Anybody else here collect vinyl records?

What's the appeal?

 

I don`t collect now but I used to in the late 80s and into the 90s. It started with a dirtbike, I had a used up dirtbike and traded it for two boxes full of vinyl. The bike was fun but the music was better. Vinyl is a great format.

I see you like Dimmu Borgir, Shagrath from Dimmu was my neighbor in the 90s. He looked a little glum and hostile but he was a very nice and friendly guy. Black Metal was the big thing for a while in the 90s.


Nothing weird going on here, just another normal day.

 

I have a handful of vinyl records I bought and listened to in high school in the early '80's. Sitting in a box in the basement. I don't have a turn table.

What many people now-a-days are not aware of is that digital music, your internet streaming, etc. is often missing the "full audio experience". Most people like the convenience of digital music,...but,...if you are one that appreciates listening to all the sounds,...fingers scratching across the strings, the artist breathing into the microphone, etc....AND you have a decent room to listen in or a nice set of full headphones, then you will appreciate the vinyl records.

 

I would like to and also get a record player but I don’t have the space or money to get a good one. The best I could possibly do is one of those suitcase styled players but I saw a video an expert on music technology made where he tried one and thought it was okay if you are a casual music lover but not for those who really enjoys it. I think it was the quality of the sound he didn’t like so much.

 

I have a very large collection of vinyl, hundreds of albums. I really should do something about reinvesting in a turntable.

I even became heavily invested in the short lived fad of quadraphonic sound.

Besides the sound experience, there were all kinds of cool things they did with vinyl. A for instance would be the True Colours album by the New Zealand rock band Split Endz. It was laser etched across the surface with geometrical patterns that refracted light, producing a rainbow of colors Also, some albums had messages around the inside of the center between the label and the last groove.

I, seemingly, do not have the mind set to unclutter my life, so I still have all my old vinyl, albeit stored away and unplayed for decades. The collection contains a bit of everything: rock, opera, rock operas, operettas, Indonesian Gamelan, electronic (e.g. Wendy, nee Walter, Carlos and others), musicals, spoken word, Gregorian chant, comedy, film scores, etc.

Some of it might even be worth more than I originally paid for it, but I will probably never get around to exploring that, as I have a skeleton made up entirely of lazy bones and they tend to cloud my ambition.

Nuff Said!?

 

Some of the more interesting records that I would love to see in person are the ones that can produce a hologram while on the turntable. Those look really cool. If I could afford the hobby, I’d buy a mix of vintage and new records. I’d try to find some old classics like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here with the man on Fire cover art and a single that is easier to find on vinyl than on CD and not even on digital music stores that I really like. The single is Baby Love by Regina and it is extremely hard to find on CD as the album in that format is extremely rare and iTunes only had the album in its Store for only a year. I managed to make a copy at the FYI store in my local mall but I really want the album itself as the songs are really good. What I don’t get is why a Top Ten hit that was massively popular and easily confused with being recorded by Madonna is so ridiculously hard to find? It took me eight years just to find a way to get it on CD yet I kept seeing the vinyl copy selling online for low prices and this was before vinyl made its big comeback as a form of media.

 

After I started collecting vinyl records, I one day saw something I thought was amazing. Vinyl records with pictures and colors. So I had a collection of those kind of records for a while, if I saw one I tried to buy it.

 

I personally would collect those types of records only for display purposes. I’d be too afraid to play them out of fear of ruining the artwork with scratches and typical wear from use.

 

Me too, it was more about decoration and display, I didn`t play them.

 

Yes, I have hundreds of vinyl records. I used to have more but in the mid 2000s I stupidly sold a lot of my best records on Ebay to fund a special interest in collecting other things. That was a big mistake. I abandoned that collecting special interest about five years later and now wish very much that I had all of my old records back. Back then I sold the ones I did for more than I paid for them and now they'd be worth even double or more. Colored vinyl, picture discs, complete sets of all albums from certain bands, etc.

Vinyl records are magical. It helps the experience greatly to have a good moving coil cartridge (ie needle) rather than a moving magnet cartridge for sound reproduction.

 

I got rid of my vinyl years ago most were half speed mastered. Vinyl had no dynamic range. If I see a disc jockey in a bar playing vinyl we leave the bar sounds like crap. I have a good ear can tell if the disc jockey has a decent amp, most don't.

 

Yes, I have a collection of vinyl records. It's not very big yet, about 120, because I only just started to collect them recently after years of collecting CDs. I have hundreds of CDs. Just recently upgraded my turntable and cartridge, too.

 

But think of all that nostalgia of those ticks, pops and perpetual hiss with dynamic range in the 40s. And all that preening we did using the Discwasher System to keep dirt and lint off our precious Shure V15 Type IV cartridge. Always being mindful of the strobe, making sure wow and flutter was contained or eliminated. With death to anyone using a belt-drive turntable! Ahhhh....those were the days. NOT.

As I recall, I dumped all my vinyl around 1991. Today all we hear are likely the musicians turning pages of their music or farting. So much nicer than all those ticks, pops, hisses and diminished dynamic range some of us don't miss at all.

And now I have my entire music collection digitized on a single flash drive...to listen at home or in the car. But I have kept my Boston Acoustics T-830 speakers over the years, having had to rebuild the woofers that time eroded.



Not so tough any more to be an audiophile with OCD.

Ok, I do have ONE recording I have digitized from a Japanese virgin vinyl record I bought many years ago. The soundtrack to the 60s movie "Battle of the Bulge". That was a keeper. Not the record, but to transfer it to DBX and later to MP3. Nearly flawless...but certainly the exception when it came to my record collection.

 

I kept one vinyl record for years, signed by the band members of 'cats can fly', my cousin was thier drummer. Just before retirement I give to my understudy. found out he was a fan. thought he was going to cry when I give it to him. I just recently sold my 40 plus year old Bose 901 speakers.

 

I have at this point over a thousand old 78s, Edison diamond discs, and phonograph cylinders to fill a good sized box. Would like to get into vinyl one of these days, though. There's a decent collection of hand-cranked phonographs I've put together as well; I go buy the old broken ones & fix them up.

 

Note that iTunes openly admits to offering some music with stereo bit rates lower than 192kbps. I suspect most people would probably notice degraded sound at anything recorded lower than this bit rate standard.

If you are listening to something recorded at 128kbps, it probably stinks.

Choose import settings in iTunes on PC

 

CD's are actually the optimal format for audio quality. The dynamic range is over 10 times that of vinyl.

I personally won't collect either. Too much clutter, as well as never finding a single album where I enjoyed every single song.

FLAC is the way to go imo:



"FLAC files can also provide a resolution of up to 32-bit, 96kHz, so better than CD-quality"

Very based, provided you have the hard drive space.

Ed