The invasion of unwanted vinyl records ....

Wait till they revive the wax cylinder. You'll be driven demented altogether by their outdatedness

Too expensive, too much effort involved… skipping tracks, changing sides etc, need way more room for storage…

i bought some of my favourite albums on vinyl about 8 years ago to put in frames as a sort of wall art decorative collage collection that worked out rather well… a few older ones appreciated nicely and I’ve others in boxes which are worth a few bob.

ive an aunt who was a singer back in the day and rubbed shoulders with the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Shirley Bassey… her children wernt interested in that genre of music beyond in a general sense … so the aunt was keeping vinyl of theirs, all that stuff for me until my American cousin got wind and managed to wangle most of it…she’d my uncle wrapped around her finger… knowing her, and how flighty she was / is …years later it probably ended up on eBay.

Golden Discs is not the shop I would be going to for buying vinyl. It’s the sort of place where people who don’t really have a clue about music would go.

Absolute tosh. A CD can encompass a greater dynamic range than vinyl because there isn't the limitation of the physical room for the groove to move side to side. In order to make a vinyl pressing you have to compress the dynamic range to reduce the amount of groove excursion just so you can get the length of a musical piece onto the disc. It's called the RIAA bias curve, where trebble is boosted and bass is compressed as it takes up the most space in terms of groove wiggle. The phono stage of a preamplifier has a reverse bias built into it's circuitry to uncompress the audio. I have to laugh when people talk of a'natural' or 'pure' vinyl sound when it's been messed with, a lot.

A preference for vinyl sound is simply a preference for it's technical limitations that lead to a technically more compromised sound. This was shown when recoding engineers took vinyl recordings, recorded them and burned audio CDs from the recordings. They then set up a blind listening test where the original vinyl and burned CD were played back on the same reference quality system and people, including vinyphiles, were asked to distinguish between the two. They couldn't. I have direct experience of this as I used to record my vinyl to a DAT deck and then listen to them. One benefit of this was doing a time consuming 'master clean' to get as much dust off the LP as possible, not to mention skipping tracks I didn't like and making tape mixes of different LPs.

A CD can therefore sound exactly the same as vinyl, so it's not a limitation if that sound profile is preferred. Digital audio is like a superbly made transparent glass bottle. It doesn't sound like anything. What you get out of it is wholy dependent on what you fill it with - fill it with a vinyl recording and that's what you will get back out, fill it with a well mastered recording with headroom and no compression, and that's what you get back out; fill it with a hugely copressed track for maximum playback volume and no headroom and that's what you get back out.

The supposed criticisms and sound preferences that are used by some to criticise CDs are in fact misplaced criticisms of the quality of the mastering of the content stored on it.

You don't get people blaming the inadequacies of wine bottles for how the wine tastes, it goes without question that if you put Penfolds Grange Hermitage into a bottle, then what you pour out of it is going to taste rather nice, but put rubbish into it and that's what you are going to get out again.

I for one do not miss one bit, squeezing the trigger of a zero-stat gun repeatedly over a spinning LP to flood it with negative ions to dampen the ststic charge so the several minutes of carfully sweeping a carbon fibre brush across the surface would actually be able to shift some of the dust out of the grooves, loosened of their static charged attraction. And then of course, carefully positioning the stylus of the moving coil cartridge that cost more than a CD player, only to hear the dust such a process sometimes couldn't shift.

Not sure mastering genius of any level could rescue source material provided by Ash...

Shops called Golden Discs and Tower Records selling records?

Well I never.

Music is a beautiful form of artistic expression, enjoy it anyway you can. Preferences are everywhere.

It certainly used to be but it's a dieing bred now. Honestly does anyone even care or know what artists are in the so called charts these days? I know I for one do not have a clue as far as I am concerned the real charts died when Apple came and destroyed music with there devices.

There was a time when I could easily tell you every artist in the the top 20 and if they were any good or not.

As for which format is best for me it's CDs. I grew up on CDs. I still remember my Brother bringing home his Philips multi CD player it could load 7 CDs at a time and the sound was amazing some years after that he got one that could do 3 or 4 times as many CDs but sadly it did not last.

As for the Philips one well I have that now it still works at least it did a few years ago as I have not used it in years sadly as its quiet bulky. I must take it out and see is it still working.

Stuff like this doesn't come cheap but as a package it's stunning imo.

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You know that any music made in the past, oh, 40 years will have been stored as linear PCM - the format on a CD - at some stage (of not all stages) between production and pressing?

Vinyl needs specific mastering to make it sound at its best, which is only going to be as good as a CD sounds. If its not done right, it sounds like absolute crap

People are buying it again for the experiential elements - not for the sound quality. Lots are listening on mono speaker, circular stylus, ceramic cartridge suitcase systems too - so they're not even getting close to the pressed quality. Have heard those systems that have clearly had no working RIAA equalization too.

Music was good though when you had to pay for an album.

Free access has ruined innovation and progress.

Neil Young was complaining, years ago, that you only got a small percentage of the sound he wanted on CD. His beef was all about compression, I think. Really hated MP3 and streaming services.

I’ve always preferred vinyl but unless you’re playing it on a top sound system you may as well be listening to a CD or download.

Neil Young is nearly deaf, so his comments on this can be thrown away as nonsense.

He then released a digital music player, using 192kHz sampling which is known to have worse results than the 44.1kHz of CD; to just compound the bullshit from him.

The Vinyl revival is for people who like to throw money away

Great album 🙂

Na, it's common sense. Paying for things that are free is a bit silly, I'd rather keep my money for beer

Some people would think buying beer is throwing money away.

How 'bout you spend your money how you like and everybody else spend it how they like.

The vinyl revival is literally record execs taking advantage of gullible purchasers. It'll die off in a few years ago along with the remnants of the high street record shops (or they'll have to morph into something else).

The medium really doesn't matter as alluded to earlier, it's about how it's used.

Now, the nostalgic days of browsing, listening and buying records, I understand, now, all music is almost immediately accessible anywhere it's wanted and that drives homogeneity of what gets produced.

(it also concentrates the available revenue into the hands of fewer artists which causes other issues)

I never liked CD's - still have records I bought in the nineteen eighties I would fight to the death for. Spindizzy and Freebird for the win although I did see some kids pointing at Miles Davis Bitches Brew in Golden Discs earlier which I was well impressed with.

Saturday afternoon shopping was Charles Mingus, Miles Davis and the great Cathal Coughlan's - Telefís A Dó.

eBay around 1998 on dial up modem and posting of physical dollars which had to be exchanged at a bank was the golden age for bargains.

Nobody wanted records.

I remember those days fondly.

But 1993 was the nadir.

My local record shop got 502 copies in of U2's Zooropa on release day. 300 CDs, 200 cassettes and 2 LPs.

I had pre-ordered one LP, someone else the other. A week later, I saw the second copy in the racks. The owner told me that the guy changed his mind so I bought that one as well.

Similar for Nirvana's In Utero, Neil Young's Unplugged, Kate Bush's The Red Shoes, PJ Harvey's Rid Of Me......

In Virgin and HMV, nearly every new LP on a major label was discounted after a few months - usually to £3.99 or less. They just couldn't shift them. George Michael's Older being the most notorious example. HMV got in 10 copies. I bought one, a mate bought another and an unknown person the third. They were stuck with seven copies for weeks on end, eventually selling them off for £3.99. Sadly I didn't buy another - and it's become the most sought after LP of the decade, routinely selling for €800+ - albeit was finally reissued in September.

Whipping Boy's Heartworm - plenty copies of the blue vinyl pressing in Virgin at the time, nearly everybody ignoring it and buying the CD or cassette (now there's a crap format). When it was reissued last year, they all came out of woodwork, all anxious to post photos of them playing it.