Playable LPs

95%+ easily.

DeKay

Well I'm sorry to say ,I haven't been playing my vinyl in a while.I have over 1,500  in great shape lots,of first issues.Lots, of unopened  copies ,Japanese  and European. But I have like 5,000 cds and and I would say there are plenty of copies,that are also my vinyl. I'm lazy and putting on a 60 to 70 min cd is alot easier than getting up and turning my lp over..I  have 3 nice systems to play on.

My focus since around 2006 has been to curate a very large collection of "standard" pressings though many are highly collectible, from the late 60s and early ’70s- the goal was to get the best sound possible from "ordinary" pressings (though many are now hard to find, small label, private label or simply in the province of record collectors). I never considered myself a "collector," more an itinerant dilettante who finds something and "surfs" it for other material I like. Very little of what I listen to these days is "audiophile" issues though I kept a lot of that stuff-- it sits in an adjacent room and includes psych, prog, blues, jazz and a ton of classical. As to %s, I could not say-- I am usually in a mood to find something I haven’t listened to in a while, and since I can go shopping at home through the stacks, can always find something to scratch the itch. I culled about 5,000 records out of around 17,000 and bought another thousand or so since, after dumping a similar amount shortly after arriving in Texas.

Any playlist of a listening session would mix acoustic jazz with roots/slide, some hard psych, a classical work and some soul. I can go from Sly Stone to an obscure psych band, it all depends on mood. Having a lot of records just means more access to more different things. To me, all of that is "justified" and it isn’t based purely on sonics. I kinda got out of the "audio spectaculars" a while ago-- and it was pretty liberating. Take a chance, try something new and different or old and different. My cleaning is quite rigorous and pretty much everything is in top playing condition (I have spares of some that are not quite up to par but haven’t parted with them yet- they have some collector value--I just have no urgency to do another purge, which will no doubt come). I don’t stream. I do have an SSD from which I can play local files digitally, but that’s mainly for stuff that isn’t on vinyl, demos, some material I was sent for work back in the day, etc. My serious listening is pretty much all vinyl. 

It’s getting harder to find clean copies of some of this stuff just like fresh old high end tubes. I suspect there will be another turn-over when my generation passes on to that great listening room in the sky. In the meantime, carpe diem!

I rarely encounter records used or reissues that I ever have issues with noise or poor sound quality. All the vendors I deal with will immediately accept a return for replacement or just send me a replacement disc with no exceptions asked. Likewise with all the brick-and-mortar establishments I deal with whether the record is new or used. New unsealed usually only require a light dusting and a pass with a silicon roller to play perfectly and maybe a new inner sleeve if the one it came in was a paper or printed one.

Used records get a pass through the Spin Clean following the manufactures instructions to the letter and using the cleaning solution with distilled water and the cotton rags that come with the product and 99% of the time that's all they need other than a dust and silicon roller before play. I also use LAST liquid stylus cleaner and their carbon fiber stylus brush before every record played.

I believe this is all compounded by the fact that I have exceptional playback equipment and use cartridges that use fine line or Microline stylus geometry and that I keep them clean. I would like to find a quieter copy of The Carpenter's A Song for You though, which I'm currently pursuing.

Hah! I posted about this about a month ago. I stated that the 7k invested in a turntable and artridge, phono pre amp was not worth the mediocre and unpredictable quality of the ever expensive records I invested another $1500 in at at least $30 per album. And now it seems vinyl’s average price is approaching $35 easily- for no reason other than a price gouge imo. If I have 50 carefully researched and purchased 180 gram supposedily "audiophile" recordings, I estimate that only 15 are truly really good and the rest range from crappy sounding to just ok. I continue to stream- endless music, instantly change songs/artists, no cleaning, prepping, changing sides, no static, no pit in my stomach after opening a new $35 album and hearing the first song and regretting the purchase.