COLORED VINYL: CLASSIC OR DUD

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