Man Erg wrote: I still have around 2.000 vinyl albums. I play them only every now and then when I'm home alone as my turntable is in the living-room and can be a bit intrusive/anti-social.I have ump-teen CD/MD players scattered about various rooms and can listen to CDs/MDs wherever I like. I think that I'll have to make room in my den/studio for another turntable.Not under the thumb,just considerate.

I have about 1500 LPs and last night I was sampling and recording onto MD selected tracks from a half dozen for possible inclusion on Thursday nights radio show, (it's now difficult to play vinyl in our radio station (especially on a remix DJ's deck - and would iI trust those styluses?). One album in particular by Illusion (largely the original Renaissance line-up), I found unlistenable - too much surface noise. Not scratches, rather Island Records pressing up the 12" with something like recycled vinyl. 'Listen between the scratch, the hiss, the pop' - come on, there wasn't a musician in the studio at the time of recording with a machine for generating surface noise*, it's the crap pressings. Why should I be distract by superfluous noise? As I said before, spend a fortune on the best deck, arm, stylus money can afford and you'll find a crap pressing is the weakness in the set up.

When Australian broadcaster (of ABC) Robert Armstrong, started some of the pioneering work cleaning up old jazz and blues 78rpms in the late 80's, and occasionally daring to make mock stereo recordings too, there were all those 78rpm collectors complained about the loss of this and that, saying things like "nothing like the old original 78 version". But again those jazz and blues master musicians didn't go in to a studio in the 20's and 30's and deliberately lay down scratches and other surface nosie. Besides, listening to the aural quality and range of Armstrong's cleaned up Bix Beiderbeck and then comparing the same recording on vinyl, and you can hear all the instruments on the CD, rather than suffering lost of half in the muck of time on the analogue. [And one day somebody will clean up the best tunes of Blind Lemon Jefferson].

I would would agree that WITHOUT suitable remastering, direct transfer of albums originally released on vinyl only to CD, did give rise to some very tinny CDs. I assume the original mix was made specifically for vinyl, often with top and bottom ends of the aural range clipped to fit the needs of the analogue 12" microgroove pressing. Putting the top and bottom ends back on without remastering/remixing , ready for CD release, meant that often the drum kit shifted from the back of the mix to very colse to the front. That's what happened to the first CD issue of Jean Luc Ponty's Enigmatic Ocean (where cymbals tend to dominate the mix at times). However, the long, early Genesis recordings when first released on CD, with restored top and bottom ends, sounded so much better than the vinyl. And look elsewhere on Progarchives for my reminder about Todd Rundgren's instructions on the back of the Initiation LP cover.

One final comment, I think Maani said that many albums are still yet to be released on CD. True; I have to say many of the LPs in my collection which are still vinyl only, but I have very little desire for CD versions of them because they have passed they sale-by-date in my head. As I said elsewhere I had a list of about 105 LPs I wanted as clean sounding CD versions, (and my tastes are fairly obscure), I think I'm now two short of that number (but it took over 15 years, however). While I'm here, to reiterate: please release Jan Hammer Group: Oh Yeah!

* a couple of exceptions to this statment I've come across:

Al DiMeola/Steve Vai: Race With Devil On Turkish Highway

Shuggie Otis/Al Kooper: Shuggie's Old Time Blues

Karnevil9 wrote: Comments such as that come from people who never owned a top vinygrinder...i have no crackles on my 30 odd year old albums.

KE,

Then you've been amazingly lucky and it sounds like I've been lumbered with an unfair number of very dodgey pressings. Besides nowaday paying 4 figures for a deck, arm and styllus is luxury I for one can't afford nowadays. It was different in 1967, when I reckoned playing 200 quid + put my kit somewhat above average (hell you could buy a good house in Kent for 5000 grand then).

Working in a record shop 30 years ago, I had the chance to find the best pressings from a batch of records received into store and often found no one single pressing was of  good quality - some times I'd wait 6 months before buying hoping a new sub-master might be in use. Decca Records for instance were notorious for bad pressings at the end of the 60's (I dealt with endless customer complaints, who claimed too to have top quality hi fi systems).  Many record companies aimed at satisfying the small (and what they thought as the more discerning) hi fi buff market place, especially classical music releases andand took greater care in those records pressing. Took them a long time that pop and rock fans wanted quality pressings as well.  Deutches Grammophone (part of the Polydor Group?) was long the reference point for high quality recordings AND pressings.

Man Erg wrote: In the mid 1970s,the quality of vinyl became very poor mainly,I believe,due to the 'oil crisis.' I can remember that EMI's and in particular RCA's vinyl quality being appalling.RCA even tried to scam people with their 'Dyna-flex' invention' of almost transparent,wafer - thin,wobble-board vinyl that hopped-skipped and jumped like the proverbial March-Hare.I also remember taking Bowie's Hunky Dory back to be replaced so many times it almost became embarrasing.Pink Floyd's WYWH suffered a similar fate.So much so that EMI had to keep their Hayes.Middlesex pressing plant open 24/7 to replace the dodgy copies.The thing that baffles me is,how much oil was used for WYWH's original sealed 'plastic-wrapper' album sleeve?

I remember RCA importing the American pressing of that Jefferson Airplane album (title?, was it the first JA's own Grunt label release) into the UK, packaged in a brown paper supermarket bag. I was amazed how thin that disc was - weighing an Island Record's pressing of the time and that disc, the latter was approx. a third the weight (British pressing subsequently went that way too). And there were those British djs who went on about the "quality" of that disc, with plainly daft statements, e.g.  'the more you bend and flex the album, the better it sounds'. Strangely 30 years later, that album is sound good on my hifi.

Sweetnighter wrote:

What! I didn't write that KE9!

My mistake.Sorry..sorted.