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April 6, 2007 - 5:35am
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Finally, why oldtimers still think LP's are worthy
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There are two good reasons to own LP's. One is that a lot of them are collector's items, worth a lot of money. The other reason has actual musical value. Sometimes first pressings of old albums sound better just because they were mastered when the tapes were new, assuming that the actual LP being played is mint. There have been complaints here and there that the wrong tapes have been used on some CD remasterings, not the original takes. Some people have also made complaints that age, as well as wear and tear on old master tapes, leave them sounding crummy. I have read stories about record companies treating their tape vaults like garbage cans in the past, where tapes have been trashed, cut up to get the materials at the core of the master reels to sell off, as well as tapes being dumped in the ocean to keep storage costs down. All kinds of horror stories. Maybe DSD and SACD are superior to analog, maybe not. The source material seems to matter most. If a record company remasters inferior tapes, not the source as it was heard in the studio, originally, not in mint condition, then it seems that it doesn't improve on the LP. If you remaster a turd, it's still a turd.
And how many do you own that are really worth anything of substance? Do you have an early Elvis promo that goes for about $10K, yeah, $10K as long as someone is willing to pay that much for a piece of plastic. The price they are worth in the books is usually pristine, etc. Most valuable one i got is $75. And that's if someone is paying that much. Record collection is as lame as some other collections, like stamps and coins. Only ones who benefit are the ones who sold you the things. Or teh ones who make a living off of publsihing the value guides. Majority of LP's are worth $3. What they cost in the 70's. Ya listen to em, wear em out, that's what they are worth. Who had access to radio promo copies of early Elvis Beatles or Stones, very few, and they probably don't even have em anymore, they probably got trashed when the radio stations closed. Lotsa dreams, very little reality. Even teh current bunch of "limited" issue LP's are not worth anything more than listening too. Eah play wears em out. Like old guitars, on paper worth a lot, in reality, kinda usueless for teh perception of some absurd price for some old worn out piece of wood. Like Eric Claptons worn out Fender, auctioned at $700,000. Come on, that's some freak of nature, and ain't worth it, just rich people playing. They make more, it's a lotta hooyey. Wonder what those $100K TT's are going for in 20 years? About as much as an Edison wax cylinder, worthless.
The LP, CD and SACD are probably formats that are all going to be dead in the near future. When a person can download music, there is no need to buy individual discs to play each album. I wonder if electronics manufacturers are working on Class A Ipods, home systems to be played back on high end stereo equipment. I agree with you on LP's in this respect. There is no reason to ever press a vinyl LP for new material. Production of vinyl, cassettes, turntables and cassette decks probably should have stopped somewhere around 1985, for all practical purposes. It was clear by that time that the CD was taking over the electronics marketplace. Aren't most recording studios geared towards the digital medium, anyway? As far as old LP's go, they still have value, depending on the LP. Some albums have had awful transfers to the CD medium, for various reasons, such as using the wrong tapes or awful remastering. In some cases, the old LP will be better by default because it was mastered from original source tapes that no longer exist. Some record companies simply did not take care of the master tapes. I am not making a general statement about everyone. The Beatles' library is apparently mostly intact, due to all the unreleased material that has come out over the past few years. My pet peeve is when record companies alter albums from the original version. I want the original takes and mixes, as well as artwork, unchanged from the original record. Sometimes albums get remixed in a substantially different way from the original version. Then to hook people, record companies add throwaway tracks on the album. Why not do a Beatles Anthology style package of outakes if they're so great? I've also read where old, analog tapes are overly compressed when they get remastered to make the album sound louder. Is there any musical merit to it?