Shady scams and other silly business ideas to take advantage of earnest new vinyl collectors

You actually don't need to leave the house to get one now

#keepem sounds an awful lot like "eh, keep 'em, i certainly don't want 'em"

the 2nd death of vinyl cannot come soon enough

i even hate that word "vinyl" and all the fetishism it implies

they're just records, man. in whatever format.

saw a pro-VNYL dude getting aggro on instagram, saying they were great and fuck the hipsters and he'd never seen foghat in a dollar bin.

Hipsters ruin everything. Even things that are doomed from the get-go: Hipsters ruined it.

― austinato (Austin), Friday, May 15, 2015 1:15 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"I've never seen Andres Segovia or Foghat in a bargain bin in all my years, TBH."
I've never seen them in free boxes, my grandma's attic, a church flea market or in a goddamn dumpster either. But those are all very likely places to encounter these records.

someone needs to start working on a way to turn old linda ronstadt records into fuel.

i think that's what neil young's been working on all these years.

a glimpse into one of my two dollar rock sections. to be fair, when people buy stuff i tell them to take a couple of two dollar records on the way out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMC94VXDla0

(having said that, i sell a LOT of two dollar records...)

Scott what are some of the shitty digital-sourced reissues? I wasn't aware of this trend but I'm not surprised either I guess

lots of new vinyl is sourced from CD or digital files! probably most of it.

I guess unless it makes some claim otherwise assume it's digitally sourced

presuming good playability, the Graham Parker, Polecats & Laura Nyro jumped out as good bargains.

#vibes

i'm still loling at the #danceparty peter paul and mary jamz

"If I Had a Hammer (Dubstep RMX)"

it's amusing but also a little sad that some people are still reacting to this as though VNYL attempted to match subscribers' "taste profiles" and failed -- or even trying to imagine some arcane rubric used to decide the contents of the packages they sent out.

they clearly didn't try at all. it is exactly what it seems to be: a randomized assortment of junk-shop records.

if they were actually trying, this might be more interesting.

i'd definitely pick up a copy of that teardrop explodes record

presuming good playability, the Graham Parker, Polecats & Laura Nyro jumped out as good bargains.

And Romeo Void! Hooray!

regarding digital sourcing, from this thread:

S&D: vinyl reissues

I've heard more lately (maybe bc people are more aware) of how lots of cd reissues are nothing more than CD versions copied to wax, basically. like someone said that about the stereolab LPs that just came out in new reissued versions. maybe the recent aphex twin SAW II reissue as well? I was never really aware of that sort of thing. Never really considered it as a possibility.

― christmas candy bar (al leong), Wednesday, April 16, 2014 8:53 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah it is a real bummer and hard to get good info about what's what

I think the only thing you can do abt it is look for "remastered from the original tapes" in the promo hype.

― sleeve, Wednesday, April 16, 2014 9:14 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the fact of the matter is that almost any reissue done by a 3rd party label (i.e. light in the attic, sundazed, etc.) is going to be digitally sourced. the major labels who own most of these records a) may not have the original tapes (we are talking about poorly run bureaucracies managing gigantic catalogs of which they only really care about a small percentage) or b) will absolutely not let them out of their sight. this means having to pay their outrageous in-house engineering and lacquer cutting fees in order to keep the process completely analog. this is the difference between a $18.98 LP on light in the attic and a $40.98 LP on whatever high end audiophile reissue labels still exist...

international titles will throw a whole 'nother wrinkle into this shit, there is no way EMI brazil is sending the original tapes up to the US so that LITA can do marcos valle LP reissues that are 100% analog.

also - and i'm sorry if i sound like a dick but as a dude who has spent 10 years in the reissue game i am kinda tired of having this conversation - there are a LOT of things that can make a LP reissue sound like shit and, yes, a poorly done digitally sourcing job can be one of those things, BUT i would put a LOT of money down that every dude out there that has ever complained on the internet about a digitally sourced reissue would not be able to identify a digital sourcing job vs. an all analog job any better than a coin toss.

― moe handy, Thursday, April 17, 2014 10:50 PM (1 year ago)

hear hear

true story: make one comment on a #vnyl hashtagged IG post where a guy complains about the service and the VNYL head honcho might suddenly follow you

"CD versions copied to wax" sounds like the lamest, but i probably would never be able to tell the difference. worst thing i've experienced about new vinyl is warped records, which has made me generally go back to CDs. CDs don't warp!

my problems have mostly been surface noise related, but I am coming to the same conclusion.

yeah i've had a few probs with that too... just makes you feel silly. i like old records if they're cheap. i've been buying a bunch of old, cheap, 70s jazz comps and that is satisfying any vinyl fetishism that remains.

i can't do new vinyl anymore, too many bad experiences. if i do buy any, it's only at a store that accepts full returns. out of the new pressings i've bought in the past year, i want to say about ten percent had problems bad enough where i traded them for other copies (if they had them.) there's another store near me that won't take returns because of the how common such problems are. which seems like a bullshit policy to me tbh.

true story: make one comment on a #vnyl hashtagged IG post where a guy complains about the service and the VNYL head honcho might suddenly follow you

Because it's all the same person? Is that what you're getting at?

What a weird #vibe it must be to work around that guy.

i don't know why he followed me. did i say something constructive? is he trying to creep me out? probably no on both counts but still...

sleeve thanks for that post from the vinyl not (vnyl) thread

My biggest problem with new vinyl has been off-center pressings. I don't even buy much new vinyl, I probably have at least five records, including an ostensibly high-quality reissue of Joy Division's Closer, where the needle sways side-to-side in the groove so much that it affects the pitch.

I've read on record nerd forums that you can correct this by carefully filing away at the center hole and then manually adjusting where the record is set on the platter, but I haven't tried that.

Yeah I've had a few where the hole was too small and I essentially had to force the platter onto the deck. Then getting it off felt like I was going to break it. Surface noise has been the biggest problem though

presuming good playability, the Graham Parker, Polecats & Laura Nyro jumped out as good bargains.

― Vic Perry, Friday, May 15, 2015 3:26 PM

And Live Stiffs! A classic.

yeah i've had a few probs with that too... just makes you feel silly. i like old records if they're cheap. i've been buying a bunch of old, cheap, 70s jazz comps and that is satisfying any vinyl fetishism that remains.

Yeah! Those 2LP Impulse and 2LP Blue Note comps are great, and always cheap. Lots of 2LP Arista/Freedom stuff around, too.

Also, you can't go wrong with Sam Rivers. For some reason, a bunch of his old records are plentiful and cheap (and uniformly great).

Yes! anything on Tomato

Too bad vnyl isn't sending some of these dollar bin LPs that people actually like!

i'm always amazed by how many of those anthony braxton arista LPs are out there, usually in good condition. i wonder if arista really pressed a lot of them thinking hyper-intellectual third-stream stuff was going to be the next rock 'n' roll.

"CD versions copied to wax" sounds like the lamest, but i probably would never be able to tell the difference"

the issue for me is simply the price! CDs are gonna be cheaper and a lot of new vinyl is also just not made that well. or its made in a rush because the poor bastards can't keep up with all the rainbow-colored crap they have to press. soooo many warped new records. makes me not want to buy any of it.

If you want to fix an undersized spindle hole just wiggle a pen in it xp

^^^ OTM

i'm always amazed by how many of those anthony braxton arista LPs are out there, usually in good condition. i wonder if arista really pressed a lot of them thinking hyper-intellectual third-stream stuff was going to be the next rock 'n' roll.

Haha...it's true, though-- I've even seen lots of NM copies of For Four Orchestras for cheap. I imagine Arista probably had a deal with their pressing plants where the minimum run was around 100,000. Even the Freedom series -- Cecil, Andrew Hill, Roswell Rudd, the 2LP Savoy comp -- is everywhere.

yeah, and that's the kind of stuff that by all rights should be hard to find and pricey. and it is--for most other labels. but the arista stuff is everywhere! man, they must've lost a ton of money back in the '70s.

some of the qualities of listening to vinyl is still present regardless of the mastering source, of course; you can have a digital master and the vinyl versoin is still going to sound warmer if you have a good turntable and a tube preamp. So discounting something because it has a digital source isn't necessarily fair; sometimes that's all that's left; mastering directly off tape to vinyl is expensive and not worth it for smaller runs of records that aren't going to make a shit load of money.

There are a few represses that are like cds of the late 80s though, with bad mastering, weird volume, just stamped and sold

Which is weird because vinyl pressing people still generally have higher standards

i'm fine with a good needle drop of an old rare record. get a really clean original copy and record it to tape. then use that for a reissue pressing. honestly, though, i'm fine with well-made CDs too. they sound good. if something was cCD-era to begin with and originally came out on cd, i have no need to own it on vinyl.

i have a friend in town who likes to dabble with audio and he does cd transfers. i would give him an old reel to reel tape - pre-recorded record label tapes - and he'd transfer them to cd for me and i swear they are some of the best CDs i've ever heard. and he's just a guy in his house. they sound beautiful! he doesn't really do anything fancy to them. maybe some noise reduction or whatever. which is one of the reasons why it bums me out when i hear some modern CDs and vinyl. it's often less than great. (still plenty of greatness, but you have to search for it. great sound isn't common. i do feel like it was more common once upon a time.)

yep, I have a CD reissue of Nurse With Wound's Insect And Individual Silenced that was done from vinyl but it is imperceptible and sounds far better the original due to digital tweaking

On the other end of things, the same holds true for the vinyl-only Sema/Robert Haigh reissues that Vinyl On Demand put out. They were digitally tweaked from the original LPs, then re-pressed to vinyl and they sound far better than the originals (which were bad pressings to begin with, worth noting that those have always been around)

unfortunately these are rare exceptions in the current reissue market

NWW seem like they would care!!

There is a nerdo New Order/JD blog linked elsewhere on ilx where dudes have sourced the best releases/formats and done better remastering than a couple lazy label releases and it's sad

oh yes I am familiar with those, they did The Smiths as well and those AAC files sound better than any CD I have ever heard

I swear the DRI LPs I just ripped to digital using an MMF-5 turntable and a Cambridge preamp straight into a TEAC CD burner and leveled up in Amadeus sound better than any CD reissue to date

it's easy, but somehow still gets fucked up