Vinyl records make a return

it's all comes down to personal preference, of course, but to me this digital brittle brutalism is like buffing metal with metal

2 new vinyl only record stores opened in St. Paul last week

i bought a used john renbourne record recently. but i'm no hero, just a guy doing my bit.

oh no ..
this links up to my current dilemma re a laptop based output vs laptop + dac
too many variables.
never going back to cassette though .. those fuckers were evil.
and as for vinyl ?
well for all the hipster love, those buggers are nasty to look after and you need to flip'em every 20 mins.
sod that.

Oh and tapes're making a comeback, that's been going a while so I guess it's been discussed, I guess I didn't expect THAT

sh@kedown dudes like you are the true heroes etc etc

yeah, i know re new found cassette love ..

does this mean my boxes full of the lo-fi bastards in the attic have now become £££ ?

Are they limited edition things? Maybe, anyway. The vast majority of mine're mixtapes so worth nothing, nothing but bittersweet memories

some of my tapes are limited edition (ztt cassingles etc), but on the whole nah .. just your normal chart loving crap of the 80s.

All of the music subreddits I've visited are very dire places.

I would be into tapes but unfortunately the last half dozen tape players I have owned have all stopped working or (gasp) eaten tapes, and after one too many good tapes lost, I packed them all into a trunk and put it away for now. When you play a record on a turntable you are never in danger of it destroying your record. When you play a CD in a CD player, there's not a significant chance it will accidentally slice through your disc with a laser. Eff tapes imo.

yet one tape is more useful than your entire ilx corpus

2 new vinyl only record stores opened in St. Paul last week

― Little Nicky Pizza loved that rascal Rust (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

Have you been to either of them? I moved here last autumn and I'm already impressed with the amount of record shops there are here. I go to Cheapo as much as I can and Hymies every so often too. It's ridiculous how much vinyl I've bought here in the last six months.

Yeah I live in Auckland NZ and a specialist vinyl store opened here abt I dunno, two years ago? Haven't actually been in bc no money bt a friend's working their extended (Sun/Mon) days, so I'll see what it's like sometime

I traveled around Australia and New Zealand last year. Ended spending a lot of my time in Auckland. Real Groovy was the only place I was aware of to vinyl. It has a decent selection but can be a bit on the pricey side.

Yeah, v much so. Thing is I used to work in the vinyl dept and they know fuckall abt anything that isn't p much straight rock/country/jazz type stuff, so you can find lots of v rare/great postpunk/electronic etc stuff for supercheap

I did find the odd bargain there but can't remember much of what I ended up coming back with now. Last Exit by Junior Boys and the first Hidden Cameras album were a couple I got quite cheap on vinyl. I'd spend a lot of time going through those vinyl bargain sections as there were often some gems in there. When did you work there?

Abt five years ago. Did Last Exit have anything written on the inner cover? It might've been mine

I was actually in New Zealand six/five years ago too. This might make me sound a little crazy (revealing I now live in Minnesota in a previous post) but a lot of my records are back home in the UK at my parents house so I can't check that out, really want to know if it is your copy now. I bought it almost exactly a year ago if that narrows it down.

Might be right, could be a bit too late. Sorry if this is going to bug you! It'll have "ART" on the inner cover if it ws mine

Don't worry about it. I can ask a family member to check and let me know. Would be kind of cool if it was. I was really surprised to find a copy there.

i mention this on every vinyl thread but vinyl is getting to be a fucking ripoff, especially new vinyl, don't know why all these people are getting duped into spending $25, $30, $45 on a single album, fuck that shit. and tapes are a complete joke

there are still obviously places where you can find cheap used vinyl, but i feel like they are getting rarer

the "vinyl is back!" thing has definitely pushed up prices in the past year - and every clown with a yard sale checks ebay now and puts $20 on his fucking Captain Fantastic record. You have to really dig deep to find old 45's for under $5 or even $10 at stores these days - stuff that was a 25 cents to a dollar for years and years

2 new vinyl only record stores opened in St. Paul last week

― Little Nicky Pizza loved that rascal Rust (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

Have you been to either of them? I moved here last autumn and I'm already impressed with the amount of record shops there are here. I go to Cheapo as much as I can and Hymies every so often too. It's ridiculous how much vinyl I've bought here in the last six months.

― Kitchen Person, Thursday, March 27, 2014 7:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haven't had a chance, don't get over to st.paul that much...my usual spot is Roadrunner Records in South Mpls, small but nice stock and I feel the most fair pricing in town. Hymie's is really nice since they moved out of the original gross building to this new place....

Electric Fetus can actually have some really good priced stuff and they get a lot of new stuff they end up clearancing

from a buyers perspective, the "death of vinyl" era was really a golden age - thrift stores and yard sales were full of full collections being just dumped. feel like there's much less of that now - and people have an inflated view of what things are worth

Oh man it so was, I decided to go for vinyl around then and picked up so much for so little

from a buyers perspective, the "death of vinyl" era was really a golden age - thrift stores and yard sales were full of full collections being just dumped. feel like there's much less of that now - and people have an inflated view of what things are worth

― brio, Friday, March 28, 2014 9:48 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jah, if i would have spent the 90s buying weird private press folk records and obscure prog for $1 i'd be retired by now ;_;

there's a death of cd thing going on right now, lots of good stuff available for ~$5 or less. not as abundant as i would have liked or expected but still there is lots to be found.

the bulk of my classic rock and blues and jazz vinyl was bought up years ago, even when I was a student I could afford some pretty sweet shiz. Now it's kind of ridiculous. I think in L.A. for example that market was killed by amoeba, who had higher prices but a bigger selection and knocked out the second generation of LP stores where you might find bargains. The third wave of stores that came with the vinyl resurgence are good but their prices are similarly jacked up. there's are also those horrible stores that will put crappy mid period rod Stewart LPs at twenty bucks because they have a promo sticker.

otm

and an xp to marcos - yeah, I was picking up those sweet Can remastered CDs on clearance for like six bucks each last year

yeah i've bought a lot of great CDs lately

Discogs is a pretty good place for stuff, the fact you can see all the available albums for sale i think helps keeps pricing down, or prevents eBay type gouging....

those horrible stores that will put crappy mid period rod Stewart LPs at twenty bucks because they have a promo sticker.

They'll do this because they see one international sold listing from months ago on ebay and then hope that same very specific and unrealistic buyer (that was using the internet to seek out something very particular in a WORLD WIDE market) will waltz into their store in their random town.

xpost
yeah i've had a much better time buying things on discogs than ebay, there's a lot of over-pricing going on but there are other folks on there who seem to be selling off whole warehouses of stuff cheap. but online buying is way less fun - and people sell really beat-up records. Took me awhile to realize "VG - very good" means "not very good".

by jove he's got a copy of tonight i'm yours. and the sticker remains affixed.

Literally saw a copy of Saturday Night Fever with one record missing priced $20 because it was an "Import" last weekend.

I think a lot of these eBay guys just trade records like a commodity, it could be literally any widget...you overprice tons of stuff, like just thousands of items and you sell a few and every once in a while some crazy person actually pays $250 for some lutheran college church choir record....it's basically market manipulation...like browse this piece of shit (he used to have a store in mpls):

http://stores.ebay.com/Shuga-Records

dude was famous for going to local shows, buying up records from local bands, then selling them as out of print for double the price, like local records that had just come out

I was in a beach town in Delaware last summer and found a crate of LPs in the back of a store that otherwise sold knick-knacky things. Sticker price for a US Capitol Rubber Soul (late 70s pressing) in VG condition? $40. The sad part is, I could totally see a tourist snapping it up; "It's the rare, original vinyl!"

arrgghgj'jtkh;dj to all these overpricing stories

Literally saw a copy of Saturday Night Fever with one record missing priced $20 because it was an "Import" last weekend.

― brio, Friday, March 28, 2014 11:14 AM (2 minutes ago)

I do a lot of loling in stores when I see stuff like this and then fantasize about lecturing delusional shop owners

haha me too

my 1st encounter with this, I thin, was seeing a beat up copy of Joni Mitchell's Blue for $25 in a store around 2008.

I could totally see a tourist snapping it up; "It's the rare, original vinyl!"

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat)

This is kind of why I linked that reddit/r/vinyl page... many of them are these exact people.

i'm actually starting to hit estate sales - living in a big city you're just not going to find weird cool weird old stuff cheap in stores these days unless you really luck out. I used to check craigslist a lot, but now there's just so much RARE STYX - $18.95 it's not worth it

sleeve - overpriced???? hardly....i mean i wouldn't take a penny less for this "rare disco" SPINACH POWER record

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SPINACH-POWER-popeye-sailorman-LP-VG-SKS-S-48-Japan-Hard-Boogie-Disco-Funk-MP3-/310782738430?pt=Music_on_Vinyl&hash=item485c183ffe

the good thing is a lot of those people will price any recognizable (and therefore probably not rare) record at crazy prices and sell their weird stuff for nothing

Also whenever you see "WOW" in the description on ebay you know it'll be a really stupid listing.

xpost - ha obv not referring to that SPINACH POWER seller

You're all suckers to market forces. Fuck vinyl.

You're funny

i mention this on every vinyl thread but vinyl is getting to be a fucking ripoff, especially new vinyl, don't know why all these people are getting duped into spending $25, $30, $45 on a single album, fuck that shit. and tapes are a complete joke

― marcos, Friday, March 28, 2014 10:16 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ this, not least because pressing/cutting can be kind of a crapshoot with new stuff.

But if the point of listening to vinyl is to get closer to the analog source, wouldn't something like this make more sense?

http://www.tapeproject.com/

(speaking of overpriced)