Old LP Recordings
  • Randolph Nichols
    Posts: 398
    As some of you may know my wife and I have put our home on the market and are in the midst of throwing things out right and left.  Yesterday I tossed a gazillion cassette tapes, including many of my own performances.  Even if transferred to a more current medium I’m not sure I could bear listening to them. (Are only the young enamored with the sound of their own performances?)

    Today I discovered three large boxes of LP records I had forgotten I even owned. Some records are really of interest and a couple are quite rare (e.g., a gem by Robert Goldsand, one of my NYC piano teachers in the 1960s and1970s). Most are orchestral, chamber and piano works performed by major artists of my youth and predate my work in churches. There are, therefore, few choral or organ recordings that would be of special interest to many of you.

    I really don't know what to do with them. With no working LP player I haven't listened to them in years.  I know many audiophiles still prefer the old LPs but am wondering how realistic it is to buy a workable system, particularly since I don't know if any of the recordings have warped after such a prolonged storage in a basement.  I sort of just wish they would go away.  

    What's your advice?
  • francis
    Posts: 10,668
    If they are playable you can buy a turntable that goes directly to your computer and you can rip everything to mp3. I have one.
  • Randolph Nichols
    Posts: 398
    Thanks Francis for the sensible recommendation. I'll hang on to the records . . . at least for now.
  • ghmus7
    Posts: 1,465
    Ahhhhhh! Don't throw them away....haven't you been noticing that there is a resurgence of interest in vinyl? Put them up on Ebay with a few pics....make sure you say they are vinyl.
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,368
    I had a wonderfull collection of hundreds of LPs - Landowska, English choirs, German choirs, Deller consort, lots of late mediaeval and renaissance revival, chant, the famous recording of Toscanini humming along on an aria in 'Aida', Furtwangler, von Karajan, Fischer Dieskau, English change ringing, organ, Horowitz. Rubenstein, Dame Edith Sitwell reading Chaucer, pipe and drum corps, and on and on. When I moved in the late eighties I donated them all to the Fondren library at Rice University.
    I wish now that I still had them. Who would have known when CDs seemed to be the wave of the future that there would be a 'vinyl revival'? Besides, a CD disc held more music and didn't require turning over or going to the next disc in a work that took multiple discs.

    Now I have hundreds of CDs but don't listen to them anymore because I can hear anything, anything! (almost) that I wish to hear on youtube.
    Thanked by 2tomjaw CharlesW
  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,934
    Same here, hundreds of LPs plus cassette tapes and CDs. I think the vinyl has a warmer sound more like what you would hear in a live concert. I have thought about getting one of the turntables that converts LPs to mp3 format but I will probably keep the LPs for the liner notes which often contain some excellent information.
  • Randolph Nichols
    Posts: 398
    Though memory tells me that with a good amplifier, turntable and speakers the LP sound was superior to other formats that have come along, I'm at an age where it's very easy to question old assumptions. Was it really better or am I just imagining that it was. (Artur Schnabel's angelic trills in Beethoven's Op. 111 were after all the result of a technology yet unable to capture upper overtones.) Yet, I'm told the MP3 format by its very nature loses some of the range of original recordings.

    I'm curious how some of you younger, more tech savvy folks weigh in on this. Should I relive my youth and invest in the appropriate equipment or is the LP revival a passing fad?
  • Schönbergian
    Posts: 1,063
    Compared to lossless formats like FLAC, I think vinyl itself holds no advantage in quality. Even recordings as great as Kleiber's 1980 Brahms Fourth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic, which was digitally recorded then pressed onto vinyl, sound more anemic than most CDs. What people really pine for, in my mind, is the "warmer" analog recording methods in use before the 1970s. And, of course, low-bitrate MP3 is obviously inferior to any proper format, analog or digital alike.
    Thanked by 2Randolph Nichols CHGiffen
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