John, wasn't (isn't) there a shop somewhere in East Anglia called the Vinyl Resting Place? 

I've looked it up - it's in London:

http://www.thevinylrestingplace.co.uk/

Yes Age Concern, cheaper than Oxfam etc. good for classical  but not jazz :

Yep, I bought a lot at auction which included Solti's Ring cycle on vinyl.

Probably my favourite LPs are two boxsets of Richter playing Bach's WTC. The playing is sublime, and the sound is exceptionally clean - these are probably the quietest LPs I have. Quite a rare combination of great playing and sound:




I also have many of the old Vega LPs, but they are very scratchy and the Accord boxsets released last year were a revelation. I would not part with my favourite Messiaen LPs - Yvonne Loriod playing (nearly) all the piano music - not all of it had been composed when the ultra rare OME1 was issued, but this is the only place where you will find a recording of Messiaen's opus 1, La Dame de Shalott, and Loriod's playing in the key pieces is utterly different to anyone else. The sound from these LPs is also noticeably better than from the CDs in the Messiaen Edition boxset reissued last year:

Perhaps more worringly there's a store in Calilfornia called 'vinyl solution'! Reports of the mass extermination of CDs is as yet unconfirmed.

I have heaps of vinyl which I try to keep in the manner recommended by Kennytone. Prized possessions include, Coltrane's Kula Se Mama, both This Heat LPs, With the Beatles (mono) and some Harvest compilations. I'm not hugely into rare records, being more into what's on them rather than their value, but its nice to know that some of the collection sits there accumulating wealth while idling. I once sold a Pink Floyd test press of their first 45 - 'See Emily Play', when I was hard up, and I've regretted it ever since.

I too have Rega P3, but not in arresting yellow. I adore its sound (played through a creek amp and royd speakers). I'm too lazy to digitize the collection, but do fileshare some pieces to save me the bother. This is the only filesharing I do as generally i think MP3s cheapen music in every sense, but then again my ipod is a close companion on journeys. Well, in fact I did make a CD of my favourite punk 45s one time (took me the best part of a summer - but what fun)

The ritual of vinyl is time consuming but wonderful fun. Some evenings I only play 45s and do spread them all over the floor! There's something delightful about having 2-4 mins of music and then having to choose another. I also think that 1 side of a vinyl album is about perfect listening time. Who has time to do 80mins of a CD? There's often too much fill on them. But, (sigh), I guess the mp3 may be spelling the end of albums full stop? I, for one, hope not.

When it comes to classical I find that since they got recording techniques right I prefer CDs, perhaps there's an inherent snobbery that allows me crackles in pop and jazz, but not in classical. Having, said that my most played vinyl at the moment is Janacek String Quartet which I picked up in a charity shop for 50p. I can't get over just how modern it sounds.

I started buying LPs in the early 1970s, as soon as I left school and had a disposable income. I had about 70 before I even got round to buying something to play them on! That first system was a Pioneer PL12D with a built-in amplifier and a pair of Videotone Minimax speakers. I still use the speakers in a bedroom system, and they still sound better than they have any right to for their price and size.

I progressed to a Dual 1229 turntable, if that was progress (?), which was eventually fitted with a Decca London cartridge. Good sound, but I'm not sure it was very kind to records. This was used with a Quad 33/303 amplifier and a pair of KEF 104s. Not a bad set-up for a teenager in the 1970s 

However... when the oil price crisis hit and raw vinyl became expensive, manufacturers started using large amounts of recycled vinyl even in full-price LPs, and pressing quality went down the drain. At its largest, my collection reached about 750 LPs, variously bought new (from shops which can't have made much money out of me, because I returned so many unacceptably noisy discs) and second hand from the much-loved Ives shop in Norwich. I was so annoyed by dire pressing quality that I became an early adopter of CD, and started replacing LPs as soon as reissues appeared. Now I'm replacing some of those early CD reissues with better, more recent transfers... I must be daft.

I had no turntable for years, but hung on to all the LP treasures which hadn't made it to silver disc. I'm glad I did, because home transcription to CDR came along, a technology we couldn't have dreamt of in the 1980s. For this I bought a secondhand Linn LP12, on which I installed a Rega arm and Ortofon moving coil cartridge. I use an EAR phono stage with adjustable output level, which feeds an outboard "Flying Cow" (no, really) 24 bit A-to-D converter; the digital signal goes via an M-Audio interface box to a USB input on the computer, thus bypassing the computer's own sound card. Results, after de-clicking and de-noising with Cool Edit, are very satisfactory.

As an experiment, I transcribed Berglund's LP (ASD 2952) of the well-known Alfven Swedish Rhapsody, something for which there exists a commercial CD issue. I preferred my transcription, which was not only warmer sounding as expected, but also had much better instrumental timbre. The commercial CD sounded positively harsh by comparison. It shouldn't be possible for an amateur to make a better-sounding CD from an LP than the professionals can from a master tape, but friends preferred the CD-R too.

Several winters later, I'm finally down to the last few candidates for transcription...

Ian,

What a coincidence, I have just earleir today mentioned that very LP on another thread, in the general R3 section, the "unkown..... " thread

 

John W