Which LP defect annoys you the most?

I vote warp. One bad warp and it's vinyl ashtray time.

 

Off-center, hands down. With content like piano or string sustains, it’s painful.

 

Other than flat our skipping, I have to say ticks and pops. It just messes with the flow of the music and completely takes me out of it, ugghhh.

 

Off-center and IGD.

 

Most of these bug me and take me out of the music and continually remind me that I'm listening to something canned. I'll add one that you didn't mention but maybe the one I had the most -- groove echo, because when there's groove echo in a break or quite passage of the music ahead of a louder passaged it can totally give away and destroy the drama of the music.

I don't care about flaws I can't hear. If it plays perfect but there appear to be physical marks -- couldn't care less, but I don't usually find that to be the case, if the surface is physically marked the result is often visible. Warps, if they're not bad, and the music tracks without flutter, I can deal with those. I'm less acutely sensitive to slight variations of pitch so minor off centeredness is something that's easier for me to ignore than other problems (though when I hear stuff like tapes that have been transferred using the Plangent Process compared with tapes that have pitch variability, I'm amazed at how much more musical and "real" the corrected tapes can sound). But with off centeredness it's a matter of degree. Also some music is more intrusively impacted by that flaw -- long sustained piano parts and off centeredness is a deadly combo, whereas with an album of garage rock tuns from the '60s, the pitch variation may not be as intrusive.

So in a spectrum of dislike, those would be on the lesser offensive end for me. Ticks, pops, crack, non-fill, groove echo, would all be in the more intrusive category.

For me, personally, I haven't been a vinyl buyer in 25 years, and while I still go back and listen to my old vinyl, I do so less and less as the years go by -- partially because digital recording and playback has improved so much, and partially because, after 25 years of mostly listening to recorded music without these intrusive flaws, I'm less tolerant of them and find them even more intrusive now.

 

Warped records have always bugged me the most. As someone who grew up listening to beat up (my fault) records, pops and ticks are just part of the deal; I barely notice them. I have only purchased a few new records and luckily haven't experienced non-fill, or off-center records.

 

Repeating clicks from a scratch. Click click click click click click. Hate that! I will return or find another copy if there is more than 2 of those in a row.

 

Scratches on brand new vinyl. All others are mostly manufacturing process defects. Scratches are from careless people.

 

Absolutely off centre, every sec of every track severely degraded.

I bought thousands of albums between 1974-1994 and stopped buying new vinyl when pressings went downhill. I was very lucky with only having a very few warped records and non-fill was extremely rare. Surface noise was reduced as my system improved and pops and clicks becoming far less significant in an active system.

Off-centre records never became less annoying and several I had to re-centre. Sonically it reduces a pretty decent system to crap.

 

Been buying records since the 60s, never had non-fill on them till these past 10 years or so. The very occasional warp (usually my fault, bad storage, hot car, etc.) and off-center pressing, but amazingly few defects, back in the day. I used a pencil to widen a spindle hole now and then.

 

For me, it's probably warping, I've never had a situation where it seemed as though the audio was being affected but not living in the USA means it's frustrating to get some record from Amazon only to find it's warped and I can see the tonearm go up and down as the record spins. Particularly with Paul McCartney's Flaming Pie reissue which had a warped disc 2, I had a bit of an issue where they shipped it to the wrong address and the shipping company was really taking their sweet time going to get it and bring it to me that I ended up just driving to the address myself and getting it. The other was a Dylan record, Shadows in the night that I got out of curiosity but it's warped so I don't play it much.

 

Almost always due to a bad setup, low-end components, or records which were permanently damaged from being played with a quarter on the cart back in the day.

 

The thread is about record issues; not jacket issues.

 

Factually incorrect. Recent memories will always lose to romanticized so-called "good ol' days".

1979 record.

 

off center

 

Seam splits. Because with all others I know what to do – return, while this one is more like case by case but I’m sure every time I reach out to play it I’ll be annoyed if I decided to keep it.

 

IDK , I clean them, and I play them. Period. No worries nor anxieties. Analog has so much going for it and that’s all that matters.

 

Yeah it’s the same with off centre, really annoying!

The grading system could do with an overhaul, in England we historically had Ex between VG+ and NM which was really useful, but discogs followed the US system which has now become the norm here too.

 

I would say non-fill is the most frustrating but luckily in my experience, I find it to be a fairly rare occurrence. My vote goes to low level crackling, and general surface noise. All other problems can be corrected for, even occasional pops and ticks can diminish over time (and are also fairly trivial to touch up in transfers without affecting anything else) but you can never do anything about a noisy pressing or poor quality pvc

 

Again, guys...

This is about *LP* defects; not jacket defects. The thread title was pretty clear.

 

Back in my vinyl days I had a very decent table, arm and cartridge options. My problem was even after cleaning some good and expensive pressings sometimes had inherent pops embedded or actually recorded into the pressing.
Now, that may be ok for most to put up with but at the high SPLs that were rather normal for me they could sound like the high crack of a 5.56 NATO round being touched off in close vicinity. I even hit the deck more than once. When CD showed up I was off like a rocket!

 

Yikes!!

Just to emphasize: I personally never encountered those issues (off-center, non-fill. Luck?) So, I certainly don't romanticize my own history with vinyl records; when domestic pressings really went to hell in the late Seventies, I was hoping for a better format -- then CD happened, thankfully.

 

I've encountered them but it's relatively rare. More often than not, I've encountered noisy vinyl especially for late 70s US pressings, likely due to the oil crisis.

 

How about the so-called "hopper vinyl", where they'd grind up returns, labels and all, and re-press into new LPs ... ? I always wondered if that was an urban legend. People I knew who worked at distributors circa 1979 swore it was true ...

I had an LP of Erik Satie piano pieces, that sounded like it was recorded next to a blazing campfire. And that was on a classical label, whom you'd think would take more care with quality.

 

While I do feel like I have noticed a higher number of off-center pressings among brand new LPs over the past decade or so, I have to say that off-center pressings have been a big problem for decades. I have scores of records from the 70s and 80s (and 90s) which were pressed off center (I don't have many 60s LPs - most of my 60s stuff is either on reissued vinyl or CD - but I'm sure off-center pressings were common then too). So, it's always been a rampant problem.

What's weird to me is that people complain incessantly about non-fill, but I've honestly encountered comparatively few records with non-fill. I can think of fewer than 10 LPs in my collection (of around 2,000) that definitely have non-fill (i.e., those intermittent bursts of surface noise that sound like zippers). I've found other types of surface noise to be much more common.