MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
I retrieved my LPs from my parents' loft this Christmas and bought myself a turntable.
Popped into a second hand record shop today and bought an album and an ep. The latter, The Triffids' Field of Glass has words neatly etched in the centre of the disc. One side reads 'pope held on infant rape charge', the other '....papal semen identified'
wtf?
Not unusual with vinyl, especially punk/new-wave/Indy recordings; the bloke doing the mastering would often write something in the run-out area, "a porky prime-cut" can be often found, along with all sorts of random nonsense.
Always worth checking the run-out space for any stamp showing the name of the mastering house and comparing it with what's on the sleeve; if they match, it's a pressing from first generation metalwork or stampers, and best quality, especially if it says Masterdisk.
If it says something different, say Masterdisk on the sleeve, and Stirlingsound on the vinyl, then the original metal stampers have become worn or damaged, and new ones cut from a duplicate, second-generation tape copied from the original stereo mastertape.
I was a bit of a vinyl geek back when I sold audio gear before CD's came in.
Also, back in the 80's, a lot of vinyl was recycled due to the oil crisis, and disks were made thinner, so it's not unusual to find bits of paper pressed into the vinyl where the label was ground up along with the rest of the old vinyl.
This is why I stopped buying vinyl, and went over to CD; I had a disk which you could see white specks in, it jumped like buggery, because these were all tiny bits of paper showing through the grooves.
I have no illusions about how great vinyl was, it wasn't most of the time, unless you had top-quality pressings, and a bloody good turntable.