heisenberg wrote: > You paint a very bleak picture. Basically, buying an LP is the same as > buying a lottery ticket. You may hit the jackpot, but most likely you'll > hit a dud.
The situation isn't quite as bad as suggested. The LP pressing plants do, in general, try to produce a quality product. Stampers are normally replaced at some predetermined point and they check random samples to check for quality, etc. In retrospect, my use of the term "wild card" was probably not the best choice of phrases. With a record from a quality plant, the difference between the first pressings and the last isn't so much a "jackpot" versus "dud" issue but is rather more subtle. Of course, it doesn't take much to get a good obsessive-compulsive personality revved up! In a way, vinyl works much better than one would expect from describing the production process -- kind of like the internal combustion engine. In describing the latter (holes in a block of metal plugged with other blocks of moving metal attached to an irregularly shaped rod and powered by explosions), it'd be hard to believe that you could end up with the super-smooth, long-running running power source that one gets in a luxury car! My music collecting started back in the 1960s so, as a consumer, the LP was pretty much it. I've since converted my entire collection to digital and really don't miss the variability of LPs. I have no problem with digital; I'm just sad that so many of the recordings these days buy into the rather unmusical recording fads so popular in the industry. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mlsstl's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9598 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98603 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
