It showcases some of the most famous optical illusions, which in my opinion, is a pretty clever approach and unique way of making a music video. Anyway, see for yourselves…

I also find the music pretty good, never heard of the band before though. I’ve done some quick research and it seems that the band formed in 2003 and they released their first album, titled Dreams, in 2006 on the Asound/Bubbles label (it’s also available on LP).

Their homepage doesn’t say much about the band, as well as their album. One thing that it does say is that the band started out as an electronic dance music project, which is kinda strange as they seem to be playing some restrained, relaxed and pretty mellow indie rock now if you ask me. It seems that they’re touring Mexico at the moment. The site also features a guestbook and has a link to a merchandise shop, where you can buy some band-related clothes or order the album.

In my opinion their music has a Coldplayish kind of vibe to it. I’m planning on looking into the other tracks from their album, as I’m pretty tempted to buy it.

Comments on both the video and the music will be appreciated.

Now first and foremost, last.fm is a great tool to let people get to know what music you like listening to. It also enables you to easily find people who have similar musical tastes. It also gathers statistics according to your music and presents you with your own weekly, monthly or yearly music charts. I guess it’s also much more than that, but I’ll let you find it out for yourselves.

Anyway, how does it work? Either you download their own music player or use special software plugins for your favorite music players, like winamp, xmms, audacious (my player of choice on Linux) and many others. Some players have such plugins already built-in and so you’re ready to use them right out of the box. The software sends data about the tracks that you play back to last.fm, which in return uses it to populate your music profile. Easy as pie and you only need to spend a couple of seconds to set it up (in most cases you only need to enter your user name and password in the software).

These are the basics and I recommend that you give last.fm a try. It’s really a fun way to share information about your personal music tastes. I hope you’ll like it as much as I do.

You don’t need to register in order to see people’s profiles so if you wish to check-out my music profile, simply click here.

So what the hell was I doing? Well, for starters I finally got a turntable here in Warsaw, so I’m back on the old vinyl collecting band wagon (yay!). One can also say that I did a lot of audio research, for instance I’ve found out a great recipe for an inexpensive, but very effective vinyl record cleaning fluid. Also, the turntable that I bought had an old cartridge on it so I bought a new one and replaced it (for the first time on my own). I’ve also had to re-adjust the table, so now I’m on the fresh with how it should be done (and not just recalling it how I did it several months ago back home). This is just a taste of the material that I’ll be showcasing here on the blog real soon.

So, tomorrow I’ll be leaving Warsaw for Easter and I plan to be back here on Wednesday. The thing is that I’m not going straight home to Lebork, but to Wrzesnia, a little town in central-western Poland (the so called “Greater Poland” region), because I’ll be spending the holiday at my grandparents’ place this year. That’s why don’t expect any input from me till next week.

In other news, it would sure be great to own a digital camera… I’ve skimmed through all the posts that I wrote here and they surely look bleak without photos… (well one of the Vinyl Collecting 101 posts has some, but they didn’t come from me). I don’t want anything fancy, just something with which I could do some snapshots of my HiFi gear, records and anything which I’d deem useful to show you guys. Problem is that I don’t know much about digital cameras, so I’m open for tips and recommendations regarding this matter.

Well, I still have some packing to do, my train leaves at 10 a.m. so I can’t stay up late either. Happy Easter to all of you!

PS: The title for today’s post comes from a Steppenwolf song :)

I promised that I’ll write a few words about my new speakers so here it goes:

The JBL L-100T’s hooked up with the Sansui 9090DB sound great, especially if you’re into rock and other genres that feed on raw power and dynamics. But that doesn’t mean that they’re your straight and simple, off the block “ALL-BASS/NO-CLASS” heavy loudspeakers that techno music enthusiasts praise so much these days. The high and midrange are also top-notch, especially the titanium tweeter (that’s what the T stands for in the name). They also seem to have a lot of detail in them. I say that they “seem” to have it, because as for the sound resolution and detail, I can only estimate as of now, because my only source of sound is my computer’s soundcard (an old SoundBlaster Live! Platinum), connected with a not-so-expensive 10 meter long cable… and this really can’t qualify as a quality music source, at least not in my opinion. So I decided that until I get my hands on a decent CD player or turntable hooked up with the system, I’ll leave my review as it is now and come back to it later. I simply feel that my speaker-receiver combo gives as much as it can, but it still can’t spread out it’s wings, because of the source.

On a side note: Actually, some people (especially Hi-Fi newcomers) make the mistake of putting most of their money in the amplifier and speaker sections of their system and leave the rest of the money pile for the source-devices. It kinda should be the other way around, because even the greatest loudspeakers and amps will sound like crap if they’re fed with sound coming from a crappy source. So my word of advice is: the source device should be at least on par with the other components of your Hi-Fi system, quality wise.

Another advice: If you plan to use your SoundBlaster Live! or Audigy series soundcard as a music source and connect it to your amplifier, use the rear-speaker channel output, because it’s of higher quality than the front-speaker one. I know it sounds weird, but the signal really has much less noise in it. If I remember right, it all goes down to the cards having a separate DAC for the front and rear speaker outputs, and Creative (the makers of the SB cards) paired a higher quality one with the rear output. If you don’t believe me, try for yourself. The difference is quite perceivable and you don’t need any high class equipment to hear it.

As for the other part of this post’s title, I’ve got a slight spending dilemma on my hands. I can’t decide on what should I save up money for now. I’ve got 2 ideas: a CD player or photo camera. The CD player would go as the new main source of music in my system, as mentioned above. The photo camera would mostly be for the benefit of the blog, because I (and probably you too) seriously think that my website is really in need of some photos, especially my guide posts. I’ve often written that this lack of “visual attachments” really starts to limit me and the post content’s quality in general.

Luckily, one of my roommates also had a similar problem. He started thinking about either investing in a camera or in new speakers for his computer. You could say that I slightly “poked him” in the right direction, by saying that now he already has a pair of speakers, but he doesn’t have anything to take photos with, so he decided for the camera. He spent a few days on the net and reading photography magazines, while being on the hunt for a good camera that would be available within his budget. He settled on a Samsung (I don’t know the model) and ordered it from the net (ironically enough, the seller is located in my home town). My plan is that when he gets it, I’ll try it out and then if I’ll like it, I’ll buy the same model. I really don’t want to start learning loads of stuff about photography as I’ve learned about audio stuff through trial and error and internet researching methods. I simply want something not too costly ($200 max.) that will make good photos which I can share with other people (like you for example, my faithful readers).

That’s all for now. From the blog’s stats I see that there are more and more readers subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed, which is a good thing, as now I know that there are some folks out there who probably think that my site has some potential and is worthy of coming back to, which really is a high praise for me personally. As for the blog’s top content, my vinyl collecting guides take the top 4 places with almost no competition, so I guess that I’ll finally have to start thinking about a new guide series… Goodnight y’all .

The last thing I’d like to talk about is the “hardcore” aspect of vinyl collecting, namely finding vinyl oddities/very rare albums and releases which never made it to the digital-era music market…

What kind of rarities are we talking about ? Here are some examples that I’m aware of:

a) Album releases with different covers

Example: the original LP of the “In Through The Out Door” album by Led Zeppelin is said to have been released with 9 different cover designs. One of them is a photo of a guy in a dressed in white sitting in a bar (that’s the design that appears on most today’s CD releases of this album). There’s also a cover design showing also the guy in the bar, but it’s shown from a different perspective, having the guy in the white suit in front of you. I’ve also seen a design that looks like the album’s wrapped up in cheap and plain packing paper with the album title printed on it like it’s been stamped (I’ve also seen this cover design on the recent “mini vinyl” CD releases).

There’s also a story about a Jimi Hendrix Experience album, namely “Electric Ladyland”. It’s said that it had 2 cover designs and that the first edition of the LP cover featured Jimi with a lot of naked women. Shortly after, this design has been misteriously replaced by a “less intimidating” one (it’s totally different than the original, it shows Jimi’s head during a live performance). Also, not every country accepted the first design, so their first edition had the second design.

b) Album releases with errors made by the printing company/record manufacturer

Some collectors have managed to find some LP’s with “glitches”. For example: side B being the same as side A, less tracks on the record than stated on the album cover/label and vice versa, etc.

There’s also the story of the Rolling Stones album “Aftermath”. When it was released under the Decca music label, there was a printing glitch. One of the most famous songs which came from that album, “Paint It Black” was written “Paint It, Black” on the cover (not in the track listing on the back, but on the front side, under the album title there’s written in a smaller font: “Including Paint It, Black”) and on the record’s label. Later in an interview when asked about this small colon issue, band-member Keith Richards said “That’s not ours. Ask Decca about it. It’s their fault.”

c) Promodiscs and bootlegs

Promodiscs are vinyl records issued especially for record shops and music reporters in order to showcase the album. They are always marked that they’re for promotional causes only and that they’re not for sale, but sometimes you can find such records on sale today.

Bootlegs are illegal pressings. These are either pirated copies of original albums or material unreleased by the music artist’s label. One of the most common practice with bootleg releases was to smuggle a tape recorder to a band’s concert, record the music from the audience and then release it to the market, mostly in small quantities.

There’s also a lot of music that has never been (and maybe never will be) released on a digital medium, especially in jazz and classical music.

These aren’t the only examples of vinyl rarities. I’ve got 2 albums in my personal collection which are pretty rare. Let me tell you about them and why are they so significant:

1. Black Sabbath – “Black Sabbath” (NEMS edition)

This is a 1976 re-edition of the first Black Sabbath album by the NEMS music label. The original one was released in 1970 by Warner Brothers. Here’s the review of this particular edition taken from allmusic.com:

“British record label NEMS, which contributed both the Live at Last and Greatest Hits albums to Black Sabbath’s catalog, also issued their own versions of some of the band’s classic Warner Bros. releases in the late ’70s. Aside from the recurring misspelling of Ozzy Osbourne’s name (”Ossie”) in the liner notes of the NEMS releases, there are some interesting differences between the Warner Bros. versions and the re-releases. Most significantly different is the first album, Black Sabbath, which, in NEMS’ pressing, bears a completely different track listing than the better-known version, and the song “Wicked World” is replaced by a Crow cover called “Evil Woman.” Diehards should watch the used vinyl bins for this oddity.”

I managed to snatch this album from an internet auction for less than $5 ! I was so surprised that I even wrote to the seller about it and he replied that he’s happy that the record goes to good hands. The vinyl hunters probably didn’t know of the significance of this record or thought that it was another re-re-release of insignificant value.

2. Deep Purple – “Shades of Deep Purple” (Tetragrammaton edition)

Many people think that DP started off with EMI. Problem is that they didn’t. Their first album, titled “Shades of Deep Purple”, has been recorded and released by a small American record label Tetragrammaton. The debut was a success and pretty soon EMI came a’ knockin’ to Deep Purple with a contract offer. The band took the deal and EMI bought the rights to the first album. Funny thing is though, that until the 2000 CD remaster release, every release of “Shades of Deep Purple” under EMI was made not from the original master tapes, but from a dubbed vinyl disc ! Apparently, Tetragrammaton has kept the original studio tapes until just recently. Thanks to that, one can say that the original first edition LP is the best sounding one.

Anyway, apart from the story above, it is the very first edition of the LP, so it’s pretty rare nowadays.

That’s all on this subject for now, I guess. Final advice: always try and look for some information on a particular release before discarding it, even when it doesn’t look too promising. Many collectors found real vinyl treasures by sticking to this method.

As this is the end of the post series, I’d like to apologize to you that I haven’t showed you many images or any images of my personal stuff in fact. That’s because I have very limited photo capabilities here, because right now I’m here in Warsaw and my whole record collection is at my home in Lebork and I don’t own a photo camera.

I plan to update my posts with photos when I get ahold of a camera and when I’ll be at home and have enough spare time.

Also, I know that I don’t have many links in my posts to topic-related sites. That’s because I know that not every reader comes from the United States or from the UK or some other country and as for that I advise you to google around yourselves for some local record collecting communities or forums.

Today we’ll concentrate on taking care of our record collection…

1. Storing vinyl records

ALWAYS keep your vinyl records in a vertical standing position.
NEVER stack them on top of each other!

Horizontal stacking can do serious damage to the vinyl discs, mainly because of the weight pressure that the records on top impose on the rest of the stack. It could also damage the album covers.

The proper way is to keep them on a shelf, a rack or something like that. LPs have a fixed size, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Some people put their collection on whole shelves (like 100+ records per shelf) and some divide their shelves into small “boxes” in order to further reduce the pressure that the records induce on themselves.

Another issue is keeping your records in a proper environment. The basement is a big no-no in most cases, because of the level of moisture found there (if you’re one of those people who adapt their basements as living rooms then it should be OK). It’s best to keep the records in a place where you have approx. normal room temperature and humidity levels and if you need to store them not in your living space, try the attic. It’s always better than a typical basement where the conditions are simply too damp, but if your attic accumulates a lot of heat, i.e. during summer then it also won’t be a good storage place. As for temperature issues in general, avoid having your collection exposed to direct sunlight, because you can easily warp your record thanks to that. You should also try to make sure that your records aren’t exposed to cigarette smoke, as the nicotine in it can also partly damage vinyl surfaces. So, to sum up vinyl records storage: heat and dampness are vinyl’s greatest environmental enemies. Keep that in mind.

2. Record preservation

I’ll need to divide this part into 2 subparts, as it’s crucial to keep things proper on both ends of this topic.

The general rule of thumb for records is: ALWAYS handle your records by using the edge and label (center) areas. Avoid touching the grooves with your fingers.

a) Record cleaning

In order to keep your records collection in tip-top shape, you need to keep them clean. Dust, soil, so called “finger oils”, etc. are the worst enemies of your records.

There are 2 ways of cleaning a record: the dry and wet method.

The dry method’s all about brushing off the dust and small particles off your records. In order to do that, I advise you to get a special record brush made of carbon-fiber, velvet pad (some turntable companies like Reloop also manufacture those) or a record cleaning cloth which in most cases is simply a microfiber cloth (you can find those even under kitchen cleaning appliances).

As for the brushes, I personally prefer the velvet pad type, because after a year or so of use, the carbon-fibers tend to fall off the brush (sometimes even onto your records and then they’re hard to get out as they’re “micro thin”) and tend to get all mangled up. Velvet pads are easier to clean too.

How to use your record cleaning brush or cloth ?

Most people do it like this:

1. Put the record on the turntable and let it spin (play it without putting the needle on the record). You can also manually rotate the turntable’s platter in most cases (some turntables prevent you from doing that or get their auto-return/auto-start mechanisms locked-up for example).

2. Gently press the brush or cloth into the record’s groove.

3. After a few rotations, sweep the brush away and scrape the collected dust from the brush (use a credit-card, a brush-holder or something similar).

4. Repeat the process until you can’t see any remaining dust on the record’s side, then flip the record and do the same with the second side.

And that’s it. Bear in mind though to always do this in a well lit place, because it’s pretty hard to spot dust in the dark.

Some people also dry-clean their records not on their turntables, but on some solid and soft surfaces, like a clean, lint-free cloth or a sheet of plastic, but I personally recommend the turntable method for most cases.

Now let’s talk about the wet method. It’s called “wet”, because it means to employ some kind of fluid in order to wash your records (Yes, you CAN wash records).

There are a lot of ways for wet-cleaning your records. There are companies who market “special record cleaning fluids” and there are also known ways to make your own “special fluid” at home.

It’s your call if you’ll buy fluids or make them, but if you intend to buy, I need to advise you that those flasks in most cases aren’t cheap (I for example would never pay $10 for a small 4 oz. flask, but there are also better deals out there so keep a look-out for those too).

As for making your own record cleaning fluid, distilled water is your best bet. Some collectors say that a 70% isoprophyl alcohol solution also gives good results, but there’s also a camp of enthusiasts that say never to use an alcohol based fluid on your records. Some also mix those fluids in order to have a better, “special mixture”, for example mixing some dish washing fluid with distilled water is said to do wonders for vinyl records.

I can’t personally recommend any method, because I haven’t done any extensive wet-cleaning myself yet (only tried some of the mentioned methods on a few records), so I still don’t have any “personal best” solution for the wet method.

OK, now that you have a fluid, how to wash your records ?

Some people dip their velvet pad record brushes in the record cleaning fluid and then use the spinning-on-turntable method.

Some people take a cloth (can be microfiber or simply 100% cotton, like a white cotton T-shirt), put a some fluid on the cloth and wash the record’s grooves in a spiral form from the center to the rim.

Do not soak the record with your fluid. Just get it “wet enough” to get the dirt off.

It’s also essential to take your time with wet-cleaning and taking EXTREME caution for not getting any fluid on the record’s label, because the paper might peel off or get stained.

After the wet cleaning is done, leave the record in a plate rack or something in order for it to dry off (NEVER play a wet record! It could get disastrous for both your record AND turntable).

b) Stylus cleaning

You also need to take care of your turntable’s record stylus (it’s the small needle that extends under the cartridge that’s mounted to the turntable’s arm).

If you have access to it, you should follow the directions in your phono cartridge’s manual. If not then here’s some general steps:

Dry-clean it with a special stylus brush or any other clean, stiff, short-pile brush (be very cautious while doing this) in a rear-to-front type of manner (brush the stylus towards you).

In order to wet-clean your stylus, use a special stylus cleaning fluid with a stylus brush or use a cotton swab dipped in a 70% isoprophyl alcohol solution.

Don’t try and make your own stylus cleaning solution, because in most cases you’ll end up leaving some solution residue on the stylus.

I recommend that you wet-clean your stylus and records occasionally, but dry-clean them EVERY TIME you play a record in order to ensure long-lasting life for both your records and your stylus. Depending on the amount of time you spend on listening to records, you should also replace your stylus with a new one from time to time, as when it’s in a “worn out” state, besides putting more wear on your records, the playback sound quality also suffers.

Companies who market the special fluids and brushes also sell them as so called kits or packages, which in most cases can be lighter on the wallet then buying all the “special” components separately.

There are also special record cleaning machines which wet-clean the records for you and dry them off by using a small vacuum. They’re very expensive so I only can recommend them to people who have the cash for it. I prefer sticking to the manual methods.

3. Record covers and sleeves

In order to preserve album covers, it’s best to put them in a plastic sleeve (it’s the same idea as book collectors put sleeves on the books in order to keep the book’s cover in shape). As for the inner sleeves in which the record resides, it’s best to keep the original sleeve, but put the record in a separate plastic cover and put that in an acid-free paper record sleeve.

You can either buy such plastic and paper sleeves or make them on your own by buying whole sheets of those materials (you can buy the thick plastic in a garden shop for example).

4. Turntable related stuff

The biggest downside of vinyl is that it’s all about physical contact as the stylus rides on the grooves. Thanks to that, wear and tear from simply playing is inevitable, so in order to extend the life of your records, you need to minimize the factors that cause this. The first one is to keep your records clean. The second is to keep your turntable in proper shape.

It all goes down to proper alignment of your turntable, which amounts to: proper speed accuracy, tonearm/cartridge balance and alignment, the state of your stylus, etc.

I won’t cover these topics right now. Instead, I’ll do it in a future post series regarding turntables, so please stay tuned for that.

That’s all for today. I think that the next part will be the last one of this post series. I still haven’t decided what will be after the record collecting post series, because I’m not so sure if I’ll be able to start the turntable series right now (it’s a much more extensive topic).

PS: I’d really love to hear some comments from you guys. It boggles my mind that an average of 30 people visit my blog daily and I’ve yet to see a comment on my posts. Such reader-author interaction would be very encouraging for me and perhaps also for other readers…

UPDATE:
The 4th and last part of the series is complete. Click here to go to it.

It’s an article from the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, titled “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”. Here’s a short review:

It’s author, Joe Gross, makes a very elaborate study on modern record loudness levels and tries to answer the question as to how and why does today’s popular music can be exhausting to us, the listeners.

Joe touches the subject on both sides: from the music enthusiast’s and from the sound engineer’s (a.k.a. “the expert’s”) point of view.

Read on for some interesting excerpts from the mentioned article…

“(…) there are millions of copies of CDs being released that are physically exhausting listeners, most of whom probably don’t know why their ears and brains are feeling worn out.”

“For the past 10 or so years, artists and record companies have been increasing the overall loudness of pop and rock albums, using ever increasing degrees of compression during mastering, altering the properties of the music being recorded. Quiet sounds and loud sounds are now squashed together, decreasing the recording’s dynamic range, raising the average loudness as much as possible.”

“The idea is that louder recordings automatically sound better on low-quality reproduction systems, but this isn’t really true in practice. MP3 players such as iPods have their own compressors and limiters, further reducing the dynamic range of recordings, as do computers. A CD doesn’t have to be mastered loud; the iPod can make it as loud as everything else it plays.”

“(…) It is entirely possible that anyone younger than 18 reading this has no idea what we’re talking about. They may not bother to buy CDs anymore, such is the availability of MP3s single downloads. To them, popular music has always been hyper-compressed, square-wave stuff, able to punch through background noise with a single snare drum hit, clipping all over the place.

The article’s very long, but very well written and although it mentions things like: dynamics compression, sound clipping and RMS, you don’t need to be very familiar to all the technical knowledge beforehand, because the author explains it all rather nicely so that every reader can understand.

So, after saying that, click here to go and read the whole article.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

What does it mean ? It’s very simple actually. Just think logically: how can a small iPod surpass or even be equal in sound reproduction quality to, let’s say a home theater system ? The stratling thing is, most youngsters think that portable equipment really sounds THE SAME or if not then it can’t be such a big diff…

In my opinion, such a way of thinking about audio doesn’t even need a commentary, so let’s leave it at that (I wouldn’t want to make new enemies ;)).

Anyway, check the scoop out for yourself by reading this news article:
“Thousands of songs in your pocket: An audiophile’s nightmare?”

Also, the CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) just recently started a campaign called “The Great Audio Experience“. It’s main goal is to popularize great sounding audio devices and it’s especially dedicated to the younger generation. It even got support from the band 3 Doors Down. You can check it out at the GAE’s official website.

Today I’ll concentrate on the aspects of buying a vinyl record…

1. Where to buy a vinyl record ?

Check around your local record shops, pawn shops, thrift shops, flea markets, etc.
Also, scout around some yard or garage sales. You’re bound to find some guy or gal selling some records there.

You can also search around the internet. There’s tons of vinyl sellers on eBay for example. Some of them are mass-sellers who simply scout out for records locally and put them out on a net auction. The other type of eBay vinyl seller you may encounter is a collector who got lazy or bored with the stuff or those who “inherited” a record collection somehow and try to make a profit out of it (collectors are the best sellers if you want to have some guarantee that the album you buy is in a good shape).

2. Record grading systems

Records and their covers are often graded by sellers in order to describe their general shape.

There doesn’t exist any standarized grading system, but record sellers tend to use the same or often similar scheme than others, so record grading systems in general are very similar.

As a general rule, the grade of the record is listed first, followed by the grade of the cover or record sleeve (if no cover is available).

Here’s an example record grading system from the “Record Collector Rare Price Guide 2006″ magazine:

MINT(M): The record itself is in brand new condition with no surface marks or deterioration in sound quality. The cover and any extra items such as the lyric sheet, booklet or poster are in perfect condition. Records advertised as Sealed or Unplayed should be Mint.

EXCELLENT(EX): The record shows some signs of having been played, but there is very little lessening in sound quality. The cover and packaging might have slight wear and/or creasing.

VERY GOOD(VG): The record has obviously been played many times, but displays no major deterioration in sound quality, despite noticeable surface marks and the occasional light scratch. Normal wear and tear on the cover or extra items, without any major defects, is acceptable.

GOOD(G): The record has been played so much that the sound quality has noticeably deteriorated, perhaps with some distortion and mild scratches. The cover and contents suffer from folding, scuffing of edges, spine splits, discoloration, etc.

FAIR(F): The record is still just playable but has not been cared for properly and displays considerable surface noise; it may even jump.
The cover and contents will be torn, stained and/or defaced.

POOR(P): The record will not play properly due to scratches, bad surface noise, etc. The cover and contents will be badly damaged or partly missing.

BAD(B): The record is unplayable or might even be broken, and is only of use as a collection-filler.

There are also some other grade considerations (although they aren’t as popular as the ones listed above):

NEAR MINT(NM): A nearly perfect record. Many dealers won’t give a grade higher than this implying (perhaps correctly) that no record is ever truly perfect. It’s considered as an “in between” grade for M and EX.

STILL SEALED(SS): A never-opened record. Still in it’s original manufacture seal. Take caution with this rating, because some record dealers reseal records and then claim that they’re of SS status.

Some collectors/sellers also use a + or – notation next to the grades in order to widen the grading scale even more. For example: a VG+ grade means that the record is somewhere between the VG and EX ratings.

eBay tip: If you find a seller that has a lot of albums that you’re interested in and it’s the first time you’re buying something from him, DON’T buy more than one or 2 albums. Nevermind if the seller has thousands of positive feedback from previous buyers, you need to check him out yourself. I’m saying this because some people grade their records in a more consequent way (that’s good) and some in a easy-going type way (i.e. the seller grades a “poor” or “fair” disc as a “very good” disc). So to sum things up, my advice is that you need to check the seller out if he’s a good and reliable one before buying a load of albums of off him.

eBay tip 2: If possible, try not to take the risk of buying records from people who, for example don’t own a turntable (they can’t possibly grade them properly), although many established and esteemed record sellers tend to grade their records visually, so be prepared for that.

3. Drillholes and cut-corners

You can sometimes find records which have a drillhole made right thru the record’s label or one of the record cover’s corners. You can also find records in such a state that one of the cover’s corners has a single scissor-cut on it or it’s been simply cut off. Record store owners often did that to records that they sold on a discount offer.

People who sell vinyl records online in most cases inform the potential buyer about this while decribing the state of the record and cover. Sometimes they describe it with some code-like shortcuts (like CC for Cut-Corner).

Such records are in most cases of lesser value than records without “discount modifications”.

4. The record’s edition

It’s up to you if you want to buy new vinyl pressings or used ones.

If you don’t like the whole idea of “vinyl hunting” then it may be a better resolve to just look for new releases.

Modern pressings or re-releases of vinyl tend to be worse than the originals, because often the record companies cut the vinyl master disc using not the original master tapes, but a digitally remastered tape which the company used to issue a new remastered CD release (I’ll try and touch the “original release vs. remaster” subject more in a future post).

I personally recommend looking into the catalogs of some audiophile labels (you can find some of them under the blog’s Links page).

You could also search for a company who specialises in releasing new vinyl record pressings using the original master tapes of an album (for example: Simply Vinyl).

If we’re talking about buying used vinyl, then it may be helpful to determine if our record is a 1st edition or a re-release or if it came from the original label.

For most cases, you simply need to check the label of the record and it’s catalog number. The catalog number can usually be found somewhere on the cover of the record or on the record label. Then you can compare it to the listings at allmusic.com (preffered way) or Discogs.com (also good, but not as good as the prior).

How to find the catalog number listings ? It’s pretty simple. Let’s take allmusic.com for example. You go to the website, type in the artist’s name in the search box, after you get to the artist’s webpage, click on “Discography” and choose your album. There, under the review you can find the various years of edition, the labels who originally released the album and it’s catalog number. Be aware though that allmusic.com doesn’t have perfect listings and you may come across that the catalog number just isn’t there. If that’s the case, try to google around using your catalog number. In most cases, it should be pretty unique so if anybody talked about or listed his collection on the web, you’ll find out and you’ll know that it was the same copy as yours.

Sometimes you can easily determine if the record is not a 1st edition type. Some record labels (Atlantic Records for instance) often added something like “-2″ or “B” next to the original 1st edition catalog number to specify that it’s a 2nd edition or later re-release.

Some later editions are recognised by changes to the label on the record or the record cover in comparison to the original release.

5. Mono/Stereo/Quadro

Some records (particularly those released in the 50’s and early 60’s) have been released first as a mono recording and shortly after that re-released as a stereo record. Some also record labels had simultaneously released a mono and stereo version record. Today, the mono editions are rarer, because after that most records were only stereo.

Quadrophonic records are a completely different matter and I’ll be covering this topic in a future post.

6. Origin of manufacture

This isn’t a well discussed topic in the record collector’s world (IMHO) and I’ve already elaborated on this topic in a previous post, which you can find here.

If you have the opportunity, try and obtain a copy of an album, for example one from the USA and the other from Germany and compare how they sound. Maybe you’ll back-up my humble theory ;)

That’s all for today. The next installment of the post series will cover record preservation. Stay tuned!

UPDATE:
I’ve completed the 3rd part. Click here to read it.

As this subject is quite a comprehensive one, it looks like I won’t be able to include every important aspect in a single post. That’s why I’ll divide it to seperate parts, which I’ll be posting in the following days in a consecutive (I hope) manner.

On a side note: consider these series of posts as sets of handful tips or a “beginner’s guide”, dedicated for the most part to people who are new to this topic, but I can’t promise that vinyl veterans won’t find anything interesting for themselves.

The question for today’s part is: “What kinds of vinyl records are there anyway?”

For starters, let’s clasify the numerous instances and parameters of vinyl records:

1. Speed – there are 16,33,45 and 78 RPM (Rotation Per Minute) records

These are the speeds at which a record must be played on your turntable in order to properly listen to the recorded music. 16 and 78 RPM discs are very rare these days as (for the most part) they were made back in the days where vinyl was a ‘yet to be standarized’ format (up to the early 50’s). 16 RPM is the rarest of the bunch, while 78 RPM has a cult status of it’s own as even some modern DJ turntables have the capability of playing these records.

The most popular formats are 33 and 45 RPM discs.

2. Record size – 7,10 or 12 inches

As vinyl records are round, we denote their size through their radius.

7 and 10 inch discs are the sizes most commonly used by the so called “single-play recordings” (SP for short), more commonly known as “singles”.

12 inch discs is the most common size for “long-play recordings” (LP for short).

What does LP and SP mean in practice ? Read on:

3. Music time

This is the classification scheme that ties both the record’s size and playing speed. Why ? Because the amount of music included on a vinyl disc stricly depends on those 2 factors. It’s quite a simple principle: the smaller the size and the higher the RPM speed, the faster the turntable’s needle will ride on the disc’s grooves and the faster it will come to the end of the side.

The vague name of “long-play recording” simpy means that you can play a recording for a “long time” (it became a pretty relative term in comparison to tape and CD time capabilities). LPs can cover up to about 25 minutes of music per side and as vinyl records are double-sided, an LP discs music coverage can amount up to 50 minutes of music, although from my experience most LPs were released with up to 40-45 minutes of music. All LPs are 33 RPM speed records and have the size of 12 inches.

‘Single-play recordings’ on the other hand can’t be classified as easily as LPs are. SP means that a record can be played a “single time”, meaning that it mostly includes up to 2 tracks/songs for each side.

3.1. The most popular size format for SPs is the 7 inch one and most 7 inch records are of 45 RPM speed. These can amount up to approx. 6 minutes of music per side.

The 7 inch records often differ from the other sizes, because of the radius of the record’s center hole. Almost all pre-80’s 7 inch SPs has a hole with a bigger diameter than the turntable’s spindle. In order to play such a record, you need a kind of spindle diameter extender, which you put on the turntable’s spindle prior to putting on a 7 inch record. In most cases it’s just a round piece of plastic or aluminium with the exact diameter of the 7 inch record hole, but with a hole of the diameter of the turntable’s record spindle on the inside of the piece.

Nowadays, most 7 inch records have a regular (turntable spindle sized) hole in their center.

3.2. There are also 12 inch SPs, which are often called “Maxi-SP”. These are mostly used in the case of songs (or a pair of tracks) which exceed the 6 minute limitation of 7 inch records. The play time here can amount up to approx. 12 minutes per side.

3.3. The 10 inch is the least-popular size for SPs. It can be considered as a bridge between the play time capabilities of 7 and 12 inch SPs.

There are also SPs which have a 33 RPM speed, while still preserving the short music time. This is achieved by cutting a slightly wider than regular groove in the disc. Why do they release such singles ? I really don’t know.

4. Record material types

Most vinyl records have a black color, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only form available.

4.1. Record companies sometimes release a limited batch of so called ‘”color vinyl” records.
These records can be purple, yellow, white, blue, grey, red, etc., a combination of colors or even transparent!

Here’s an example of a color vinyl Maxi-SP:

Nowadays, many DJs release their works on color vinyl and in most cases it’s not just a “limited series” anymore.

4.2. There are also vinyl records in the form of so called “picture discs”.

Picture discs simply include a picture or some form of art on it’s sides instead of the regular black color and because of that, such records often have a transparent cover (instead of a regular one) or are simply sold in a transparent record sleeve, without a cover. Most picture discs were very rare and limited releases, but they’re becoming increasingly popular nowadays.

Here’s an example of a picture disc album released by Depeche Mode:

5. Record mass

The mass of vinyl records is also an important factor. Most SPs have roughly the same mass.

Most LPs weigh about 120 gramms, but some audiophile-class releases (or re-releases) are often cut on heavier vinyl, ranging from a weight of 150 up to 200 gramms! Why is this so significant ? Because the more does a record weigh, the more volume it has, thus the grooves are deeper and are much less prone to physical damage. Also,thanks to the deeper grooves, heavier vinyl records often sound better than regular vinyl cuts.

This concludes today’s part of the post series. The next one will cover tips on buying vinyl records. Stay tuned!

PS: I apologize to everyone for not making it this time with my “post per 3 days minimum” disciplinary obligation, but I’ve had a tough week and I simply didn’t have enough spare time to write a new post. I’ll try to make it up to you by having my next post tomorrow.

UPDATE:
I’ve posted the 2nd part. You can find it by clicking here.