No, it's not unusual. Provided you have the ability to clean vinyl effectively, stick predominantly to buying used vinyl, preferably recorded in full analog pre-early 80's at thrifts or garage sales for $1.00 or less. Focus on condition and you can buy 15-20 albums and throw away, trade to dealers (and very often end up with superb music in good condition), or recycle half of them before you hit the wall of diminishing returns. Then spend the big bucks on new vinyl very discriminately and you won't be disappointed.
New Vinyl Defects
I'd like a little input from you vinylphiles out there.
My buying recently shifted back to almost exclusively vinyl rather than CD. I'm buying mostly "pre-owned", but recently purchased an armload of new and 180 gram pressings. A recent order of 4 LPs, 2 of them were defective. One is unplayable - it had label glue on the last track, and (this is the really odd part) the grooves were off-center, so much I could see the tonearm oscillating back and forth, and the sound was also oscillating. The other one wasn't so bad, or unusual, the first track had near-constant "scratching" sound for nearly the whole song. I recall this as being pretty common in "my before cd" days, but assumed with 180 gram LP's that the QC may be better.
Here's the questions:
1) is the above unusual? That is, is 50% defective - common, or anomaly?
2) What's the likelyhood that if I send back the second LP (Johnny Cash "American V: A Hundred Highways") for a replacement, that I'll get a good copy? I like it and will tolerate the first track if they're all bad.
My buying recently shifted back to almost exclusively vinyl rather than CD. I'm buying mostly "pre-owned", but recently purchased an armload of new and 180 gram pressings. A recent order of 4 LPs, 2 of them were defective. One is unplayable - it had label glue on the last track, and (this is the really odd part) the grooves were off-center, so much I could see the tonearm oscillating back and forth, and the sound was also oscillating. The other one wasn't so bad, or unusual, the first track had near-constant "scratching" sound for nearly the whole song. I recall this as being pretty common in "my before cd" days, but assumed with 180 gram LP's that the QC may be better.
Here's the questions:
1) is the above unusual? That is, is 50% defective - common, or anomaly?
2) What's the likelyhood that if I send back the second LP (Johnny Cash "American V: A Hundred Highways") for a replacement, that I'll get a good copy? I like it and will tolerate the first track if they're all bad.