Since others are posting their history with vinyls, I guess I will too.
Any one ever have any luck finding vinyls in thrift stores? Every time I look at them, they look like grandpa passed away and the family donated his vinyls to Goodwill. So, a bunch of shit from the 50's. And most of the time, they smell like they've been in the basement for decades. The one time I found something wroth getting was a Doors album, but it was just the jacket.
Another thing, do all you guys properly maintain your collection? We all know to store the records standing up. But what do you guys do to clean them? The guy at the record shop I went to (mentioned on page 2) had
this thing. When I asked him about it, he said it was very good and cleaned deep in the grooves. When I read some reviews about it on Amazon, some people said it actually scratched their records. One guy said he tested it on brand new records, and it fucked them up. And every cleaner on eBay seemed to have similar problems.
I just have an old vinyl cleaner that I stole from my mom (along with some of her albums
) that I use. It's just a roll of velvet or velour or whatever material vinyl cleaners traditionally are. I'll put a record on the platter and spin it up (I can spin the platter without having to move the arm) and hold the roll on it to collect all the dust and whatnot before playing. But I have some older vinyls that could probably use a deep cleaning. I've read that you can give them a deep cleaning with common household items (dish soap, microfiber towels, etc) but I haven't tried it yet. What do you guys do?
dsheinem wrote:Point taken about problems with CDs, but I also know of recent vinyl that uses the same compressed source or is victim to the "loudness war". It's always a crapshoot in any medium anymore
Hmm, I assumed vinyls would always have a different master just due to the fact that they're not CDs. How lazy could you be? If I went out of my way to buy an album on vinyl because it's CD version was compressed garbage, I would be extremely disappointed to find out it was the from the same source as the CD. To the point that I'd probably send a handwritten letter (well, maybe type it out and hand sign it since my handwritten is horrible) Certified Mail to the record label.
dsheinem wrote:I think the emulation analogy falls apart in many ways when discussing CD, though you might be on to something if comparing vinyl to MP3...
Ah, well, I wasn't trying to engage in a serious debate. That was more of an off-the-wall remark. I like CDs a lot, don't get me wrong. Vinyls are just fun. It's a damn shame that they degrade, which is why I'll only play my vinyls when I wanna relax and really listen to music. But if you take proper care of everything, they'll at least last a long time.
I can't let the "I don't wanna use it so it'll last longer" bug get me. You can say the same thing about video games, you know. All the buttons in all your controllers will eventually wear out and stop working if you use them enough. All the SRAM in all your carts only have a certain amount of times they can read/write until they can't anymore. I guess we're lucky enough to have new controllers for retro consoles manufactured (although 99% of them are garbage), and one could replace the SRAM in a cart if one has the know-how. But my point is, I'm not have this stuff sit on a shelf because I'm afraid of wearing it out. Then what's the point of owning it?
And lastly, while CDs wont degrade from each playing like vinyls, they shouldn't be considered to last forever. They'll eventually die whether you play them or not. Disc rot is a bitch. Rot with any prefix (eg: bit rot) sucks. To my knowledge, there's no form of storage that's absolutely permanent. But yeah, I'd rather listen to music on vinyl with some static or clicks and pops then not be able to listen to it at all (or with missing parts, lots of skipping, unreadable tracks, etc) because of disc rot.
