When I was a kid our vinyl was black

[Bellacaster]

I'm 42 and have been collecting records since I was about 10, perhaps younger. When I was growing up, used records were cheap, really cheap. Even through my college years they were affordable. You could walk out of a record store with a pile of records for $20. I'm glad I collected when I did because the market has skyrocketed in the past 10 years or so. It's great that people are into it, but now I pretty much buy reissues whereas I'd be able to find the original for cheap back in the day. I do find the sound to be much warmer with more dimension to it.

Regarding colored vinyl, I have a good friend that's a music director for a college radio station who's been buying vinyl religiously his whole life that steers clear of colored vinyl. He believes that it doesn't sound as good as ye olde black vinyl. Back in the late 70s through the early 90s a lot of indy label stuff on colored vinyl did sound bad, thin and gritty. Now a days most colored vinyl sounds great and is cool to look at.

Check out Jack White's Third Man Records. He's done a lot to keep the media alive and puts out a lot of great reissues that are always quality products.

 

[Killing Floor]

I love vinyl.
Say what you wish, but vinyl through speakers sounds like live recordings of musicians. All the extra din and hiss is what living people sound like. I have seen countless live shows in countless venues of all types and many genres, I have never seen a performing artist who sounded like a CD or a digital file. In the 90s and beyond, the belief was that CDs sounded “better”. Better is subjective. In my judgment records sound more authentic, more like a captured moment in time. It’s not the gear but the editing and production that makes the difference. With digital media there is too much quest for perfection in the process so all the life breath is cleaned out.

Plus, records are good for your health because you have to get up every 15 minutes, can’t sit all day!

Lastly, I sincerely hope your son stole the milk crates. Never buy milk crates.

 

[John Owen]

I still have many of the records I bought 50 years ago. I have been buying vinyl every since then. There was about 10 years around 'the turn of the century' when I was buying more CDs than vinyl. Now it is probably about 50/50. I do streaming as well but if it is something I really like and/or want to support the artist, I will buy a hard copy. For 'the really good stuff' I pretty much always go with an LP. I have always had a turntable. About a year ago I replaced my 30 year old Thorens turntable because it was starting to get janky and because it is good to change things up every few decades.

PS - I agree with what @Killing Floor says in the post above. The numbers might give digital an advantage but the life-like element of analog is what really makes me smile. That and the interaction required - having to get off my butt and flip the record over is somehow satisying and engaging.

 

[bottlenecker]

I have boxes full of vinyl, but my buying of vinyl has slowed to a crawl. The prices for some have gone crazy. I've been collecting records since I was a kid. I really got into it in the late 80s/early 90s simply because no one wanted records anymore. People would find out that I collected & would offer to give you their stash. How many Abba, Bee Gees, Kansas, etc. does one actually need? A lot I just threw away. It amazes me when I see kids interested in albums. Around here they want mostly classic rock. Been there, done that.

I've been buying a lot of CDs lately dirt cheap. A local GW had a stack of blues & jazz CDs in excellent condition recently. Nice.

I love buying CDs now.
I still buy vinyl, but it's not as automatic as when I started. In the mid 90s LPs were $4 cheaper than CDs and I felt like I was getting away with something.
Turns out I was.

 

[Jakedog]

I have streaming and satellite in the car, and vinyl in the house. That’s it. My new car doesn’t even have a CD player.

 

[ArdeliasTele]

I’ve gone through periods of audiophile nonsense before I had kids. I like vinyl too but pragmatically, it’s certainly not better than CD or lossless digital. Different, yes, and also a function of your stylus and table and preamp and and. There’s more to tinker with. 50% for me is nostalgia for the ritual and objects from childhood, in my parents’ house with their stuff, when almost all music was still magical.

This is a pretty awesome observation.

The ritual we surround our music with (really, any art) is real and meaningful...and since "sound" is a perception to begin with, it's a completely valid modifier of how someone can hear vinyl. In that sense "lossless digital is measurably superior" and "vinyl sounds better" can both be true at the same time.

I'm in the exact age range where I straddle all 3 media. My older brother's music collection was 85% vinyl. By the time I was old enough to have money to buy my own stuff, cassettes had just overtaken vinyl records...so my collection was 90% cassette, with vinyl being a valid choice if the store in question only had vinyl in stock for the album I wanted. I got my first CD player when I was a junior in high school, and honestly, the sound quality was a revelation.

So for me, the rituals are mixed, but are largely around jewel cases of one shape or another, dubbing a great album from CD to cassette so I could play it in my truck, and having the means to create my own convenience and mood mixes at reasonable quality.

But the magic is still the same regardless of medium.

 

[Lone_Poor_Boy]

Virtually all of my vinyl stash is black….. IIRC, I have a yellow LP by The Dickies, and a swirly blue and green EP by The Flying Lizards…. Pretty sure the rest are black ….. I DO have a Monty Python with “3 sides”. One side is a normal length side, the other side has “ grooves within grooves,” so depending when/where you set the needle down, you have two different half length “sides” on the same side.

I remember the Monty Python album with the two grooves. I think it was 'Matching Tie and Handkerchief'.

 

[fender4life]

Do it! The 312 is a very good sounding table.

They are nice, and whats amazing is i checked the belt about a year ago and it's fine as tho new ! 45 year old rubber and it; doesn't seem to have degraded at all. Thats some serious quality.

 

[Mark E Rhodes]

I don't have any vinyl these days. Back when I did, I remember having a red vinyl copy of "Bloodshot" by the J Geils Band. Also a "vanilla blue" copy of a Naked Raygun single. I seem to recall something on yellow vinyl but I'm drawing a blank as to what.

One of these days I may get back into vinyl. I could see it happening but it's probably at least 2-3 years down the road.

 

[Drew617]

This is a pretty awesome observation.

The ritual we surround our music with (really, any art) is real and meaningful...and since "sound" is a perception to begin with, it's a completely valid modifier of how someone can hear vinyl. In that sense "lossless digital is measurably superior" and "vinyl sounds better" can both be true at the same time.

I'm in the exact age range where I straddle all 3 media. My older brother's music collection was 85% vinyl. By the time I was old enough to have money to buy my own stuff, cassettes had just overtaken vinyl records...so my collection was 90% cassette, with vinyl being a valid choice if the store in question only had vinyl in stock for the album I wanted. I got my first CD player when I was a junior in high school, and honestly, the sound quality was a revelation.

So for me, the rituals are mixed, but are largely around jewel cases of one shape or another, dubbing a great album from CD to cassette so I could play it in my truck, and having the means to create my own convenience and mood mixes at reasonable quality.

But the magic is still the same regardless of medium.

Probably similar experience here (I am 40) and those scenarios are all familiar. So is copying LPs to tape for portability in the car or walkman - that's really stacking limitations, but it worked.

The ritual part of it for me is probably a number of things, including all the familiar motions, and especially the deliberate nature of doing it. The kids need to be in bed, I can't ask Alexa to a play a record for me, I have to get up to do it, which means I have to sit down somewhere that may as well be a good listening position. I'm receptive to the experience from the outset, because nothing about it is passive. In the car, it's trivial to skip right past Wild Honey Pie, or whatever. I'm far more likely to receive the LP completely, in intended context/sequence.

I like the Grateful Dead and have tried to explain their appeal to friends who don't get it. Some of that, in my calculation, is that a huge body of well-recorded live output is available. Of course you need to like what they're doing in the first place, but if you are (as I am) the kind of nerd who's really interested in the deltas between a 1980 Aletha and a 1982 Althea, where else in pop can you even go for that type of stimulation? Not The McCoys or REM or Statler Brothers. LPs can unlock some of the same kind of reward for me: I think I've got at least 5 different pressings of something like the White Album, for instance. An evolutionary record of this thing is available in that sense, before the information ever left the physical domain. Those differences are very subtle but can be interesting, including the knowledge that the experience was slightly different in France than it was in Russia than it was in England... so on.

 

[ArdeliasTele]

Probably similar experience here (I am 40) and those scenarios are all familiar. So is copying LPs to tape for portability in the car or walkman - that's really stacking limitations, but it worked.

The ritual part of it for me is probably a number of things, including all the familiar motions, and especially the deliberate nature of doing it. The kids need to be in bed, I can't ask Alexa to a play a record for me, I have to get up to do it, which means I have to sit down somewhere that may as well be a good listening position. I'm receptive to the experience from the outset, because nothing about it is passive. In the car, it's trivial to skip right past Wild Honey Pie, or whatever. I'm far more likely to receive the LP completely, in intended context/sequence.

I like the Grateful Dead and have tried to explain their appeal to friends who don't get it. Some of that, in my calculation, is that a huge body of well-recorded live output is available. Of course you need to like what they're doing in the first place, but if you are (as I am) the kind of nerd who's really interested in the deltas between a 1980 Aletha and a 1982 Althea, where else in pop can you even go for that type of stimulation? Not The McCoys or REM or Statler Brothers. LPs can unlock some of the same kind of reward for me: I think I've got at least 5 different pressings of something like the White Album, for instance. An evolutionary record of this thing is available in that sense, before the information ever left the physical domain. Those differences are very subtle but can be interesting, including the knowledge that the experience was slightly different in France than it was in Russia than it was in England... so on.

I totally get it. As primarily (originally?) a classical/orchestral musician, I own multiple different recordings of many, many pieces.

The conductor's influence and the disparate ensembles recording the pieces has a much more obvious impact on the experience, but some format and engineering-based differences have an outsized impact as well.

 

[mr natural]

700+ and counting. I spin them all the time. Got a few colored ones and picture disks.

 

[bottlenecker]

This is a pretty awesome observation.

The ritual we surround our music with (really, any art) is real and meaningful...and since "sound" is a perception to begin with, it's a completely valid modifier of how someone can hear vinyl. In that sense "lossless digital is measurably superior" and "vinyl sounds better" can both be true at the same time.

I'm in the exact age range where I straddle all 3 media. My older brother's music collection was 85% vinyl. By the time I was old enough to have money to buy my own stuff, cassettes had just overtaken vinyl records...so my collection was 90% cassette, with vinyl being a valid choice if the store in question only had vinyl in stock for the album I wanted. I got my first CD player when I was a junior in high school, and honestly, the sound quality was a revelation.

So for me, the rituals are mixed, but are largely around jewel cases of one shape or another, dubbing a great album from CD to cassette so I could play it in my truck, and having the means to create my own convenience and mood mixes at reasonable quality.

But the magic is still the same regardless of medium.

Similarly for me, I bought cassettes until getting a CD player in high school. CD sound was the best I'd heard because I'd only been able to listen to vinyl on a terrible player, hooked up to terrible speakers.
I started buying vinyl in the mid 90s for a variety of reasons, and ended up preferring it for a lot of the music I like.

But "lossless digital", assuming you mean a high resolution like 24/96, is really wonderful. I would happily switch to some 24/96 format, even if it was just downloaded files, but it's a unicorn.
It barely exists anywhere. The few times I've gotten really good flac files, they came with a vinyl record.

 

[Fuelish]

I remember the Monty Python album with the two grooves. I think it was 'Matching Tie and Handkerchief'.

Can't say without going down to the basement and digging for it, but I remember it saying something about "this album has three sides" .....Matching tie and handkerchief sounds familiar

 

[saltyseadog]

I am 71 and away back in the 60's almost every record was black vinyl. I did a couple of years in the Merchant Navy from 1968-70 and one trip we went to Taiwan/Formosa/Free China and found that it was the world capital of bootlegs of almost anything but especially records and books. You could get vinyl records in any colour and if they didn't have the colour you wanted then come back in a couple of hours and we will have it then.

 

[loopfinding]

the only thing i have on vinyl is techno/house music. i find it's just easier to be present when mixing (sort of like how it's easier to be present driving a manual car) and have better flow when you have to juggle so many things than other formats. it's not really a sound thing for me. and luckily for me nobody cares about late 90s techno and house records (only before that and after that), so they were all cheap.

otherwise, i don't really care.

 

[421JAM]

I grew up in the ‘80s, when vinyl was still the mainstream format. It still feels like the right way to listen to music to me, so I’ve stuck with it. I don’t buy nearly as much anymore, mainly focusing on local bands and a handful of newer artists I discover and really like. Fortunately I was able to build a solid collection when CDs came out and you could find great records on vinyl for $1, so you could take a chance on anything that looked remotely interesting.

I find that, of all the colors available, clear vinyl is most likely to sound bad. Solid colors are fine, but I stay away from translucent colors, especially colorless translucent/clear. I don’t know why, but it often has a fizzy sound that black and solid colors never have. Fortunately, quite often artists these days who release colored or clear vinyl also offer a black option, and it’s usually cheaper.

 

[joealso]

When I'm in my man cave, I love the sound of vinyl. When I'm out and about, I love the convenience of cd's and streaming.

 

[fender4life]

Back in the 70's i had a bootleg double LP of zepplin live on yellow and red transparent vinyl. I gotta think that would be worth a near fortune today.

 

[421JAM]

A friend had a Zeppelin picture disc bootleg. The picture was the wheel that spins inside the LZ3 album cover. That’s probably the coolest record I’ve ever seen, and most creative use of a picture disc. Sound quality was absolute $h!+e though, as is the case with (in my experience) most bootlegs.