I remember ‘hidden tracks’ in the pre-gap of the first track. There was no way to ‘seek’ to them, but you could go to the first track and rewind from there to get to the beginning.
2 Likes
I’d argue that vinyl might be the best for archival storage, with the exception of gold cds which won’t corrode (some cds experience rot/oxidation under the plastic and won’t play a decade later). Right now, with the popularity of rare reissues, a lot of obscure private press albums are mastered from vinyl-- the original tapes are lost or crumbling. We can still play rare Skip James 78s, but Bad Brains master tapes recorded in the 1980s are already falling apart.
3 Likes
One of my old Spacemen 3 LPs has reversed grooves. To play the damn thing you have to put the needle at the end of the record which was brilliant but annoying due to my old turntable’s automatic return arm.
1 Like
Actually, millennials are driving the resurgence of vinyl LPs… not hipsters who constitute an older group. That the younger group would go for vinyl doesn’t surprise me since they would be more susceptible to the “so old, it’s new” effect.
http://oururbantimes.com/life-style/millennials-genx-hipster-and-gen-we-what-behind-labels
All that notwithstanding, your post was still cruelly hilarious!
2 Likes
oreloB
4 Likes
There’s a very good reason for that, the vinyl was thick and heavy, and later vinyl from the 80’s was much thinner, and often produced using ground-up recycled albums, complete with bits of paper from the labels in the matrix, which I’ve actually seen, while early CD’s were produced from master tapes EQ’d for pressing vinyl, which requires less bass to avoid the stylus jumping grooves, and reduced high-frequencies to avoid the lathe head overheating when cutting the pressing stampers.
You could always tell the best pressings, you’d check the sleeve to see who mastered the album, and if it said Bob Ludwig, Masterdisk, you’d then check the runout groove, and if the vinyl had Masterdisk stamped on both sides you’d do a little dance of joy.
Sometimes stampers got worn or damaged, and a replacement might be cut at a local mastering house from a copy of the stereo master, which would have a different stamp on the vinyl, like Stirling Sound, which was always disappointing, because it meant it had been cut from a copy of the first stereo master, itself a copy of the studio stereo master, so already compromised.
I used to read Hi-Fi. News & Record Reviews back in the 80’s, and there was a page at the back by Ken Kessler, who used to go into recording technology in detail, I learned a lot from him about vinyl and CD production.
7 Likes
Sometimes?
All stampers wear out eventually, which is why they keep the “mothers” around to make new stampers, and for big pressings of Lps that went gold they’d have multiple mothers and stampers at different plants to keep up with demand.
Re: records playing backwards-- I have an LP pressed in the 60’s that plays backwards and they claim that centrifugal force also plays a part, the stylus wants to move outwards while spinning, so why fight it. I question this logic, but who knows.
3 Likes
Bob’s work is spectacular. I’d love to see BoingBoing do a feature piece on him!
1 Like
Given that the stylus isn’t the thing that’s spinning, I too question this logic. The stylus wants to stay where it is. The groove is what makes it move. A reverse-pressed vinyl album would just wear down the inner edge of the groove more, rather than the outer edge.
6 Likes
Aw, c’mon… LP’s are the supreme manifestation of the art of music (mild hyperbole here). CDs rot and MP3s are digital dross.
2 Likes
When you’re out & about looking for vintage Starday & King pressings you might notice chunks of paper in the vinyl. Sid Nathan liked to use recycled vinyl now and then. Got some James Brown pressings that were fairly noisy. Had to wait till the superb French Polydor pressings to find out how good the recordings actually were.
1 Like
Especially the RCA “Dynawarp” pressings. Some folks love 'em, but I hated the weight and feel of the LPs.
i still like they might be giant’s apollo 18.
they put a ton of little short songs ( “fingertips” ) on their cd. and with random play you were pretty much guaranteed to have at least one 15 second song in between the “real” songs.
take that vinyl. 
2 Likes
The flip side of my 45 rpm copy of “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Haa-Haaaaa” by Napoleon XIV was called “aaaaah-aah yawa em ekat ot gnimoc reyeht” and was the song played backwards – no physical force required!
3 Likes
1 Like
Rush - Fly By Night has an infinite track at the end of side one. The track, "By-Tor & The Snow Dog ends with tinkling chimes which repeat forever.
1 Like
Get out of here! What year was that one released?
1 Like
A lot of currently running smaller plants use recycled vinyl. Sure, I’ve seen bits of paper in the grooves even on things pressed in the 80’s, but it’s not super common. From my experience pressing plants are more likely to have dimples in the vinyl from bad stampers, or mis-press double A-sides (URP seems to do this regularly.)
2 Likes
The origin of the term “Hipster” was a descriptive for young people who know an awful lot about Jazz – in other words, the finest of young people. The word “Hipster” spans multiple generations and shows no sign of dying out. It will be a cold, boring world if the word Hipster dies without a suitable generation-spanning replacement.
3 Likes
Good point.
Maybe I should look for a place where my copy of Steve Martin’s Comedy is not pretty! will outlast human civilisation.
