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

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

I guess we're a little off topic here, but hey it's Friday

Cannot wait for the collapse of the trend, mainly for the same reasons that it was awesome to buy records in the 90s: good stuff dirt cheap.

^so otm

Looking forward to a similar scam to VNYL in 10 years time, but involving CDs this time, when they're getting the future hipster kisses.

Nah, it'll be cassettes.

Hipsters have been moving from vinyl to cassettes for a while now. Apparently it's fairly easy to release like 50-100 copies of a cassette release but for vinyl most labels abd pressing plants won't do less than 500 copies

http://cassettestoreday.com

Just a couple of years ago, United in Nashville would do runs of as little as 100. Now their minimum is 300, and supposedly it's backlog city. I've heard stories of small indie labels having to scrub an entire year's worth of releases due to delays at United.

And anyway, the next trend will be reel-to-reel tapes:
http://tapeproject.com/

I mean, if the goal is to get as close to the original analog master as possible, wouldn't this be closer than vinyl by definition?

yes, yes it would.

wow, they really have their work cut out for them, releasing 10" open reels in 15ips - a format not playable on all but a handful of reel-to-reel decks, mostly pro studio models and a few high-end consumer machines, none of which have been made for years to my knowledge.

i do dig their tape reel design:
http://tapeproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/catalog.png

i'm gonna start releasing albums on laserdisc. i always loved how they sounded.

listening to/watching suspiria on laserdisc with huge speakers still one of my top audiophile experiences. massive!

the whispers!

I tried cutting some songs on a laserdisc w a record lathe and it didn't really work. Seems like you could pull it off w the right needle though!

Hopefully these will make a comeback someday -- video played with a needle!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc

best headline ever, by the way:

Sony Goes to Battle for Its Favorite Child

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/2-02.html

What's the next thing, minidisc revival?

CD will be the next big headlines revival. Hipster revivals are meaningless. Actual normal people are buying vinyl not just hipsters.

Gonna be sweet when all this vinyl goes back to the thrift stores a second time. They're still a dollar or less at Value Village.

i'm not looking forward to people dumping their 200 gram mumford and bat for lashes vinyl on me in a couple of years...

Yeah, that's gonna be the weird part, when dollar bins are full of digitally-sourced/poorly-pressed reissues from 2010-2015, and original pressings of, say, Rumors fetch insane $$$.

And then labels will be all, "D'oh, we screwed up on that last reissue! Try this new one!" to try to get everyone to re-buy shit for the nth time.