You cant buy them on somewhere like Amazon, the only place you can buy them is on the Verglas website, Arena's official store.   And at the moment as i write this, they are not strictly speaking actually selling them at the moment,  they are just taking orders for them to see if there's enough interest to make it worth getting them produced.   £40 in my opinion for a vinyl is too much, over priced.    The most ive ever spent on a vinyl is £33, and i dont intend on spending that much on one again, that one was just a one off.

I only like spending £18 to £22 on vinyls, and thats from Amazon when they offer a free digital download rip aswell.   £40 for a 12 inch circle of plastic that im hardly ever gonna use just isnt worth the money.   Its a shame really, cause id love to own The Visitor and Immortal on vinyl.

Hi,

Vinyl has always been spendy ... even in the 70's driving down to Moby Disk to get an IMPORT (everything vinyl in those days), the cost was around $15 dollars, and up to $20. At that time, the "price" for many albums, was around $5.98 or $6.98 depending on the over rating of some crappy stuff.

Vinyl is only worth it, if you have a top of the line stereo system, otherwise you are wasting your money. My old roomie, knew I had the stereo and the albums and heard a lot of the stuff and its quality, and I think he wanted to get something similar. He did get a decent stereo, and later some vinyl's but I can tell you that the Led Zep 2 album sounded like crap on his system or mine. My old version (had not replaced these with CD's yet!) was vastly superior, and made me think that a lot of these "vinyl" this and that is just a bunch of advertising bullcrap to get your money. 

Honestly, vinyl is over and gone. As time goes by the electronics that handle the digitization of a lot of music will improve and vinyl will come off stupid and bad! It's a matter of time, although it won't be in my lifetime, I don't think! I have not heard a single vinyl out there that had the quality and "superiority" that some folks here on this board seem to give it ... well, it might help if you were a bit smarter and gave yourself a large room with good acoustics and air flow, too ... but some folks don't believe it!

So, spend your money is the option for a lot of these commercial junk pushers!  

Yes, it's very expensive, and used vinyl records in general have got very expensive. 

Indeed , when did CD's suddenly jump to £20 a pop. I spend £11 a month on streaming and its well worth it as its saved me literally £100's on CD's. Of course some artists are really hard to find on any streaming service (Magenta , Glass Hammer to name 2) but at least you can get their CD's for about £13-£15 , although thinking about the last GH CD may have been more. 

On the subject of Vinyl I do think there is a noticeable uplift in quality when the recording is analogue based as a lot of prog from Norway seems to be. I'm not sure with a more 'Digital approach' you will see a massive difference but nevertheless it can still be better. What Pedro asserts about needing a high end stereo is total nonsense. I have a very nice deck, cost me £260 , backed up with a Denon amp £280 and a couple of speakers that cost about £600 for the pair. Does the job very nicely indeed. 

Moshkito, most of what you said in your reply was off topic tangents, my thread wasnt about are vinyls in general worth it, or are they only justified when on very expsensive turntables.   Also vinyls have not always been exspensive, in the 80s they were half the price or nearly half the price of a CD, i even remember that myself.

I buy vinyls more to collect them, rather than for them to be my main method of listening to music.   What ive mainly done is buy my absolute favourite albums of all time on vinyl, usually my favourite album of each artist/band, and leave it as that.    When i can buy a vinyl for only £18 or £22 and it comes with a free digital download, thats more attractive.   £40 for just a vinyl and nothing else is not attractive, too exspensive for my liking.

Other than to say if you do a simple Google search on LP price in 1975 say, it was about 5.99-7.99. Even I remember in the late 70s paying no more than 8.99, I don't think I ever remember seeing a $15 record.

Bottom line is the price of all stuff has increased due to the current inflation and the past 2 years due to Covid and supply chain issues. The LP took a big hit when that lacquer plant in California burned down, one of only a handfull that produce lacquers, needed to press LPs, and then Covid with a massive demand since everyone was home not working in office and listening to records all day long.

Simple supply and demand. Regarding Arena's price, that does seem on the higher end for a record, part of it may be that they only plan to press a small run so their mfg costs are much higher.

I bought the CD for $24, which is indeed steep for a new release.

I believe his "nothing special" remark was directed at the packaging, not the music itself.

As you know I'm right there with ya Herc......

Hi,

Speaking of sleeping under a rock ... I specifically said that IMPORTS were spendy, compared to the rest which was between the range you mentioned. I rarely bought anything else in the 70's and 80's except imports, since the home driven grounds were not releasing a lot of the European stuff I wanted. So, yeah, you could get LP's cheaply otherwise and I added a lot of them into my collection, found in many a store for a very small fee ... heck, all my Family/Streetwalkers stuff was used records and they were all up to$2 dollars each!

I won't say much about Arena's event. I think they might have felt that something special was important, and I will leave it at that.

Yes it was, even though i actually dont think all that much of this latest album, it was meant at the packaging.   It should have come with a bonus Cd or something,  or the CD casing should have been like a hardback book, like what Nightwish's Endless Forms Most Beautiful is, on its CD copy.

I think this response nailed it on the head. I've curtailed purchasing CDs from Europe because the shipping costs are sometimes more than the price of the CD (mainly from Italy at this time). Japanese imports are also off limits for me because the CD and the shipping are both very high. Living in the U.S., the best option for me at this time is if one of the local retailers (like LaserCD, Wayside, Doug Larson Imports, progwalker on Discogs) can get their hands on some of these imports. This means it's mostly a waiting game for me. Sometimes, in the end, I'm forced to buy a download even though I like to have the physical product.

Hi,

I have, for almost 50 years been very critical of the nature of the distribution of many of these things. As you say, I have not bought anything from Japan, because the price is ridiculous. I am also, having issues with buying stuff from Europe, since my bank (25 years +) locks up the card each time a purchase is made with the English Pound or the European Euro ... which leaves me with Amazon for the most part, and Bandcamp won't fix a lot of its security issues ... Bandcamp has a very bad rating in security in many places, and their ability to accept different currencies, in what is ... a WORLD MARKET. You would think they would learn that, but as many bands as they show, they don't care ... I can't buy anything from Italy or Spain via Bandcamp.

I don't have an answer, and even the IMPORTS that we bought at Moby Disk, and the Tower on the Strip, were already the select few that got that far with the LP ... and the price was sometimes a problem, but I was NEVER going to worry about Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze ... period! Arena or Dream Theater, I would have passed.

You can pay via PayPal on Bandcamp - does that not accept all currencies? Why would Italy and Spain be different to other Euro countries?

Italy are terrible for international shipping, on anything!!!!.   I wanted to buy a playstation 2 video game from them once, and they wanted to charge me £20 (might have been 30 or 40 actually) just for fricken postage and packaging, when im also from europe aswell.   Germany are pretty good for international shipping, ive bought CD's several times from vendors from there.  The label Nuclear Blast are based in Germany, and they seem to charge reasonable prices for international orders.

Yuppers....I was buying a ton of records from Burning Shed, KScope and band sites across the pond....Have not bought from them in almost 3 yrs. I bought mainly from Marillion website, the last album was gonna cost me about $70, $35 was shipping. So I waiting for US stores to get it, bought it from The InGroove in Phoenix for $35. LaserCD is pretty much my go to for overseas records, I just wait for him to get them or post a prebuy.

Ouch!!

Regarding the very high prices for used vinyl today, I have my doubts whether it's good for the sale of vinyl in the long run.

Hi,

That's what the record companies said 60 years ago ... and guess what? It was the bootlegs and FM Radio that gave us the freshness of the "new music" at the time.

Used LP's make up about a quarter to a fifth of my LP collection which was at 3K at one time. The only thing that hurt, was ... availability of the material that you wanted to find ... and it took looking in a very large place (Rasputin in Berkeley and Millenium in Portland -- for example) to find two or three things that you are taking home.

In the end, it is not the re-sale of the LP, or CD, that is important ... it's the livelihood of the music itself, and I can remember the days when the used bins had 50 Elton John albums, and the Rolling Stones had 40 albums, but you were hard pressed to find other things ... and btw, guess what? The majority of folks DUMPING THE LP'S WERE THE RADIO STATIONS ... not the users ... so at least make sure you know where the decision to make some money came from the the first place ... and it wasn't you and I since we were into the music!

Remember that!

PS: Even more hypocritical is how everyone ignores one band that allowed people to record their shows and even offered it from their boards, so people could get better recordings. And their market is STILL massive ... but we're not honest enough to discuss these things except support a model of ripping off the artist, when the bigger rip off is not the artist, but by the record company! Let's talk Grateful Dead when you grow up!

Not sure what you mean.......I pay $20 for a used record because it is a first press, and or it is the version to have from a sound quality perspective. Any reissues may have been mastered from a digital copy, which is usually krapp. There are many examples of used records costing a lot due to desire and fact that may not have ever been issued again, or simply they are extremely popular.

You want a first UK press of DSOtM A2/B2 lacquers?? Yea that'll run you about $2-3K........but you can still buy the 2016 remaster by Bernie Grundman for $30, so the used prices have not affected the new issues.

Me too.

I remember a spotty Welsh Youth being interviewed the day afterwards about his reasons for voting Leave, saying he couldn't think of any reasons why we'd want to stay.

The good old Beeb had placed him hear a road sign for the new 'Heads of the Valleys' road widening scheme, which had been made possible by the £250 million match funding from the EU...