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Extreme Record Collecting part II: There’s only one way to find Better Records
08.25.2021
08:21 pm
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When I recently wrote about being an analog vinyl snob, I made mention several times in that essay of Tom Port, the proprietor of Better Records. Port claims that the copies he sells of classic albums sound better—much better—than others. He calls them “Hot Stampers” and he sells them to a well-heeled audiophile audience who can afford to spend $500 on, say, the perfect copy of Aqualung. But when I wrote of the Hot Stamper notion, I was not writing from firsthand experience, but because Port’s offerings at Better Records was conceptually an easy thing for the reader to grok. Once the concept of doing a shootout between dozens of copies of the same album to find the best sounding one is understood, the rest of what I was banging on about came into sharper focus.

After he read Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Snob, which was crossposted at Robert Brook’s The Broken Record blog, Tom got in touch through Robert and offered to send me a Hot Stamper of Steely Dan’s Aja that had a scratch rendering it unsaleable so that I could see just how much better his Hot Stampers were compared to an average, run of the mill copy of Aja.

Aja was a particularly fortuitous selection, not just because it’s considered by many to be the best sounding album of all time, but because I once had the good fortune to take a tour of the legendary Village Recorder studios in Los Angeles which culminated in getting to listen to the first side of Aja made from a dub of the master tape in the studio it was mixed in, on the very same speakers! Imagine that, right? I still have a strong sense memory of it and with an experience like that under my belt, there was probably no better test of the Hot Stamper concept that he could have sent me.

The record arrived two days later, packaged far better than anything that I have ever been sent by a Discogs dealer. I was excited to get it, I must say. I really wanted to hear an “official” Hot Stamper. This was going to be fun.

So I got super baked and put the record on. The outer groove was dead quiet and clearly it had been properly cleaned. (Pay attention to that subject below, it’s very, very important.) In the second or two before the music started, I wondered how much confirmation bias might be present when someone has spent $500 on a single record album. I imagined that they probably would be more inclined to agree that they possessed one of the world’s very best copies of album X for the simple reason that… it cost a lot more? Of course I hadn’t paid a small fortune for this album, and so I wasn’t quite invested in that way, but I still really wanted for it to sound good. I didn’t want to be disappointed.

When the music began, well, these sorts of thought immediately flew out the window. This record was clearly superior to any Aja on vinyl or CD that I have ever heard BY FAR and I realize that to many of you reading this what I am about to write next might seem pretty daft, but about a minute or two in, the thought occurred to me that this Aja Hot Stamper actually sounded better to me than the dub made from the master tape that I heard at Village Recorders. Yeah it sounded that fucking good, it really did. And if you know how painstakingly edited together that album was, you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to soundstage like a motherfucker either, but it sounded like the Dan were in the room playing live right in front of me. I was truly blown away. Rest assured that if I had paid $299 for this album, it would have been money well spent (although my wife might not see it the same way!)

I asked Tom Port some questions via email.

What is a Hot Stamper? Please define the term and how this concept first occurred to you. Can I presume that it was a slow process and that it dawned on you gradually?

Tom Port: The easiest and shortest version of the answer would be something like “Hot Stampers are pressings that sound dramatically better than the average pressing of a given album.”

My good friend Robert Pincus coined the term more than thirty years ago. We were both fans of the second Blood, Sweat and Tears album, a record that normally does not sound very good, and when he would find a great sounding copy of an album like B,S &T, he would sell it to me as a Hot Stamper so that I could hear a favorite album sound its best. Even back then we knew there were a lot of different stampers for that record—it sold millions of copies and was Number One for 15 weeks in 1969—but there was one set of stampers we had discovered that seemed to be head and shoulders better than all the others. Side one was 1AA and side two was IAJ. Nothing we played could beat a copy of the record with those stampers.

After we’d found more and more 1AA/ IAJ copies—I have a picture on the blog of more than 40 all laid out on the floor—it became obvious that some copies with the right stampers sounded better than other copies with those stampers. We realized that a Hot Stamper not only had to have the right numbers in the dead wax, but it had to have been pressed properly on good vinyl. All of which meant that you actually had to play each copy of the record in order to know how good it sounded. There were no shortcuts. There were no rules of thumb. Every copy was unique and there was no way around that painfully inconvenient fact.
 

 
For the next thirty years we were constantly innovating in order to improve our record testing. We went through hundreds of refinements, coming up with better equipment, better tweaks and room treatments, better cleaning technologies and fluids, better testing protocols, better anything and everything that would bring out the best sound in our records. Our one goal was to make the critical evaluation of multiple copies of the same album as accurate as possible. Whatever system our customer might use to play our record—tubes or transistors, big speakers or small, screens or dynamic drivers—our pressing would be so much better in every way that no matter the system, the Hot Stamper he bought from us would have sound that was dramatically superior to anything he had ever heard.

It was indeed a slow process, and a frustrating one. Lots of technological advancements were needed in order to make our Hot Stamper shootouts repeatable, practical and scalable, and those advancements took decades to come about. When I got started in audio in the ‘70s, there were no stand-alone phono stages, or modern cabling and power cords, or vibration controlling platforms for turntables and equipment. No tonearms with extremely delicate adjustments. No modern record cleaning machines and fluids. Not much in the way of innovative room treatments. A lot of things had to change in order for us to reproduce records at the level we needed to, and we pursued every one of them as far as money and time allowed.

Our first official Hot Stamper offering came along in 2004. We had a killer British pressing of Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat which we had awarded our highest grade, the equivalent of A+. Having done the shootout, I wrote up the review myself. At the end I said, “Five hundred dollars is a lot for one record, but having played it head to head against a dozen others, I can tell you that this copy is superior to every copy I have ever heard. It’s absolutely worth every penny of the five hundred bucks we are charging for it. If no one wants to pay that, fine, no problem, I will put the record in my own collection and thrill to its amazing sound for the rest of my life.”

As you can imagine, it sold immediately. That told us that the demand was there. To provide the supply, we eventually ended up needing about eight of us working in concert. It takes a crew of people to find a big batch of vintage LPs of the same title, clean them, do the Hot Stamper shootout, then check the playing surfaces on each side from start to finish, and finally describe the sound of each individual record on the website to the best of our ability.

We like to tell our customers exactly how to go about finding their own Hot Stampers, how to clean them, how to do shootouts with scientific rigor, but honestly, if you do it right it’s just a crazy amount of work. However, since it’s the only proven way to find the best sounding records in the world, to us we think it’s worth it.
 

 
Obviously the concept is controversial—to say the least—among record collectors. I’ve noticed an attitude on the Steve Hoffman Forum and elsewhere towards the hot stamper notion where someone almost takes offense, as if it suggests their records are somehow inferior. Any kind of audiophilia brings out the folks who say “I can’t hear it”—never a winning argument to begin with—and accusations of snobbery and snake oil. Was there a lot of pushback when you first started?

There has always been a lot of pushback and the pushback continues to this day, easily found on any audiophile forum you care to name. The psychology behind it is pretty well documented by now. I have read a dozen books about the cognitive biases that feed into confirming that whatever you want to believe is actually true, and written scores of commentaries connecting these ideas to a better way to pursue audio.

All of our work is entirely evidence based. Pressings that sound better than other pressings do not need to be explained. They simply do sound better, and rarely does it take a pair of golden ears to hear the difference.

But it does take a good stereo, and I talk about this issue a great deal as well. Even as recently as the early 2000s, I could easily name dozens of Heavy Vinyl pressings that I very much liked the sound of. Embarrassing as they are, I made a point to keep the old catalogs from those days. They are full of positive reviews for the Heavy Vinyl titles I was recommending at the time. They are undeniable proof of what I really believed back then. Of how mistaken I was. And I had already been in audio for twenty five years by then! After this last twenty years of working on my system and the hundreds of changes it has gone through, I would be very surprised if I could sit through one out of ten of those records now. Their shortcomings have become much too obvious to be ignored.

But… for the first time in a very long time, I actually played two outstanding Heavy Vinyl pressings just this year—the Led Zeppelin II from 2014 and the Chris Bellman cutting of Brothers in Arms, also from 2014. They went head to head against my best White Hot Stamper Shootout Winning pressings. Unlike almost all the other Heavy Vinyl records I have played over the last five to ten years, especially everything Half-Speed Mastered, both of these records sounded, gulp!, very much like good originals. in the case of Zep II, the uptake of my review would be that you simply cannot buy any version of this record outside of a Robert Ludwig original that will be able to hold a candle to the new recut. Yes, it’s that good. Brothers in Arms you can beat, but you have to work at it, and unless it is a favorite album of yours, why would you bother? The new one is probably good enough.

Even more surprising to most anyone reading this interview is the fact that I am happy to be proven wrong about Jimmy Page’s remastering project. I actually have a section on the blog for records we got wrong, with 80 entries to date. Who else points out to the world the records he was wrong about? No record dealer or record reviewer I am familiar with. But being wrong today simply means that I’ve learned something I hadn’t known before, and learning about records is what I’ve been doing for more than fifty years. And for the last 34 of those I’ve done it for a living, five days a week with plenty of weekends thrown in for good measure.

I hated what Page did to the sound of the first album in the Zep series, but I love the sound of the second album. Which just goes to show that records should not be judged by any process other than playing them. We endlessly talk about that subject on the blog. It’s a long-dead horse we just can’t seem to stop beating. Here is a sample:

We talk a lot on our site about the need for basing your audio—whether it be equipment, records, tweaks, cleaning methods or anything else associated with the hobby—on evidence.

In other words, don’t believe what you read, believe what you hear. Don’t take anything on faith, test it with your own two ears and record the data.

The only way to understand this Hot Stamper thing is to hear it for yourself, and that means having multiple copies of your favorite albums, cleaning them all up and shooting them all out on a good stereo. Nobody, but nobody, who takes the time to perform this little exercise can fail to hear exactly what we are talking about when we say no two records sound the same.

Or you can join the other 99% of the audiophiles in the world. They’re the ones who don’t know anything about pressing variations on records. Some very large percentage of that group also doesn’t want to know about any such pressing variations and will happily supply you with all sorts of specious reasoning as to why such variations can’t really amount to much—this without ever doing a single shootout!.

Such is the world of audiophiles. Some audiophiles believe in anything—you know the kind—and some audiophiles believe in nothing, not even what their own two ears are telling them.

But shooting out multiple pressings of records is work, more often than not hard and frustrating work. You can’t do that kind of work and type on a keyboard at the same time. It’s not about sitting at a computer and opining. It’s about sitting in a listening chair and gathering evidence that either confirms or disconfirms the opinions you held. If you haven’t done the work, you shouldn’t have much to say about the subject until after you have done the work. You can’t really talk about the results of an experiment you haven’t run, can you?

 

 
Where do you source your records from?

Local stores, eBay and Discogs are our main sources for records.

Isn’t ordering them from Discogs cheating?

It’s not cheating, it is in fact one of the best ways we know of to get exactly the pressing we are interested in. It’s difficult because many records are listed incorrectly, and most are graded too generously, and usually only visually. But finding a Pink Floyd import with the right stampers is not going to happen locally. That can only be done over the web.The mistake sellers make about us is that they think we buy the record from them and if it doesn’t have the Hot Stamper sound we’re looking for, we return it. That has never happened. Most records do not go into shootouts until many months after we buy them, sometimes years. The only thing we check is that the surfaces are passable and there is no groove distortion. Other than that, we won’t know how good the record sounds until it gets cleaned and played in a shootout. Many of our top dollar titles only get put into shootouts once every one or two years. Any Mingus record would work that way. How many years does it take to find four or five nice copies of Ah Um? Three to five years would be my guess. And we cannot afford to hurry up the process by spending more time looking for clean original pressings. They just don’t come up for sale all that often.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.25.2021
08:21 pm
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Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an analog vinyl snob
07.18.2021
03:00 pm
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Sorry, but this is not going to be one of those analog vs. digital rants that goofball audiophile types like to indulge in at the drop of a hat. In fact I probably should have just called it something like “Why you should never buy new vinyl versions of classic albums.”

Actually I like digital audio just fine. In fact, until four years ago, I’d have told you that I preferred it. SACDs, HDCDs, High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-Rays, 24-bit HD master audio files, 5.1 surround sound, DSD files—I have a large amount of this kind of material, both on physical media and with another ten terabytes on a computer drive. I like streaming audio very much. Roon is the bomb! Let me be clear, I’ve got no problem with digital audio. Even if I did, 99.9% of all music made these days is produced on a computer, so there’s really no practical way to avoid it. Analog and digital audio are two very separate things and each has its own pluses and minuses. I like them both for different reasons.

Please allow me to state the obvious right here at the outset: Most people WILL NOT GIVE A SHIT about what follows. One out of a hundred maybe, no, make that one out of a thousand. Almost none of you who have read this far will care about this stuff. If you are that one in a thousand person, read on, this was written especially for you.

Everyone else, I won’t blame you a bit if you want to bail.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.18.2021
03:00 pm
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Like Tinder for desperate people: Unsettlingly bad Europop record covers
01.23.2018
10:06 am
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I have a pet theory (I call him Malcolm, he likes having his tummy rubbed) that posits the suggestion that maybe vinyl declined all those years ago because there were so many shit covers around. It is possible. Too many shit covers meant people didn’t want their lack of taste in music to be seen by their cool friends, so sales dropped until downloads arrived when nobody knows what shit you’re listening to on your iPod.

I mean, we all have guilty secrets about music, you know, bands we’re not supposed to like but we always seem to find there’s just that one track that awful band did way back when that always hits the spot when we’re feeling all mushy inside or very, very drunk or just loved up on way too many eccies or even possibly having no fucking taste in music whatsoever. You know the kind of thing. If you don’t, well you haven’t been paying attention.

Having a sneaky little taste for something outré or déclassé or just fucking shit meant, back then at least, having to buy the goddam vinyl (there were no downloads then, kids, see above). This meant you would always have the unfortunate evidence of your guilty little pleasure on display for every fuckwit who browsed through your record collection and never let you live it down.

Which, by long way of a preamble, brings me to this fucking collection of shit covers from the 1970s and 1980s that were (somehow) available in Europe, well, primarily Holland, to be fair. Some of these covers look like the profile pics for would-be serial killers on Tinder. These are obviously the kind of covers made by foolhardy record execs who say things like “Who needs a designer, my son’s gotta camera, he can do it….” And you know what, he did.
 
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More tasteless record art, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.23.2018
10:06 am
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Bad, weird and just downright pervy album covers (NSFW)
11.24.2017
06:34 am
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Out there, somewhere, there’s bound to be an apology floating around the Internet from a near-retirement-age record designer fessin’ up to all the bad album covers he was responsible for back in the day when lines were a little more blurred. Now, this guy would tell you (if he could) that he has a lot of respect and admiration for all the hardworking people who design album covers and he’s truly horrified to find some of his worst work that he had honest-to-God deliberately forgotten about is now doing the rounds on the Internet.

Honestly, he really can’t remember ever doing any of these album covers and well, if he did, it must have been down to a tight deadline or a shitload of drugs or maybe perhaps both. However, he sincerely hopes these allegedly inappropriate album covers won’t be viewed as something representative of the kind of stuff he does now. He was much younger then.

Thankfully, due to all the sons of bitches who think it’s funny to share this guy’s shit, he has been encouraged to review his past history with some candor and examine his back catalog just in case there’s any more of this embarrassing shit out there.

Fortunately, for us, it looks like there is indeed plenty of creepy, weird, and downright inappropriate stuff still floating around out there.
 
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More strange and saucy album covers, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.24.2017
06:34 am
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Curiously-shaped die cut records from Grace Jones, The Cramps, Bowie and more
07.23.2015
02:28 pm
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Grace Jones Party Girl shaped 7
Grace Jones, “Party Girl” special remix on shaped 7” picture disc. B side: “White Collar Crime.” 1986
 
This post started out as a singular homage to German record label, Musical Tragedies and their super collectable line of saw blade-shaped 7” records. As it is often the way on the Internet, all it took was a few images in my browser to distract me from my “work.” And thanks to that distraction, I’m now able to share some pretty unique looking die cut shaped vinyl with you. Much of which I had no idea existed until now.
 
Blondie X Offender saw blade vinyl from Musical Tragedies - 2001
Blondie “X Offender” on saw blade shaped colored vinyl with center label picture image by Musical Tragedies (2001)
 
Pictured above is the A side of one of the saw blade-shaped records put out by Musical Tragedies. It features two tracks, “X Offender,” from the first Blondie record, Blondie, and a rare B side track from Bloodless Pharaohs, one of the first bands Stray Cat Brian Setzer ever recorded with back in the late 70’s. Other covet-worthy records in this post include the two-record 2004 release from DJ Shadow; DJ Shadow vs. Radiohead - “The Gloaming Mix” and DJ Shadow vs. Cage - “The Grand Ol’ Party Crash” (featuring the vocals of Jello Biafra). The shaped records themselves are in the image of two of the most vilified politicians of the last 25 years, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Holy shit!
 
DJ Shadow Vs. Cage ‎– The Grand Ol' Party Crash. Shaped vinyl record of Donald Rumsfeld
DJ Shadow “Donald The Merciless” 10” shaped picture disc with an image of the syphilitic face of ex US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Track: “The Grand Ol’ Party Crash” with vocals by Jello Biafra. B-side: “Party Crash” instrumental
 
DJ Shadow Vs. Radiohead ‎– The Gloaming shaped vinyl record with image of Dick Cheney
DJ Shadow Vs. Radiohead ‎– The Gloaming shaped 10” shaped picture disc with an image of Dick Cheney. A/B sides feature Radiohead and Thom Yorke
 
As with colored vinyl, artistically shaped die cut colored records aren’t made to be played—and they don’t sound as good as straightforward black vinyl records. But WHO would actually dare to put a stylus on a shaped piece of rare vinyl featuring Poison Ivy of The Cramps holding a machine gun in a gold bikini? Not me, that’s for sure. Many images of waxy oddities that must be seen to be believed, follow.
 
The Cramps - Bikini Girls With Machine Guns shaped 7
The Cramps, “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns” 7” shaped picture discl. B- Side: “Jackyard Backoff” (1990)
 
The Cramps Bikini Girls With Machine Guns shaped vinyl record - Side B view
The Cramps, “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns” 7” vinyl picture disc, Side B view
 
Monty Python fishbowl 7
Monty Python Galaxy Song 7” shaped picture disc (1983). Side A: “Galaxy Song”/Side B: “Every Sperm Is Sacred”
 
David Bowie ‎– Underground 7
David Bowie “Underground” 7” shaped picture disc (1986). A/B-sides: “Underground” edit and instrumental
 
Many more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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07.23.2015
02:28 pm
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The savant who has the power to identify records simply by looking at the grooves
06.17.2015
09:05 am
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Yesterday Dangerous Minds brought you some incredible close-up electron microscope footage of a needle moving across the grooves of a record.

That footage jogged a fuzzy childhood memory of watching That’s Incredible!, a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not style program that aired on ABC from 1980-84, and seeing a man who could identify music simply by looking at the grooves on a record.

I had to consult the Internet to make sure I didn’t dream that up, but this man does in fact exist and his name is Dr. Arthur B. Lintgen.
 

 
A 1982 TIME article describes Dr. Lingten’s bizarre talent:

With the label and other identifying marks covered, of course… Lintgen simply holds a disc flat in front of him, turning it slightly this way and that and peering along its grooves through his thick glasses. After a few seconds he calmly announces, as the case may be, “Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring” or Strauss’s Atpine Symphony,” or “Janacek’s Sinfonietta.”

A passionate music buff and audiophile, Lintgen (pronounced Lint-jen) has been regaling friends with the stunt for five years, ever since being challenged at a party and finding, to his surprise, that he could do it.

Performing recently for a television crew from That’s Incredible! he scored 20 for 20 in a demonstration set up by Temple University Musicologist Stimson Carrow.

Lintgen, who has been called a savant, applies his encyclopedic knowledge of classical music to the “quiet” and “loud” portions of the disc, which show up as darker or lighter “grooves,” to make an educated guess as to what a particular piece might be. A 1981 New York Times article explains:

How does he do it? All is explainable—up to a point. First, Dr. Lintgen is a dedicated audiophile with an extensive knowledge of the record catalog past and present. He can identify only music that he knows, and he guarantees a high rate of success only in orchestral music ranging from Beethoven to the present.

“I have a knowledge of musical structure and of the literature,” he said. “And I can correlate this structure with what I see. Loud passages reflect light differently. In the grossest terms, they look silvery. Record companies spread the grooves in forte passages; they have a more jagged, saw-tooth look. Soft passages look blacker.

Acclaimed skeptic James Randi tested Lintgen and concluded,“certainly, Arthur Lintgen comes as close to (a real magician) as I ever hope so see!”

More on the strange talent of Arthur Lintgen after the jump…

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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06.17.2015
09:05 am
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Sweet, sweet music: Meet the man who makes playable chocolate records
09.08.2014
08:28 am
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If you want to know how to make sweet, sweet music, then take a tip from Peter Lardong who created the world’s first chocolate record—the only disc that can be played and eaten. Herr Lardong from Berlin, Germany, came up with the idea of using chocolate to make discs after experimenting with ice cream, cheese, butter, beer, cola and sausages. Eventually the former brewery worker hit upon his own “special” mixture of chocolate which he melts, then pours onto a silicon mold of his favorite recordings. When the chocolate sets, the disc is removed and is ready to play or eat.
 
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Each chocolate record costs approximately $6 and can be played on a standard record player for up to twelve times before it wears out (no doubt ruining the stylus) and then has to be eaten.
 

 
H/T Voices of East Anglia
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.08.2014
08:28 am
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Talking stamps: Tiny vinyl record postage stamps that were playable, 1972
08.15.2014
01:50 pm
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Known as the “first talking stamps” in 1972, these tiny vinyl postage stamps from Bhutan were totally playable and when the needle was put on the record stamp you heard Bhutan’s national anthem and a capsule history of the nation. Talking stamps were thin plastic embossed records with removable back to expose the adhesive.

A pretty interesting concept, right? I’ve never seen one in the flesh, but from what I’m seeing on eBay, they’re highly collectable (an entire set is around $495.00) and even still legal for mailing use.

WFMU has a few samples of what these tiny vinyl stamps sound like. You can listen to them here.


 

 

 

 
via WFMU and Bhutan Today

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.15.2014
01:50 pm
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‘Bone music’: Soviet-era bootleg records of banned rock and jazz pressed on X-ray plates
06.19.2014
12:43 pm
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X-ray records
 
What do you do if you’re living in the USSR in, say, 1957, and you’d like to press an illegal record of some banned rock and roll or jazz? Consumer tape recorders don’t exist, and in the USSR, vinyl is difficult to come by. How do you proceed?

One thing you might do is press your contraband beats into discarded X-rays. A police state does wonders for the sheer inventiveness of its citizens, does it not? Clever Russians eager to hear some liberating rock and roll would salvage exposed X-rays from hospital waste bins and archives and use them to make records.

In the 1946-1961 era, some ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film. The thick radiographs would be cut into discs of 23 to 25 centimeters in diameter; sometimes the records weren’t circular. But the exact shape didn’t matter so much, as long as the thing played.

“Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy,” says Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev. “Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones, bone music.” As author Anya von Bremzen elaborates: “They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole. ... You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan—forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”

I can’t wait until Record Store Day 2015, when limited edition X-ray releases will surely be some of the most sought-after purchases!
 
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Previously on DM:
Vintage X-ray ‘vinyl’ from Russia

 
via Vinyl of the Day
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.19.2014
12:43 pm
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60s and 70s Asian album covers


 
David Greenfield has amassed a collection of records from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Japan which are all available for purchase online. I liked going through his collections from the 60s and 70s. It’s a great resource for loopy graphic design inspiration!
 

 

 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Tara McGinley
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11.01.2011
01:25 pm
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Hey vinyl lovers: ‘Living Stereo’ introduced by RCA, 1958
07.11.2011
10:26 pm
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RCA Victor introduces “a miracle,” their Orthophonic, high-fidelity, home stereo sound system.

Bob Banks, one-time RCA Victor marketing manager of radio sales and their Victrola division, narrates this short film introducing the RCA’s new “living stereo” records and stereophonic hi-fi gear. The year was 1958, ground zero for the birth of the “space age bachelor pad” as my pal Byron Werner so famously dubbed it.

The demonstration utilizes left and right-hand sections of orchestra married together to create the fullness of “living stereo” and gives you a stereo stylus’s POV as it travels across a record groove (“a canyon of sound!”). If you are a vinyl fan, it’s pretty fun and informative.
 

 
Via Douglas Hovey

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.11.2011
10:26 pm
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Famous people hanging out with their vinyl
06.10.2011
02:20 pm
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Bill Clinton (yes, I know this is photoshopped)
 
Famous faces and their record collections.


Patti Smith
 

Sophia Loren
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.10.2011
02:20 pm
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Odd photoshopped vintage LP sleeves
04.22.2011
03:58 pm
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These cleverly Photoshopped album covers are pretty funny. I had to do a double take because I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on… I think my favorite is “I Don’t Like Me Either.”

All images are from the devious and NSFW website Twisted Vintage.
 
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Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Gallery of defaced LP sleeves

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.22.2011
03:58 pm
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GIF: Vinyl Makes Them Nervous
11.02.2010
01:10 pm
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Oh noes! I’m scared!
 
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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11.02.2010
01:10 pm
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Have your ashes pressed into your favorite vinyl record when you die
08.27.2010
03:57 pm
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I’m going to have mine pressed into Eddie Murphy’s “Party All The Time.” From Wired UK:

Music lovers can now be immortalised when they die by having their ashes baked into vinyl records to leave behind for loved ones.

A UK company called And Vinyly is offering people the chance to press their ashes in a vinyl recording of their own voice, their favourite tunes or their last will and testament. Minimalist audiophiles might want to go for the simple option of having no tunes or voiceover, and simply pressing the ashes into the vinyl to result in pops and crackles.

Company presses your ashes into vinyl when you die

(via Nerdcore)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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08.27.2010
03:57 pm
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