For the uneducated on pressings help me out. How does one know where an album is pressed? Especially if you happen upon it in a record store and want to buy. For instance my daughter bought me a Remastered 180g of Meddle for my birthday. I'm looking at the cover now and have no idea where it is pressed.
I'm pretty sure Kurt is gonna send you to discog.com. https://www.discogs.com/master... Finding your version from the 609 listed for meddle (I think the catalog number is the easy way),
and then knowing what's "good"... gonna need his insight on that one.
I gave up on that and went to hdtracks.com and bought the 24 / 96 wav file. I had a 1974 German pressing I sold long ago that was very nice. Still have the rip of it though. This wav file makes me not care anymore.
For the uneducated on pressings help me out. How does one know where an album is pressed? Especially if you happen upon it in a record store and want to buy. For instance my daughter bought me a Remastered 180g of Meddle for my birthday. I'm looking at the cover now and have no idea where it is pressed.
Both pressed in the same plant in The Netherlands. You will not find this information printed anywhere on the album. It is the matrix / runout numbers in the inner dead wax that will tell you were it is from, in this particular case.
You really would need to look it up at discogs to find out. It is the most reliable source available. It helps when out doing actual crate digging. I use it to cross check listings by the major on line retailers to find out which particular one a company is selling.
I've been active there for nearly 7 years now and only know what I know as I stumble on to it. It has been a very steep and frustrating learning curve. But in order to list something for sale, you must know this stuff. There are 1,200 subs for TDSOTM and Sgt Pepper comes in currently at 963. The Wall has over 800. In can take hours to narrow one of these down and sometimes what you have isn't even listed yet and then you have to create your own entry. I have a Great Britain / UK repressing of The Beatles / White Album that has yet to be listed. Haven't got time to figure that one out, so I have long since moved on to others that I can find.
Sometimes you will see where it was pressed printed on the cover or on a hype sticker. This is rare however. More often, in retail stores you will see the country it was pressed , such as The Czech Republic, Germany and most recently Italy is showing up more and more and these Italian pressings are generally very good so far although I do not yet know much about the pressing company. German pressings are almost always good or at the very least worth taking a chance on.
There is lots of detective work involved in reading these matrix numbers which may tell you where it was pressed, by who, who cut the lacquer and in some cases which lathes were used to cut the lacquers. Even the cutting date may be part of it. But there are no industry standards for this. Each company has there own coding system. And different companies used different plants belonging to other companies as well. A&M for example never had any of its own plants, they got farmed out to Columbia, RCA, Capitol, Decca and a host of other independents. Atlantic which did not own their own presses, generally has the pressing plant codes on the actual label at the end of the label number. SP for Specialty, MO for Monarch (which is the one for the best early US Zep pressings) and many others. My first choice for Columbia is the Terre Haute pressings and they pressed for everyone including the Columbia House copies which are actually very good as a rule. Capitol Records is LOS for Los Angeles and JAC for their Jacksonville, Ill. plant which served the bulk of the Midwest for major and lesser releases. I'm just scratching the surface off of the top of my head. And for more fun, most of these places have been closed for decades. We are not even dealing with the 21st Century plants in the above, let alone foreign pressings. And again, while this may sound like I know a lot about this stuff, there are plenty of people who have forgotten more about this stuff than I will ever learn.
This user has a decent list of markings and reference links for going really deep into the weeds.
Without discogs, you are back in the stone age of the 60's through the 10's just buying an album and hoping that it sounds good, never knowing about the food chain until after you open it up and buy it and even then, not knowing much about it. One the first things I did learn back in the old daze was that when a pressing had STERLING pressed in the dead wax, it was more than likely going to be good. But that is about all I learned up until recently and now I know why STERLING was meaningful.
HTH
Edit: you have a resampled copy of the most recent treatment of Meddle (10/19/2021) from HDTracks on that thumb drive. I took it down from 24 / 96 wav to 16 /48 for size purposes.
For the uneducated on pressings help me out. How does one know where an album is pressed? Especially if you happen upon it in a record store and want to buy. For instance my daughter bought me a Remastered 180g of Meddle for my birthday. I'm looking at the cover now and have no idea where it is pressed.
I'm pretty sure Kurt is gonna send you to discog.com.
Finding your version from the 609 listed for meddle (I think the catalog number is the easy way), and then knowing what's "good"... gonna need his insight on that one.
For the uneducated on pressings help me out. How does one know where an album is pressed? Especially if you happen upon it in a record store and want to buy. For instance my daughter bought me a Remastered 180g of Meddle for my birthday. I'm looking at the cover now and have no idea where it is pressed.
Here's how I'm navigating the vinyl mine field.
I have a long, emotional history with NAD. My late great friend Steve Hoffpauir knew a lot about electronics and introduced me to the company.
He and I spend many many days shooting the breeze starting in eleventh grade listening to Todd R, including just deciding to drive the 2 hours from his house to my dorm when I told him I had "Back to the Bars" - so we could listen to it. And then we turned around and went back to his place.
Every one of the dozens of Todd shows I've seen, Steve has been standing next to me (although he was only there in spirit).
More than a decade ago his depression got the better of him, or his new wife shot him.*
And so now my home has almost nothing but NAD equipment in it. Today, this showed up. First disc I picked out of the shelf completely at random - "Todd."
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*The story goes that he must've shot himself in the chest, then the shoulder, then into the mouth. (Really? I figure the first shot makes you go - "HEY! That hurts!" but then the shoulder and then the mouth? C'mon.)
And the new wife conveniently didn't go to her usual lunch place that day, but "went to the bookstore" instead. I called the police and they assured me that they were investigating everyone. But that still wouldn't bring him back. RIP, brother.
Went to my local shop to get something as a gift. Sitting in the discount rack: TODD for 20% off. Owner assures me that it's a brand new pressing. Sweet. Get it home and it's kinda muddy. Turns out this is a known problem with this pressing. Dammit. I want everything to be as advertised so I don't waste money on stuff like this. Yes, I should've looked it up while in the store, but no - I shouldn't have had to look it up in the store. He shouldn't be selling junk.
As a buyer of vinyl, you need to become familiar with who is doing what to the pressings. When I looked at the page, the first alarm was Friday Music. The have more misses than hits, much more. The second and biggest alarm, red flag was Pressed by Rainbo Records. They are were one of the worst pressing plants ever in the business. Rainbo-Records The reviews of this POS operation. You will find no love lost at the news of its closing.
Record shops cannot return defective or bad pressings anymore. They must eat them the way the present business model is structured. More than likely the shop owner knew it was junk, but rolled the dice on turning it since he was stuck with it. Took a chance of some dweeb with a crappy rig buying it who doesn't know any better or risk loosing a potentially good customer. There are also sellers on Discogs who know their stuff is not up to snuff and in some cases will refund the purchase price and tell you to keep the record in order to avoid the dreaded negative feedback. That has happened to me twice, so far.
One reason I buy a lot of new sealed stuff from either Amazon, PopMarket, Acoustic Sounds or Music Direct. They will take back defective and replace or refund.
You need to do your homework in advance and research the good pressings from the bad ones and learn how to identify them, just out of pure self defense. Universal Music Group (UMG) now owns most of the publishing rights of all music and they decide who does what these days. Even the Beatles and now Pink Floyd have been relegated to GZM plants. The 2018 remix of Animals, pressed by GZM had a customer rejection rate exceeding 40% due to flaws. They screwed up All Things Must Pass, Billy Joel's big box set, and especially The Moody Blues 50th of Days Of Future Passed. About a 90% junk rate.
FWIW, I'll dig up my copies of Todd and see how good they are and let you know if I find that they are worthy to pass on to someone else.
I'm more than happy to share my knowledge to help you or anyone else to navigate the mine fields.
Looks to be in NM condition as in unplayed although I'm sure it had a couple of spins. Didn't need to here in Cleveland. Todd broke nationally from here. Todd was played everyday on some station for years. Todd is still god here. Cover very conservative VG. No poster. I'll get to it this weekend.
Went to my local shop to get something as a gift. Sitting in the discount rack: TODD for 20% off. Owner assures me that it's a brand new pressing. Sweet.
Get it home and it's kinda muddy. Turns out this is a known problem with this pressing. Dammit. I want everything to be as advertised so I don't waste money on stuff like this.
Yes, I should've looked it up while in the store, but no - I shouldn't have had to look it up in the store. He shouldn't be selling junk.
But, man, I hate rebuying my old record collection.
look at it this way, you get to re-live the buying experience from years gone by.
my problem is I love the buying experience so much that I pickup vinyl too often and don't get the time to sit down and listen to what I bought. I probably have about 50 LP's that I've bought, cleaned and waiting for a spin.
Got a new copy of Something/Anything the other day, and MAN does it sound great. Scored a ton of old vinyl from a place I’m visiting: Running on Empty, Late for the Sky, Tormato, Going for the One, and Silk Degrees. Total $27.
But, man, I hate rebuying my old record collection.
Nice haul. I've got 3 or 4 copies of Something / Anything as well as 3 or 4 of Back to the Bars. Have at least one primo copy of Todd. I'll have to get to them soon to figure out which one's are in the best shape. You got my hi rez download file set of AWATS with that thumb drive I sent out to you all. That was resampled down to 16 / 48. I can send you the original 24 / 96 version if you are curious.
Yep. While I still have most of my original collection, there are some that I let get away too soon and have bought again. But and it is a big but, I'm now looking even harder at buying hi rez files instead of trying to find decent vinyl copies. Always wanted Fresh Cream and finally bought the files instead of a vinyl copy. And instead of replacing my beat to death copy of Wheels Of Fire, I got that in files as well. Happy with both purchases. Earlier this week, I scored the Deep Purple In Rock files @ 24 / 96 for $12. Great googidity moogity !! Child In Time never sounded so good. Had been looking for a good vinyl copy for years and this was too good to pass up. Buying vinyl is too big of a crap shoot, new or used. Every once in awhile someone does vinyl really well and I can say without hesitation that if you want vinyl copies of Led Zep, the current copies that WalMart is selling as stickered exclusives are the best copies available, at least through the first 5 albums. You will be amazed and also very pleased with the SQ and the price. You do have to buy them in the stores because even if you order them online from WM, you may not get the stickered copies which based upon reports are somehow different and not necessarily as good. I can also highly recommend WM's BJ's Piano Man. Best I have ever heard that as well even though it is on colored vinyl of which I am not a fan of. Beware of anything that is pressed in the Czech Republic by GMZ though. You will more than likely be very disappointed with warps, glitches and noise. The LZ and BJ albums that I mentioned are pressed in Germany.
Not having the physical for all the touchy feely and the artwork is not a big deal. I'm downsizing and that part has to be let go of. Long ago I stated that I do not collect albums and CD's anymore. I collect sound.
The ritual of actually playing the vinyl is still part of the equation because of the process of ripping it. It still amazes me that something so basic and simple can yield such excellent results as I go through that process. Now it is the satisfaction of having made the best possible sound capture with my time, software and hardware that brings me joy. And that I never have to play a particular album again. Yet I can listen to it now anytime and anywhere I can play a file and it will always sound the same and as good. And sell them to some hopefully happy new owner ... so I can buy more ...
One last thought. Another primary reason for ripping and archiving my vinyl that I do not think I have ever mentioned before is that should I become physically disabled and no longer able to operate a turntable, I have the rips to listen to. I can call them up on the puter or ask someone to play the files for me. That was a conscious decision made at least 20 or 30 years ago. Music, listening to it, is that important to me.
Got a new copy of Something/Anything the other day, and MAN does it sound great.
Scored a ton of old vinyl from a place Iâm visiting: Running on Empty, Late for the Sky, Tormato, Going for the One, and Silk Degrees. Total $27. But, man, I hate rebuying my old record collection.
2020 UK / Europe This is the album that has the version of In Your Eyes that is in the library here. It was finally officially released. Looked for it for years.
