Why no more Mercs? Is the end near?

Vinyl is dead! Long live vinyl!

Rcprince, I do comb the used bins regularly. In my area (Wash DC metro) the bins are closing down. The vinyl landscape as well as cd, is changing radically. Of the four good shops remaining one is for sale, one might close due to competition from the internet (he doesn;t need the store to sell on the net),one moved and raised his prices. The fourth who moves around a bit, still has quality stuff but rarely audiophile and even more rarely any classical. There has been discussion of the difficulty of dealing with Classic on various other groups. I've had the experience and will not buy direct.The dealers can deal with Classic. The problem I have with Classic is not the quality of product but the difficulty in returning defective product. And I'm not alone. Add to the mix that there are variations of the Classic RCA's that are cheaper (not in quality) and my thinking is that the RCA's were over manufactured. I'm glad to have purchased mine. While the RCA catalog may now be saturated, the Mercury clearly isn't. It seems ashame to see it waste. I'm currently collecting some of the Speakers Corner and Alto issues. Love the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. A cost effective alternative to the out of print 1/2 speeds (by companies also "out of print").
Thanks for the contribution and information.

My understanding is that the contract Classic had was for the recordings they did and no more. Apparently either Wilma Cozart or Philips declined to allow Classic to do any more, for reasons unknown to me. Too bad, as they are spectacular and there are a lot of better performances and pieces of music out there in the Mercury catalog than Hi Fi a la Espanol and Balalaika Favorites. As far as if there's a future in high end vinyl, I hope there is, but given the close-out pricing I've seen on a lot of the Classic RCA reissues I don't know if there's enough of us out there interested in this product to make this a viable business for Classic and other high quality record companies (witness the now defunct Wilson Audio vinyl and the Reference Mastercuts reissues). There still seem to be some Testament and Alto reissues of the EMI and Decca catalogs, although they seem to be slowing down too. Hopefully this will continue to be a small niche product; otherwise, keep combing those used record bins!