vinyl Archives - Cineluxe

Discovering Vintage Vinyl

also by tom Methans

Your vinyl adventure continues with tips on how to hunt down the best collectable LPs

by Tom Methans
August 3, 2022

In “Where to Begin Your Vinyl Adventure,” we discussed the pleasures and pitfalls of buying brand-new vinyl. New is good. It’s easily found, replaceable if flawed, and generally well recorded. But there’s a big caveat: You can only buy what is listed in the current inventory, and that selection can be woefully inadequate. Meanwhile, thousands of uncatalogued vintage gems are hiding in plain sight. There is no telling what can be pulled out of a bin full of pre-owned records.

Some people have great luck at places like flea markets and thrift shops but these options are time-consuming and offer poor returns for all the effort. Unless you’re a DJ looking for obscure cuts and samples, why dig through crates of discarded vinyl in random locations when the better stuff has already been amassed in a single place? Here a few reasons why a great record shop is your best bet for used vinyl:

• Collections are curated for quality, both of physical media and artistic material. While certain shop owners specialize in specific genres, they can refer you to other dealers for a particular niche.

• True music lovers want their prized records to go to like-minded people and are unlikely to dump them at a thrift store, so estates and lifelong collectors will contract with shops to haul away massive libraries from ideal storage conditions. This also gives you some guarantee of provenance.

• It’s an opportunity to discover new music while flipping through beat-up beer-stained album covers just to find pristine discs inside. Some collectors spend hours in dollar bins just to score extraordinary records overlooked by others.

• The most important feature of a good record store is on-site auditioning. Not only can you visually inspect the covers and vinyl but you can also listen to the record. If there are no customer turntable stations with headphones, ask the staff to play it on the store system.

The next step is to find your local record stores and make friends with the owners and buyers. Let them know about your interests, wish lists, and budget for mint records. Follow through with the sale if they get your desired items, because a good relationship might lead to tips about future acquisitions. It’s also worth enquiring about rare and vintage pieces kept under lock and key for savvy customers like you.

Naturally, shops and collectors around the world sell through eBay and Discogs. Online sources might be the only way to locate very specific titles, but the thrill of the hunt remains at brick & mortar shops operated by people who devote their lives to records. Be forewarned, crate digging and collecting are very addictive hobbies. Don’t be surprised if you start planning vacations and business trips just to visit stores in different cities.

Tom Methans is a writer based in New York. As a Fulbright Scholar, he traveled all over Germany to see heavy metal bands before receiving his Master’s in Library and Information Science. He followed that with a 20-year career in the wine industry and now writes about music and audio equipment for Copper Magazine. When not watching 1970s movies, Tom listens to records on his vintage Japanese turntable.

Discogs is probably the best online resource for finding vintage vinyl but there are still advantages to seeking out brick & mortar record stores with knowledgeable staff

Where to Begin Your Vinyl Adventure

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Supply chain issues have made starting a record collection a challenge, but there are still treasures to be found

by Tom Methans
July 8, 2022

So your new turntable is on its way, and you’re ready to buy records. You might even have a list of landmark albums many other collectors tend to buy: Tres Hombres by ZZ Top, Bach cello suites by Janos Starker, Texas Flood by Stevie Ray Vaughn, as well as some oldies by James Brown or the Three Kings (B.B., Freddie, and Albert). But any one of them could be out of stock, awaiting repress, or back-ordered with no definite production or ship dates. While it is possible to reserve copies, people have waited many months to receive orders.

It wasn’t always like this. Before COVID, albums were plentiful, with more high-grade records pressed on heavy-weight vinyl, double 45-RPM albums, and proprietary technologies like SuperVinyl, Ultradisc One-Step, and UHQR (Ultra High-Quality Record). Pressing plants are now straining to meet the worldwide demand even with independent outlets doing their best to produce new records.

A few years ago in Detroit, Jack White of the White Stripes started a record press, Third Man Records, to press alternative music, but they’re struggling to release a new punk record within one year due to backlogs. White appealed recently to the last remaining major labels to reopen their own plants, but this is a major undertaking that requires specialized machinery and staffing. The final blow to the industry was a fire at Apollo Masters in California, which manufactured the first step in the physical process of record production, leaving only one other such facility in Japan. The brick & mortar record store, a fixture that once dotted Main Street in every town, is accessible only to a lucky few. Thankfully, there are plenty of great online shops only a click away:

Third Man Records
Music Direct
MoFi
Louisiana Music Factory
Acoustic Sounds
Blue Note
Turntable Lab
Amoeba Music
Tower Records

If one of the resources above doesn’t have everything on your wish list, it’s an excuse to try unfamiliar music, bands, and records when you go virtual crate-digging. Keep in mind that high-quality music can be found on a record priced $30 or a limited-release copy for $125. Both are physical media made by human hands and vulnerable to the same flaws:

- - - scratches & scuffs
    - noise, even after a thorough cleaning
    - off-center spindle holes
    - imbedded debris
    - the age-old problem of warps

New records are less fraught with these issues than vintage ones and usually can be returned or replaced easily. This brings us to collecting used records. Unless you have a second turntable for testing old vinyl before playing it on your premier turntable, I recommend buying new and only playing those after a proper wash to remove dust, fibers, and residue leftover from the pressing plant.

However, exploring vintage records provides an unrivaled dive into a treasure trove of forgotten music. Dusty bins at the used-record store can contain discontinued pressings of popular albums such as Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, featuring its original cover of images of Hollywood starlets used without their permission. Other records are deemed unworthy of reissuing and are thus lost to history until someone rediscovers them. Collecting old vinyl is a unique process, but that’s a discussion for another time.