Vinyl Records

Wax & Beans in Bury Chat about new vinyl releases for this week 18th of Aug

Ive been using a Microlinear AT VM540ML Cartridge & Stylus for about 8 months now and ive found them to be not only very fragile in that trying to clean it is almost impossible without bending it slightly. The sheer amount of fluff they attract is a massive amount from seemingly new vinyl. They are also extremely likely to pick every pop and click up from the record. So ive got used to it as long as It isnt loud when the music is on.

I have a huge problem. I want to listen to my vinyl records but at the same time i want to keep them in mint condition to preserve their value.

I couldn't find a solid answer but if i take good care of my vinyls could they be as nearly as valuable as unopened vinyls?

How do you deal with this dilemma of wanting to preserve a record’s value while also wanting to enjoy and listen to it?

The turntable in question is a heavily modified Thorens, purchased from a radio station in the mid 2000s. I tried to keep it as original as possible. The only thing replaced was the arm.

Edit: Link the table that was used as a base for the broadcasting turntable.

I got the rt82 for the option of upgrading along with great reviews.

I chose the pp444 preamp since i hear its a good budget preamp and also heard its more forgiving to use a cheap preamp with good quality speakers.

That said, what are some recommendations for a budget pair of speakers that will be good enough show the difference in listening to vinyl and digital music?

This record is one of the first, if not the first record I bought with my own money. It survived garage parties, university dorm rooms, many moves and still plays all the way through. The surface crackle is like an old friend by now. I should buy a new copy, but somehow that would be a betrayal of an old friend.

So what is your oldest treasure in your collection. That one record that never gets culled in a cleanup?

#vinyl

Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet - my favorite of his excellent Prestige titles.

#vinyl

I started collecting almost 3 years ago when I kept popping into a record store @waxandbeans. Couldnt afford a decent turntable until recently though so I waited. Money was all over the place so I bought and sold but Ive got back all the ones I sold. For me its a combination of the sound quality and The local community on it.

But what got you into Vinyl ?

A friend asked me about how the history of vinyl formats and I wrote up this summary for them. I thought it was worth sharing here, if nothing else for the Techmoan link:

So, we started with wax cylinders. Then we moved to discs made of shellac. They were 10" and generally spun at (or near, as this video indicates) 78 RPM. But they didn't hold a lot of music. I think 10-12 minutes per side. The shellac was also not a great material, as it was brittle and not very high resolution, so there was a lot of background noise relative to vinyl.

What we have today is sort of a hybrid of all kinds of things. The vinyl material has been used on 10" records, even back then, and all of the 10" disks I have are modern vinyl 33RPM discs, made small mainly for novelty. The material is separate from the speed.

In the late 40s there was a format war between RCA and Columbia. I've put a short summary below, but far and away the best source to learn about this if you have 30 minutes is this video from the always entertaining Techmoan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbFgVjijrHI&t=1s

RCA developed the 45 7" AND with it, the stacking changer. The idea was that you'd have an album (just like old photo albums, I'm sure you've seen these) with a stack of 4-6 7" 45s, each holding a song, and the changer would drop them and play one at a time to play however many you had in a row. Then you could flip the whole stack over and play the other side. PROS: You get the benefit of either playing a single track or the equivalent of a whole album and 45RPM still sounded very good, better than shellac 78s and better than 33, though I doubt it was super obvious on the gear at the time. CONS: However, the number of discs and extra packaging to hold the same amount of songs as a 12" 33 meant they cost more. Plus you only got 5 minutes or so per side. Great for pop and blues, but quite limiting, and useless for classical.

Columbia's solution was the 12" 33rpm disc that could play up to 20 minutes or so. PRO: Longer run time, which even works for classical, one disc, still great sound quality, cheaper to produce. CONS: Larger, need to buy the whole album, but much, to be honest, but they do lack the punchiness of the best 45s.

So we ended up keeping both formats once players started being able to play both speeds - 7" 45s for singles, 12" 33s for albums. In the 70s they figured out that you could do long disco songs on a 12" 45 and it became the format for DJs and then of course the 12" 45 was a popular single format for all genres in the '80s.

Side note: there were also 16rpm 7" discs used for voice which didn't need high resolution. You got the longer running time with an inexpensive small disc or two that you could even package with a book "and turn the page when Tinkerbell rings her magic bell" but other than my grade-school experience with these, I don't know much about that format.

#vinyl

I got a Big Fudge kit with the velvet brush and I got to say its the best so far after 2 kits with cloths that just seem to get dirty too quickly. I think the cloths must put the dirt into other grooves of the records where as the velvet brushes just brush the dirt along the top of it and out the record.

Id like to hear what everyone else uses ?

So Ive joined Kbin in the end ( @Whiskeyomega@kbin.social and setup a few magazines (New name for subs)

You can include the user group in your posts from here and it will post there. For example a Vinyl post from here with @vinyl
will post to /m/vinyl

https://kbin.social/m/vinyl
@vinyl

https://kbin.social/m/vinylreleases
@vinylreleases

https://kbin.social/m/PCGaming
@PCGaming

https://kbin.social/m/asrock
@asrock

#Vinyl #PCgaming