Zep wrote:  I have one,never played.

 Zep wrote: 
Yes the original release of those 2 LP's on the Island records label had the corners clipped. The one I played today is a later re-release and they used a standard jacket with that.

 black321 wrote: 
I just realized I forgot to mention cartridges. There are Moving Magnet (MM) and Moving Coil (MC). There have been other types such as Moving Iron (such as AKG) and Condensor (such as MicroAcoustisc). The most prevalent are MM and MC. There are 2 types of MC, Low Output (LO) and High Output (HO). While there are some very nice sounding MM cartridges such as the old Grace F9R (Ruby) the Moving Coil cartridges are generally better due to the lower mass of their design. When using a Low Output MC cartridge you need a preamp with a Moving Coil Preamp or Step-Up device (transformer). About 40 db of gain is needed for MM and approx 60 db for LO-MC. High Output Moving Coil cartridges are a compromise.  They need more coil winding to produce the higher output and that increases the mass. There are some decent sounding HO MC cartridges but they are not as good as a LO MC can be. The advantage of using a HO MC is that you generally need no step-up device or moving coil preamp. The catch 22 with using a LO MC is that the Moving Coil Preamp (also called head amps or pre preamps) or step up device has to be a good one or you are just wasting the cartridge. Most mid-fi receivers and preamps that have built in MC preamps are mediocre. In my experience the LO MC cartridges that have the best detail have solid Ruby or Sapphire cantilevers. Some have "Micro Reach" cantilevers which lower the mass even more. If you have a decent turntable with a lower medium to low mass arm then something like a Dynavector Ruby, 23MR, 17 series, Sumiko Talisman etc will work great. Some of these cartridges are not made anymore but there is a place called Soundsmith that can retip most popular MC cartridges and even make them better than they were new. Sometimes it pays to buy an old Dynavector with a bad stylus and get it rebuilt by him. He does an excellent job. As for new cartridges in addition to the Dynavector 17 I recommend the Denon DL-301MK2 for medium to low mass arm or the excellent for the money Denon DL-103 for medium to higher mass arms. Soundsmith also offers a line of excellent brand new cartridges he builds. Hope this rambling helps some!

 DaveInVA wrote: 
I had a copy of this (and "Shootout") where the UR and LL corners were clipped.

 cc_rider wrote: 
I mentioned that Telarc 1812 Overture in my original response to the OP. That took a really good tonearm/cartridge combo to track. There were many test records available that had trackablity test tracks for testing how well your tonearm/cartridge worked. I had a Souther SL-3 with a Dynavector Ruby and it had no problem with that track at all....Doesn't work well with a Dual 1229 and midfi Shure/Empire/Audiotechnica though....

 cc_rider wrote: 

 Servo wrote:
  Years ago one of my buddies had a chi-chi turntable, he kept the stylus weight dialed way down. It worked great 99.9% of the time, but the cannon booms in the 1812 Overture would launch the stylus into the air!

 jagdriver wrote: 
Yes that can be a problem especially if the records gets stored where it gets hot enough to cause the shrink to do what it does and shrink like in a storage place etc. Whenever I find a record where the shrink is getting tight I remove it. If the cover is still in nice shape I will then put it in a loose fitting 3 mil plastic sleeve to protect it. I just ordered 500 more of the sleeves and will eventually put all the lp's with good covers in the 3 mil sleeves and remove all the remaining vestiges of shrink as I go. I've bought "Sealed" recorded from online vendors that have been sealed from the 60's or 70's and upon opening them found they look like a Ripples potato chip because it had been stored somewhere hot and the shrink tightened up enough to warp the record.

 DaveInVA wrote: 
Aren't you afraid of the original poly shrinking and subsequently warping the LP? I remember this as being an issue back in the day, for which non-shrinking vinyl LP sleeves were marketed.

Traffic - The low spark of high heeled boys

Renaissance - Self Titled first LP German promo on white vinyl

The Shins - Chutes too Narrow - red vinyl

Van Morrison - His Band and the Street Choir

Please Note:
I started this Vinyl Only spin list in part because I was informed I was cluttering up the "If Not RP then what are you listening to thread" with my vinyl posts. Now the "Vinyl Only Spin List" thread is getting cluttered up with CD vs Vinyl "debate". This was meant to be a thread for people that enjoy music on vinyl so the debate is kinda off topic. Therefore I started a brand new thread called "Vinyl vs CD" and copied all the main debate posts to there. If anyone wants to continue in that debate please post it there.

Thanks!

Servo wrote:

 black321 wrote: 
Yep!  To have a bass note of any volume you want, without any pre-emphasis the bass note would cause the groove to walk all over nearby grooves.  Even with the RIAA filters, the amount of bass is limited.  Back when the RIAA spec was being written, instruments like the Moog Taurus, and signal processors like the original Eventide Harmonizer (which could produce sub-harmonics and deepen bass artificially) didn't exist, so the RIAA-standard vinyl record is forever limited to the RIAA "curve".  Some engineers spread out the track pitch to allow for larger undulations, at the cost of less play time.  The 12" 45 RPM EP is the epitome of this technique.  While it sounds great, it's for singles, not whole albums.


Excellent choice!  My first "good" turntable was a Rega Planar 3, with a glass platter.  IIRC I paid $350 for mine back in the early '80s.  If you buy the turntable, arm and cartridge all at once, your local dealer will probably cut you a deal where you get an appropriate arm and good MC cartridge (you want to get the best cartridge you can afford) for ~$1000.  Beware of package deals that bundle "MM" cartridges.  "MM" stands for "moving magnet".  You want a moving coil cartridge.  (Coils are lighter than magnets, and less mass means better response.)  If you need a MC preamp, good ones can be had for ~250.

 DaveInVA wrote: 
If I still had my major investment in vinyl, I wouldn't dump it either.  But, as I mentioned before, there never was (and probably never will be) much material that is as good as the grand masters.  But that's not a "vinyl v. digital" issue, it's a "studio v. retail quality" one.


In the 30+ years since the Red Book was published ("Redbook" is a women's magazine, BTW), a whole lot has changed, and a whole lot of very clever engineering solutions have been applied as solutions to what was thought as insurmountable 30 years ago.  Even the 44.1/16 narrow place in the chain hasn't been the impediment that many people, myself included, thought could never transmit good music from the artist to the listener.  We were proved wrong by people who used clever DSP algorithms and ADC/DAC designs to shove a lot of information through the pipe that they were constrained to.  I give them credit, because it really does sound excellent.


Enjoyment is paramount for the listener, of course.  And as a "golden eared" listener, I learned early on that a perfect transfer function is rarely the most enjoyable.  That's why studio monitors "sound terrible" to the consumers of music.  At the consumer end, the wise listener will embrace distortion, and choose components that distort the signal in a way that pleases them the most.


The problem with your claim is that the "evidence" that you put forth to support it, fails.  the "vinyl LP high-frequency content" that one photo shows cannot be said to be the exact signal that the artist recorded, and not unwanted harmonic distortion.  In fact, is MUST be harmonic distortion.  Why?  Because the finest recording equipment available in 1974, when the album was recorded and mastered, were unable to record frequencies much past 16 kHz, much less 90.  So to represent that which is undesirable in the reproduction of music as being desirable is to lie.  You need to find better sources.

Even with the RIAA equalizer inserted into the chain, the HF response of an LP is limited by the mechanical size of the grooves, and the lathe that cut them.  There's no way around that!  That's why mastering for LP has always been something of a black art.  The engineers who master vinyl mothers don't share their tricks, but they do admit that they alter the original recording to fit the media.  Likewise, the bands that rely on getting exposure through broadcasting, where the typical dynamic range of a Rock station is 2-3 dB, master their retail products to sound like they do on the radio.

There has been a lot of research done and published that explains why LP resolution is as limited as it is, but because it was written before the Web, you have to go to engineering libraries to find them.  What you will find is that HF response is not only limited, but things like the heat generated by dragging a diamond past the undulations in vinyl grooves causes the vinyl to get soft and deform, and do other things like ring in the same way that certain tire tread patterns make noise over certain pavement types.  The ONLY way to fix any of this is to completely re-engineer the mechanical recording process.  (BTW, SQ, QS etc. failed because the high frequency subcarriers were too weak to resolve clearly, and got burnished away after a few plays.)

The truth is that an average music recording is NOT a single sine wave.  CD media have 16 bit/channel resolution, not 4.  And although I used to be able to hear all the way up to ~30 kHz (per my hearing ultrasonic motion detectors (I was involved in the install of a store security system), I was the exception, not the rule.  The truth is that very little music has even fundamentals at the top octaves, and even if they did, 99.9% of listeners cannot hear them at all.


MP3 isn't for those.  MP3 is for casual listeners who tend to be more interested in the lyrics than the sound, and care more about the number of tunes they can put on their ipod than how they sound.  It's been nearly three decades since I had my peak hearing, so I can't tell just by listening (as with all middle-aged pundits that pretend to hear things they can't) just how good my is, but I've written some Vorbis encoding algorithms that give me ~256 kbps streams that sound as good or better than the 44.1/16 LPCM that I started with.


I really wish that you had followed that up with some talk about the same.  Instead you chose to delve into matters of ergonomics, and technical issues that only apply to some genres of music, and don't represent the music transmittal technology at all.  Back when we got our music on records, and made it mobile by transcribing to Compact Cassette, I used to transcribe using my college roommate's Nakamichi compander to compress music for playback in cars.  Today there's a button on many car stereos that does the exact same thing in situ.  Sure, plenty of people used compression (another example is recording a tape using Dolby B or C, and playing the tapes on a Walkman without any decoder) post-sale.  That says nothing about the mastering process, though.


Then don't buy them.  This is the 21st Century equivalent of why I used to buy $25 imported LPs when an American pressing cost $8, and why I used to jettison my clothes so I could stuff my suitcases with superior European LP pressings when I traveled abroad.  Go to Amazon.com and you typically can choose between three or four different version of the same album.  Clearly the Beatles box set wasn't remastered aboard Astoria, but then again there are very few virtuosos in the world.


What, like listening to music through the dbx expander-only that was sold briefly in the '70s?  Or no less and no more than the dynamic range that the artist originally intended?  Again, just because some corporate producers produce sonic trash, that doesn't mean that their practices are representative of the medium as a whole.  What's your point?  It seems like you're just making straw man arguments here.


Like I said, there have been some mighty clever solutions.

If you haven't read them already, you can find several posts I've made about my jitter-free system.  Essentially I rip everything to disk, then use the large amounts of cheap RAM that is available to standard computers to buffer the audio stream far better than the cheap PLL circuits that multi-thousand High End CD players still feature as their best effort.  The quartz crystal in a $20 sound card offers more than enough stability, but there are TXCO kits available to add a studio quality master clock to that $20 sound card.  That, with a modestly priced studio DAC, makes an excellent playback system.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
I have "Chutes to Narrow" on red vinyl also

 DaveInVA wrote: 
I think there must be some mistake: That was released after the fall of Saigon.

 lily34 wrote: 
I was THE drywall finisher for a local "rock" station a few years back.
I got to know the owner and she let me look through all the promos for pay.
LP's were on their way out, but I still scored on some stuff in dusty boxes.
And I got some rare early promo CD's too.

 DaveInVA wrote: 
Hey!
I have that one- also with the 7"!!!