The Death of the Record Collection

On the flipside there are some bands I enjoy like Pearl Jam who for all their pro vinyl rhapsodizing don’t have especially good pressings

Françoise Hardy’s reissues on light in the attic were fantastic as are her reissues on Parlophone

Anyway I do think it is often a losing and endless game trying to keep up with acquiring vinyl due to budget and space constraints

Evan, yes, that is exactly why collecting that era makes intuitive sense to me — the whole vibe and aesthetic revolved around these sort of scrappy, cherished, labor-of-love documents. There is definitely Cat's Miaow vinyl in my discogs wantlist, but this is what I mean about now being a good collector: I can't justify the price when there are CD comps and, you know, actual needs in the world. (I'm not kidding about pretty much constantly thinking "I could buy this record or give $20 to a food bank.") The people paying $100 for the "Popkiss" 7-inch are in a league I will never be able to compete with.

I still do believe well mastered vinyl on a good turntable is the best.

though, as omar says, there's a lot of shit vinyl being pressed now.

still, the new Purple Mountains for example sounds amazing

all this said, I've recently subscribed to Qobuz, which does 24-bit streaming, from Chromecast audio into a DAC and, dang, it's pretty damn close to really good vinyl, very very very close to the point I wonder if I could tell

Spotify I use walking around on headphones or in the car, but the sound quality is a joke esp after I heard Tidal and (now) Qobuz

that kind of collector mentality I've never gotten into or had the financial resources to even consider engaging in - as long as I own it in some format, that's good enough for me

xps

I’m guessing Spotify still has that audio watermark problem on all UMG stuff?

By the way I've also had anxiety about whether I calibrated my player correctly and/or whether my equipment is in good shape (especially the health of the needle), and I don't have a ton of confidence in my speakers and amp, so I worry the format as a means of "better audio quality" isn't really relevant to me until I make some adjustments and necessary upgrades. There's a lot of guilt and shame when the spotify stream of an album sounds crisper than playing the vinyl (which degrades slightly every time it's played).

I don’t really want to hook my laptop up to my stereo every time I want to listen to something. I don’t really want to buy some internet-of-things bullshit

the whole vinyl degrades with each play is massively overstated, it was definitely a thing with old ceramic needles, but modern needles are so much better designed

I have a bunch of records that were pressed in the 50s that sound great

the degradation of vinyl isn’t noticeable useless you’re playing it hundreds of times on a lousy needle

xp

fuck aligning a cartridge forever tho!

I am so sad that the Needle Doctor closed, they would install a cartridge you bought in store 😭😭😭

I spend too much money on vinyl but I've never been tempted to pay $100 for Sarah singles or anything like that. In 2015 I tried to buy a Field Mice 10" for $45 and they accidentally sent me the Emma's House single. I said screw it and kept it. I do love Emma's House. Now that single has climbed up to an average price of $85+, and I'm mystified by everything in my collection that has spiked because I never spend that kind of money on a single item. Always wonder how the person in the "Highest" category in the statistics section feels especially when the For Sale section has listings coming in below the median value.

OK good to keep that in mind on the needle degrading front, thanks. Plus I did realign my cartridge so that part of it I feel good about right now. The speakers and amp though... not so sure.

xposts

I am so sad that the Needle Doctor closed, they would install a cartridge you bought in store 😭😭😭

fuck aligning a cartridge forever tho!

― brimstead

high five, my man

The people paying $100 for the "Popkiss" 7-inch are in a league I will never be able to compete with.

― ን (nabisco), Thursday, March 5, 2020 1:54 PM (forty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Meant to paste this with my response about Field Mice and big spenders

super sympathetic to all the reservations about physical media and weird justifications i make to continue with what is mostly just a deeply ingrained consumer reflex

best reason for me is that being offline is cool and healthy

sometimes it's nice to know your listening isn't being tracked and figured into an algorithm for a huge tech company

something defensive, a kind of Noah's Ark for when the digital flood comes? Picking the records, two by two, that you can save?

I mean, for me, actually, yeah! People have been thinking "this is how the music industry is always gonna be" since the days of Edison. Incredible to me that people automatically assume the digital/streaming ecosystem is going to remain intact & the same over the next 10 years or even 5. The earth might not get hit with a solar flare or EMP shockwave that obliterates the internet, but just because record companies, tech companies, and ISPs have created favorable conditions for most people to affordably consume a variety of music via streaming doesnt mean that those conditions are automatically set in stone.

a good friend of mine recently told me his tweeters had blown as everything sounded really shit.
he only ever listens to his vinyl.
he is not that tech savvy, and so i was concerned that the issue was not his speakers.
after a lot of emails back and forth, we decided to test this out.
i sent him a specific album in 320 that i knew would test this out.
after talking him through dropping the files onto a cd-r (yeah yeah), word came back that after he found a cd player in his attic, the album sounded absolutely fantastic, and clearly there was nothing wrong with the speakers.
record players are a lot of work.
i went through a phase of stressing re the degradation of my vinyl that i played as a teenager as i rarely changed my needle (had no knowledge of such things when i was 15).
and i was right to stress.
a lot of it sounds like shit when i put it on now.
thankfully most of the stuff i really loved i have replaced with their silver disc equivalents.

friend from back home has a $22k turntable+amps+speakers setup. obv sounds good but how he and my other bff listen to stuff sucks the joy out of it imo.
major drawbacks are:
the space where the speakers sound amazing is really tiny, basically only the middle seat on the couch. and if you're off the couch, it sounds v pedestrian.
not only can you only listen to stuff he has on vinyl, but he only buys the highest quality pressings. which means there's a lot of great albums we'd all want to listen to on that setup but can't.

I’m actually surprised by how durable my old vinyl has proved to be - many of my LPs sound fantastic after multiple teenage plays on a shitty all-in-one system with a coin taped to the headshell

(some have needed a real good clean though... and I’ve also read that a finer stylus profile is better at digging past lightly trashed grooves and accessing the music)

but yeah some records that I thought were completely (sonically) fucked in the 80s/90s have come up really nice on a decent system in 2020

totally agree that not having your listening fed into “the algorithm” is a big part of the appeal, so too the related feeling of not having your leisure activity tracked by marketing teams (and worse)

what do you use to clean ? trying to work out whether its worth buying a fancy cleaner

what's all this about aligning needles? mine just screws the cartridge into the arm and is held in place by, uh, magnets I think

a lot of my old records still sound awesome. I don't think they necessarily sound better than digital but they do sound...different

Bandcamp's lossless download options and lack of an algorithm is a feature not a bug.

very otm, big Bandcamp fan here

building a miniature vinyl museum of 1984-1996 indie rock for my kids to be confused by when I die

Thank you so much for articulating my hobby, Nabisco.

yeah also big bandcamp user, they definitely massage the physical media glands with the way their UI works and presents “your collection”

what do you use to clean ?

for cheap and cheerful second-hand purchases I use an old discwasher brush (not the new one which sucks) and some home brew fluid

for anything “special” I use this stuff called record revirginiser which is like a fancy version of the old wood glue method - it takes a bit of use to master but I’ve had records that have been cleaned in a proper RCM that still crackled and popped, and this stuff has improved them outta sight - I guess it works out to a couple of bucks a record but for that’s worth it to have my old copy of Low sounding pretty good

what's all this about aligning needles? mine just screws the cartridge into the arm and is held in place by, uh, magnets I think

I'm kind of tired of collecting physical music. I have fucking way too many records and CDs. My record player is fucked and getting it fixed will cost a lot. I bought a Linn lp12 off eBay with a work bonus years ago and it did me well but now there's a loose connection in the tone arm and I just can't be fucked with it. What's the point of it all. I guess my wife dying taught me that. She loved collecting things. Postcards, Victorian photos, music. Now what do I do with it. It's just stuff. everywhere.

I bought a record tonight! Why? I guess because I thought the band was cool

Plus vinyl these days mostly sucks shit. So many shite pressings

I just need some kind of rack for all the CDs flopping around in the center console area thing of my car. I don't want to use one of those organizer sleeve things, I wanna keep em in the jewel cases and cardboard sleeves... but it's hard to tell by touch alone, groping blindly as I drive, which CD is which.

Someone cruel and insightful once wrote that the great marketing triumph with Gen X is that they persuaded us that we have to be archivists of everything we love. Hence my shelf of shitty soundtracks and compilations bought for that one Throwing Muses track.

I, too, have the Matter of Degrees soundtrack CD

Yes I think I subconsciously picked that up I even said to my wife a few weeks ago when we were talking about the pointlessness of collecting physical objects, at some point I aimed to collect every good punk record that ever existed, but why. It doesn't matter anymore

I am sorry you had to go through that colonel

Yes I think I subconsciously picked that up I even said to my wife a few weeks ago when we were talking about the pointlessness of collecting physical objects, at some point I aimed to collect every good punk record that ever existed, but why. It doesn't matter anymore

― Colonel Poo, Thursday, March 5, 2020 8:37 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Maybe not to you. I still enjoy buying physical media despite my awareness of its folly and pointlessness*. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the two big ones are:

1. Physical media (especially CDs, which I increasingly prefer) are dirt cheap, and as long as you have it in your genes to collect something and need to work that habit into your budget, it may as well be something you can currently buy for less than a dollar at a Goodwill and not, like, vintage wine, Star Wars memorabilia, or craft beer (yes, I know people who collect craft beer, maybe you do too). It's a largely harmless hobby. I have no kids, don't plan to have kids, and don't really care what happens to my collection when I die (as I doubt even libraries will be interested in acquiring such a collection by that point). I've had my fun, throw it in a dumpster if no one wants it.

2. I still enjoy the serotonin blast of this particular form of retail therapy and, again, it isn't hurting anyone (see above), in fact, when I buy new things from Bandcamp or at shows, it helps artists and labels who are currently being crushed by streaming services. If the day comes that I can pass a VG+ copy of Technique (which I already own) in the dollar bin and not feel the least bit tempted, fine, but that day has yet to arrive. When it does, I suspect my life will be poorer for it.

*If we're going go get all existential about it, what isn't pointless? If I have disposable income, the only thing I often choose over music is an experience of some kind: saving for a trip, going with friends to a waterpark, starting a garden. But even these things are fleeting, right? I don't remember half the movies I've seen in a theater. There are a million ways to spend your days on Earth, I just choose to continue spending mine exploring music and buying CDs and records. I don't feel ashamed of this. I don't care that some people prefer streaming, but I don't particularly enjoy being looked at like some pitiable weirdo stockpiling vintage printers or something, especially by people who once took just as much pride in their own collections but have now, for various reasons, given in to this new (totally boring, largely evil imo) model. So much unnecessary darkness itt. Just one more example of the nefarious way streaming has taken so much of the fun out of being a music lover.

a) naturally my excellent essay in the end-of-decade wire (jan 2020, no.431) covers every aspect of this, demolishing the bad arguments deftly while pithily consolidating the good ones
b) it seems rigorously appropriate and yet also entirely ironic that i can't link it so you'll have go buy the physical edition sight unseen to find out for yrselves

xpost CP - yeah I definitely have similar feeling sometimes and I can only imagine those lines of thinking are magnified

hey Paul you might want to consider what people are going through in life before you make judgements

Paul otm re the appeal of CD collecting especially

Worthwhile records are v tough to find cheaply now thanks to Discogs etc, but I still routinely make incredible CD finds at thrift stores because people are just getting rid of them indiscriminately.

I have 2 kids so a lot of my hobbies have been on hold for a couple years. Even if its something minor and pointless it's cool to get back into, because it's been a while since I've given myself the opportunity to ~care~ about something pointless like record collecting. It's therapeutic to me. I still love the experience of thumbing through the new arrivals at the shop and I do think it makes you appreciate stuff in a way that's difficult to do in an era where everything's online and accessible in seconds. Like stumbling across a copy of The Flat Earth by Thomas Dolby, a record I liked but hadn't heard in years, taking it home and blasting it out loud on tower speakers, listening to music as more than just background noise. It's fun and worth the five bucks. And I like the weird personal touches you get. For example I have a bunch of XTC records and they must've all been from the same person because the labels on the LP have certain songs highlighted, presumably to mark their favorite tunes, many of which are among my least favorites on the album, but now I hear them and think "well at least the last guy liked this song". I have LPs by King Crimson and the Moodies with bongwater stains on them. I dunno, I love that stuff.

what are they FOR

for me vinyl is for listening to. it's really pleasurable to me to flip through records and find something i like, or be surprised by something i wasn't looking for. i don't tend to sit and listen, though - i'm usually doing other stuff.

I share that pleasure, for the twenty minutes a week I can indulge it — but I meant "what are they for" almost more in terms of the organizational purpose of the thing, like what rubric should dictate the comparatively small number of records I would buy versus the much vaster number I'd listen to. (When I shop based mostly on the pleasure of putting a record on at home, I wind up cruising toward an archive of extremely mellow housework-and-reading music, which ... is not a terrible thing, I guess.)

Colonel Poo: I am incredibly sorry to hear about your wife. Here's hoping that as time goes by some of that stuff will cease to feel entirely pointless and can be a pleasant reminder of the person who loved it.

collecting records has been one of the only joyful things in my life over the past three years (that and legal pot). I"m not giving up either of them though I have cut back on both.