Save the reissues — please stop returning them!

I remember in the old days if you bought a record, CD, book, DVD, software disc, you couldn't return it. Copywrite reasons. To stop illegal copying. Was that only in Australia? It no longer applies?

 

I’m really surprised of the amount of people who will accept vinyl or sleeve defects. If it’s not as described or new and defective it goes back - that’s literally consumer law! And the argument of if you want perfecting buy CDs or SACDs is ridiculous why would I want to go back to a format I hated, found boring to play and look at. CDs do nothing for me.

I probably return about 5 records a year all due to poor packaging. This is mostly by Amazon.

 

I will say that I have not returned records ENOUGH. I don't know if it is due to travelling in crappy, rough cardboard inners or what, but almost every new record I have bought has been in terrible condition.

UNIVERSAL being by FAR the worst label!

Every single Beatles mono record was covered in scratches (gave up on Rubber Soul after the 3rd copy and did not bother to open the replacement. Every Bon Jovi record was in terrible condition and full of skips and/or non-fill. Not to mention the scratches. I kept the box set sealed so not sure about the contents. That came direct from Amazon UK, in the good old days when I had the right to buy anything I wanted to online, ugh, I hate this country....

Every KISS record was equally awful. The 45rpm Voulez-Vous I have was not only noisy and scratched, but had AT LEAST 6 or 7 sections of non-fill! Rythym Nation also has non-fill that effected the entire run.

I was done with buying new records a year or 2 ago. My Japanese red monos that are 40 yrs old kill the 2014 copies I have for condition!

My copy of the 45rpm Rumours had not one, but two random bits of vinyl stuck to the records! Wish I exchanged that one while there was still stock.

 

I certainly remember returning and exchanging records when I was a kid in the 80's. Can't remember returning CDs except for the first copy of Like A Prayer I bought. It was a LAP CD, but had Simply Red's A New Flame pressed on it! The girl at the front desk at Big W thought the 12 yr old (although I was already 6ft by then so looked older) returning that CD was involved in a bad prank. I told her I would play it in the music section if she didn't believe me. Shame I did not keep it as a curiosity. My 2nd copy from Big W that day did actually contain LAP.

 

Each person has a different personal level of tolerance. For one person who thinks that a dish at a restaurant is too salty, for another, it's just right.

There ARE quality control issues in the industry. The first several MoFi OneSteps had issues with the jacket covers having blotches on them, the cause was the covers sticking together and pulling off some of the coloring. At $125, do you think the buyer shouldn't complain and, instead, just put up with it?

And why is your standard the gold standard?

Expecting CD-like quiet from the surfaces of LPs is obviously unfair and unwarranted. But I just got a new record with two 1" scratches on it. Its replacement had a single scratch in about the same place. That's not acceptable.

So for that guy who hears a defect when the store owner could not, it doesn't mean that the defect isn't there. Some people are more sensitive to certain things than others. Perhaps the buyer of the LP is being too picky. My guess is that if he's truly that perturbed over little things, he'll soon get tired of constantly making returns, and find another format with which to listen to music.

 

I suspect that many records returned with minor problems get sold-on to someone else on the understanding that only a small proportion of customers will return a non-perfect record.
Only obvious defects (eg. noticeable scratch) would be removed from sale.

 

Where I was in Australia, it was generally OK to return an item within a week with a valid reason. However, some stores had a policy to give you a hard time to try to get you to keep the damaged item. In one case a snobbish retailer refused to hear an obvious defect on a record that I returned when it was played on his system, and he blamed me for having a "too good" stereo, ignoring my claim that the defect was on the record and not a problem with my stereo (which at the time was good quality, but nothing audiophile).

As a kid I recall one shop had a thing about returning warped records, and would blame me for leaving the record in the sun, or in the car window, etc. They were really horrible, but I would stand my ground. They would eventually give in, and I would get them to put the replacement record on the turntable to check for warp. In most every case, every copy of the record behind the counter had exactly the same warp that was on the disk I was returning and being blamed for. They would never apologise to me for blaming me for what turned out to be a bad batch of pressings. I detested their attitude, but it was a small town and no alternate record sellers.

 

Found him!!

 

I’d just like to clarify something about reissue recent vinyl releases:

Are modern vinyls cut from the same digital masters as CD’s?

I understand older vinyl from 60’s/70’s were cut from analog masters, thereby offering incredible sound quality.

But do modern vinyl have any superiority in actual sound quality over modern CD’s?

I’d be interested to see DR values from modern vinyl reissues….

 

I mainly listen to CDs. It's only in the last few years I've started buying vinyl again, mainly as a collectible. When I do play vinyl it's my old stuff. So I have some shrink-wrapped vinyl from Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead, Radiohead, Thom Yorke and Miles Davis. With all these quality issues appearing, I'm questioning whether I should even bother with new vinyl at all.

 

On the whole I'd say that vinyl is cut from hi-res files - 24/192 or DSD format files, not the same masters as CD. One important thing is that vinyl cutting requires different mastering to CDs. This makes a comparison with CDs less useful. Of course a mastering engineer can use compression when preparing for vinyl but it's far less likely, one would hope. In theory there is no reason a digitial transfer of a master tape should make a less dynamic vinyl pressing than using an analogue master copy. Of course there are many other factors involved in cutting an LP that have an affect on the end result, but I'd guess that the effect of using a digital source is likely to be low on that list.

 

I have to say... I have records in my collection, and I enjoy them, largely due to nostalgia, but the more I read about records on the forum, the less likely I am to buy them....

 

Added some excessive weight in playback using multiple cartridges, even doing some reverse playback on the Audio-Technica.

 

I don't think it's bad as it sounds. I have some classic underground albums I bought in my twenties at jumble sales and s/h shops. They're not perfect but they still sound great and I still enjoy them.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love music, and I'm not married to any format, though I prefer a physical copy of something.

How can I not love records, I have been listening to them since the early seventies, and when I was old enough to buy them (around 1980) I did exactly that.

In 1999 I sold my records, an awful lot of them, because I needed a new guitar for a recording session...

Around 2010 I got a record player again and bought a couple of hundred albums over about three years, and they're good, but at the end of the day, as much as I still love records, I prefer cd's and such.

These days if I happen to see secondhand records, I'll always have a look through, and probably pick something up, but that's about it.... initially that Mofi thread made me feel I wanted to get some of these fancy records for a listen, but the longer it's gone on, the less I have wanted to lol

 

I use both. CD player was probably better than my turntable. I now have a hi-res file player and find during the day i play cd rips and dsd files off that. But as I now have a much better turntable than before, my LP playing has increased a lot and I do like getting old copies of albums.

Mofi are overkill. I'd rather seek out an old copy of something than waste money on those over-engineered blocks of plastic with their super heavy-duty card sleeves. I've done it twice, and now I'm going to get rid of them. I find there's no pleasure in them.

 

Yea, Boutique product.... I'm not going to say they're good or bad, but for me it is, and always has been, about the songs and albums.... and in spite of what I said above, I go through phases.

 

Prefer to buy from Amazon for the no hassle returns, but do sometimes dabble elsewhere. There are too many defects with certain labels and this shapes what I buy now. I have bought several as new records of classical recordings from the 70’s and 80’s and it’s rare to find any significant pressing defects, if they are previously unplayed . Perhaps people saying they never find defects play only Rock music and vinyl defects are less noticeable?

 

Most stores I remember allowed you to return something if unopened... If opened you could exchange it for the same exact title.

 

Well potentially, yes, as higher resolution files and less compression can be used when cutting vinyl, particularly at 45rpm. Tom Petty's Live Anthology was put out on both CD and vinyl sets. The CD was mastered using lower resolution files and uses compression. The vinyl set was cut with high resolution files and cut without compression. There's FAR greater life to the vinyl set. Nils Lofgren's Acoustic Live is a digital recording, and the CD sounds quite good. But those who have the 2-disc 45rpm done by Analogue Productions say it's quite a bit better.

I'd guess that streaming uncompressed, high resolution files would sound better than CDs, and give those vinyl reissues a run for their money, though.

 

I will return something if it is truly defective - warped so much that it won't play or will play but the warp is so great that it is disconcerting; or ticks or pops that last quite a few revolutions that it ruins the enjoyment of the LP (minor ticks and pops, etc I have no issue with). I don't return seam splits, unless they are so atrocious as to almost split the entire side.

Other than that, and I buy a lot of new vinyl - I must be lucky as I rarely get a "defective" record. Probably over the past few years I had to return maybe 10 LPs (out of hundreds), and the majority were from Amazon - mostly warped to be unplayable, one or two scratched.

I purchase a lot from Acoustic Sounds (1 return for a massive warp, 1 return for a mis-ship); Music Direct (1 replacement for a One-Step LP that had a scratch - Eric Clapton); Elusive Disc (1 return for a very warped record).

All the records that I have purchased from Indie stores near me or through the mail, always seem to be near perfect or have minor issues (and I mean minor) in that there is never a reason to return the LP.

I don't know if it is my Turntable setup, or cartridge - but I very rarely get any audible non-fill and/or noisy vinyl.

I do wonder if and when I have to replace my cartridge, if certain aspects that my current cartridge tracks with no issue, could become an issue with a different cartridge in the future?

 

In the Uk you could always return faulty goods. Consumer law

 

I never had an issue returning faulty records/cd's in Australia between 1979 and 2010

 

You did what?



jb

 

This was exactly what I did and it ended up fixing the LP tracking perfectly on both of my turntables.