70s prog on vinyl

MikeEnRegalia wrote: Yes, but much of the new stuff is being released on vinyl. I've become quite a collector ... I even ordered the new special vinyl edition of Porcupine Tree's Fear of a Blank Planet yesterday - costs me 60 EUR including shipping, the most expensive album I've ever bought.

To bring another element into this, I work at a monotonous job which allows us to listen to music (on headphones) to keep us from getting bored (just).  Right now I prefer CDs because I can't exactly bring my phonograph to work.  Hell, if I had access to the internet, I'd just listen to uk70s off live365 all day.

Thunder wrote: I don't know if it had been discussed already but: Isn`t it dangerous to listen to all these Albums on Vinyl all the time? The more often you listen to them, the quality get`s worse. Or am I mistaken?

You have to play it a lot to make a noticable difference, I did wear out a certain guitar solo once.

I must admit, this vinyl talk has made me want to dig out my old Piece of Mind Picture vinyl.  Fun version of Cross-eyed Marry on it.

Yes, but much of the new stuff is being released on vinyl. I've become quite a collector ... I even ordered the new special vinyl edition of Porcupine Tree's Fear of a Blank Planet yesterday - costs me 60 EUR including shipping, the most expensive album I've ever bought.

Edited by MikeEnRegalia - September 09 2007 at 03:42

Listening to Dream Theater - Systematic Chaos right now ... on vinyl. 180gr, awesome artwork ... it's quite a package compared to the CD edition. Still, can't say that it *sounds* better.

Atavachron wrote: ^ and it only got worse by the early 80s when LPs had become practically floppy-- even bootlegs were better pressed

Absolutely.RCA's green label releases were a joke.You almost had to put something like a steam iron onto the the player arm to stop it from 'jumping'.

If you listen to a pre 1973/4 vinyl pressing,9 times out of 10 it will sound better than anything pressed or re-pressed during and after those/that year(s).

The 'oil crisis' hoiked up the price of oil and vinyl albums and record sleeves became 'sub-standard' because of this.The pressing plants pressed thinner,lighter albums and singles and the sleeves were either printed on thinner cardboard, double sleeves became single sleeves and 45's came in either plain white sleeves or in some sort of flimsy,plastic based material.

RCA tried to pass the pressings off as a new 'invention' called 'Dynaflex'. If you see a second-hand album with 'Dynaflex' printed on the label,think twice about buying it.The quality was usually poor.

Albums became practically like wobble boards and could almost be bent in half.Pink Floyd's WYWH was released in the wake of the 'oil crisis' and,I believe, holds the record for the most returned record owing to it's skipping because of sub-standard materials/pressing.
Ironically,They didn't skimp on the materials sleeve-wise for WYWH.It came in a black plastic outer-sleeve and inside,other than the inner-sleeve,they repeated the DSoTM packaging by including posters and stickers/decals.
EMI must have had their own oil fields just for album packaging. Shame that they couldn't have been more generous when it came to the thing that mattered;the record it'self.

Edited by Man Erg - September 09 2007 at 03:16

^ another serious disadvantage of vinyl - pitch fluctuations. Apparently you can reduce them by using very expensive record players, but you can never completely remove them. It's particularly annoying with Post Rock or Ambient/Electronic albums, which usually feature long drawn chords. 

I'm only saying that with vinyl you have to be careful because each disc can sound differently, while with CDs they all sound 100% identical (unless they're different re-masters of course).