Dead End record store day this year? Judging by one reply each day it was a flop. 4 posts and 3 of them by the OP. Full marks to @klimt for trying to stimulate some comments. There was absolutely nothing film music related in the UK that interested me this time and l didn’t even bother to visit any stores. The US had one import soundtrack that l bought on line a few days after…..A real odd cookie by any standards……Bruno Nicolai’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”, a spy spoof Italian B movie. Now there’s obscurity for you. The 3x Harry Potter stuff was just a big YAWN for me, just more repetition. |
I was a late comer to Record Store Day, not participating until 2016. This years offerings was my favorite of them all. I bought:the LPs of:
- Bobby Charles - Ry Cooder - Elvis Costello - Jackie DeShannon - Hank III - Emmylou Harris - The Jayhawks - Nick Lowe w/ Los Straitjackets - Doc Pomus - Ralph Stanley - Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives - Clarence White
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@klimt - a pressing is how a vinyl record is made; it's literally pressed/stamped from a glob of vinyl material. Think of it like printings of a book where each printing can be slightly (or not so slightly) different. |
Mainly by doing your research. There are Matrix #s/letters/initials of mastering engineers etc.in the dead wax (inner space next to the record label. They all have meaning. You have to do research as to their meaning. Go to Discogs many forums or just do a Google.search. It's time consuming but you have to put the effort in. |
@johnto - particularly the older threads on Hoffman where people who had done shoot-outs of various pressings offered their views. Often, it was different shadings or points of emphasis among the better copies rather than dramatic differences, though there are some, e.g., the RL of LZII that are often considered by many to be top copies. I went through a long period of discovery on my own, learning to decode dead wax and making the connection between a particular pressing and its sonics. That's the hard part- you either have to rely on anecdotal from others who have made studied comparisons or do them yourself. I did a fairly basic primer on this a decade ago: https://thevinylpress.com/buying-used-records-a-primer/ Even that is dated to some extent, e.g. the Piros cut of LZ1 on Monarch (a pressing plant) was bettered by a 2nd Japanese pressing, which at the time, cost me about $30 US. Perhaps the biggest change since I wrote that is grading and price inflation in the market as well as the scarcity of "good" copies--depending on what one is hunting for, the records simply aren't out there, or are in the hands of specialty shops that fetch very high dollars for a particular copy. |
