supposedly super-duper bad.

afaik "colored vinyl sounds bad" is received-wisdom bs - the things that matter in the pressing of vinyl are the quality of the master and the thickness of the vinyl. thicker is better. if anybody can cite any empirical data about why the color of the vinyl would make any difference at all, that'd be very interesting, but I've talked to multiple mastering dudes about this q (& anybody who's into music: treat yourself sometime to a mastering session at a reputable mastering house, there is an incredible amount of srsly cool stuff to learn from these dudes, they are like wise soothsayer-scientist dudes in my experience) and they all say it shouldn't make a difference at all what color the vinyl has been dyed. the idea that black vinyl ought to sound better, especially, is some confirmation-bias nonsense

some interesting stuff (and some nonsense imo) on this gearslutz thread

thickness is a weird thing, too, because the primary advantage to thickness, as i understand it, is that it prevents warpage, which is all to the good. some people say that it also allows the grooves to be cut deeper, and that this has an effect on the sound, but i dunno. i've had it on good authority that this is horseshit, that the cuts in vinyl even at their deepest are so shallow as to make this a non-issue. not an expert, so i can't say. personally, i've noticed that relatively thin records from the 70s and 80s (again, the end of the major label vinyl era) often sound GREAT, and i suspect that this is because they were being made in state-of-the art facilities by well-paid old-school pros to extremely high standards. i mean, until recently, when it's become fashionable, even high-end audiophile pressings didn't tend to be super thick.

and, yeah, cool to read the pro talk from those pressing plant folks on the gearslutz thread

DEEP GROOVE MONO LEXINGTON AVE

clear vinyl ime is flimsier which is likely why it sounds worse.

huh... waited 5 months for something to get sent to me. coloured vinyl. Sounds like ass