As a collectable, picture disks are great. As a sound artifact, I've always considered them to be sub-par. That consideration stems from listening to various picture disks over the years and all of them sounding like shit, as well as reading about the process that goes into making them (which I cannot recall unfortunately). The term, "noisy," comes to mind.

Ultimately it comes down to you and what your listening habits are, and even what you expect to get out of the individual disks themselves...if you want to pick up, "Haunting the Chapel," by Slayer on a picture disk in order to blow the roof off your place, I'm sure it will work just fine.

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As a collectable, picture disks are great. As a sound artifact, I've always considered them to be sub-par. That consideration stems from listening to various picture disks over the years and all of them sounding like shit, as well as reading about the process that goes into making them (which I cannot recall unfortunately). The term, "noisy," comes to mind.

Ultimately it comes down to you and what your listening habits are, and even what you expect to get out of the individual disks themselves...if you want to pick up, "Haunting the Chapel," by Slayer on a picture disk in order to blow the roof off your place, I'm sure it will work just fine.

Picture discs require nonstandard vinyl and printing that does not result in the best sound, generally.

Picture discs make for a whole different ball of wax, so to speak.

1) The pictures in the middle can interfere with the bottoms of the grooves and alter the sound quality. Some end up making for your 'needle' actually being pulled along the surface of the picture in some parts.

2) The vinyl is not annealed to itself like with a regular record.

3) As mentioned, different quality vinyl. But, on the plus side, the vinyl is clear and, therefore, NON-MAGNETIC!! In fact, Classic Records is now using clear vinyl for some of their LP's, so this difference we used to criticize may actually be a positive.

4) On the down side, the ink in those pictures may be LOADED with magnetism, screwing up the sound as much, or more, than the magnetisms present in the black vinyls.

In general - I agree with those who have said the sound tends to be inferior, but what the heck, have fun and play them and see what ya think!