Hello world!

Welcome to Vinyl Crate Diver, a blog about collecting vinyl records. I don’t want to date myself, but I began collecting records in the late 1970’s as a teenager. (Do the math!) Back then the main format for collecting music was vinyl. 45’s and LP’s were the predominate types of vinyl available, although 78 rpm records were still being produced. But even then there were format shifts that competed with vinyl for dominance. Cassette and 8-track tapes were new on the scene and very quickly became popular, and it wasn’t unusual for people to have music in all of these formats at the same time. After all, it was much easier to play a Cassette or 8-Track tape in your car. (Yes there were record players that could be installed in a vehicle but for obvious reasons weren’t very reliable and sounded awful.)

My Dad had one of those huge combination Radio/Turntable/8-Track consoles that were a precursor to the Stereo Component Systems that would become all the rage. That console had pretty good sound too! Somewhere along the way the console got replaced with a Phonograph player with a pre-amp and two small speakers (probably because the console took up too much space). Dad also had an 8-Track player in his car. I never liked that format because of the size of the cartridges and the weird way they changed tracks right in the middle of a song! Just as you got “into” the song it would fade out, you would hear a “kachunk” as the track shifted and the song would fade back in. Annoying!

As I said, I began buying vinyl records to play on my dad’s turntable until I saved enough lawn mowing money to buy my own. However, as a teenager just beginning to drive I found myself buying cassette tapes to play in my car on an aftermarket cassette player that I installed. It wouldn’t be long until Boom Boxes became popular and people would produce their own “mix tapes” to play on them. I still played my LP’s at home but because I was becoming more “mobile” and had limited funds, cassettes became my format of choice.

Speaking of limited funds, remember those mail-order music clubs that advertised 12 records or cassettes for a penny? The catch was that you had to then buy so many titles at regular club prices before you could cancel your membership. They also sent you a card every month with the featured releases which you had to send back either accepting the featured album, choosing a different title, or refusing that months offering. If you didn’t send the card back for whatever reason, the featured title would automatically arrive in the mail with a request for payment. How many of us would get the 12 titles for a penny and buy the minimum required albums and then cancel the membership so that you could start the process all over again by rejoining? I got a lot of my LP’s and cassettes this way.

During this time vinyl and cassette tape pretty much co-existed. And then the revolution! Sometime during the early to mid 1980’s I went to visit my brother at his new bachelor pad. By this time I was married and trying to climb the corporate ladder and as such didn’t have time to “collect” music and frankly couldn’t afford it either. As we were visiting, my brother said let’s put some music on and he showed me his new stereo component system. I don’t remember what brand it was but all of the components were matched to each other with a turntable on the top, a dual deck cassette player underneath, an AM/FM amplifier on the bottom and two very large speakers. As he searched for a title to play I noticed another component sandwiched in between, and at just the same time my brother produced this shiny metallic looking disc. “What’s that?”, I asked. “That’s a Compact Disc.” he said. “These are amazing, you won’t believe the sound!” “No pops or clicks, no tape hiss, just pure music.” And he was right. Pretty soon after that CD’s were everywhere and vinyl and cassettes fell out of favor like falling off a cliff. Not long after that we had our own component system and could play my LP’s, cassettes and CD’s as we wanted. Then we bought a car that had a CD player in it and the conversion became complete. It wasn’t long before my cassettes and LP’s were relegated to the closet. Too “Old Fashioned”.

It’s funny how life “happens” while you’re making other plans. It was actually the next “revolution” in music that brought me around to vinyl again. With the advent of personal computers and the internet, the digital format is now the predominate form of musical entertainment. Several years ago my wife and kids bought me an iPod as a Christmas gift. Both my kids had iPods but I never paid too much attention to how they worked. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I was some old “Fuddy-Duddy” who didn’t like technology. Quite the contrary, I love computers and everything they have made possible over the last few decades, and like most people I don’t know how we ever got along without the internet. But I just wasn’t sure about this iPod.

The device in question was an 80 gig iPod Classic. My daughter said “You’ll never be able to fill this up with ‘your music’.” Challenge Accepted! Of course the first thing I did was open an iTunes account and began ripping my CD’s to it. This was satisfactory until I saw an article or online post about converting vinyl to digital, and I immediately thought of my vinyl LP’s. I did some research and found a way to hook my computer to my stereo receiver and, using an mp3 conversion program, copy my analog records and store the mp3’s on my computer and ultimately put them into iTunes and my iPod. Even though this did work the results were less than optimum. Either the equipment or the program I was using made the music sound tinny and distant, but it was fun. And so I began to look for more vinyl records to “copy”.

Then two other events happened that blew this renewed interest in vinyl into an obsession. The first was the purchase of a new turntable that had the capability of hooking up to my computer via USB and with the use of a better mp3 program (in this case “Audacity”) I was able to copy my vinyl more quickly and with much better sound quality.

The second catalyst to my obsession was a book entitled “Billboard’s Hottest Hot 100 Hits” by Fred Bronson. This book took a new look at the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 Singles chart for each year from 1955 to 2006 (I bought the book in 2007). As I was ingesting the information supplied in this book my brain was formulating a project. “Wouldn’t it be cool”, I thought “to collect each of these Hot 100 singles in mp3 format in my iTunes and iPod?!” “I could have a playlist for each year!” And so I began organizing the music I already had into these playlists, highlighting each song that I possessed in Mr. Bronson’s book with an orange highlighting marker. And that was fun.

Once my existing catalog had been exhausted I began to look for more ways to collect these mp3’s and add them to my “collection”. I must admit I tried using Napster and Limewire to get digital content but ultimately decided it was too rife with bugs and really was like stealing. Additionally I could buy songs from iTunes and add them to my account but at .69 to .99 cents a pop things could get expensive quickly. (Now most iTunes songs are at least $1.29 each). I must also admit that I’m enough of an “Old Fuddy-Duddy” to not trust digital content and computer hard drives to keep my “collection” safe. I always feel safer having a hard copy of my music should my computer bite the dust or my iPod crash. And so this led me to start looking for more CD’s and LP’s and what better way to get them inexpensively than to buy them used from flea markets, antique stores and the like. My wife, Cheryl and I always enjoyed visiting antique stores and flea markets so this was something we could do together.

So now up to this point vinyl had not yet become the “retro hot item” that it is today and as such there was generally a lot of it available in these venues. I found myself buying LP’s to glean one or two songs for my collection. This was okay if the artist was popular enough to be collectable, however, (especially in the 50’s, and 60’s) most LP’s were produced with only one “hit” song on them and 9 or 10 mediocre songs to fill out the album, and this is okay if you can pick up the album for a buck or two. But my obsession to collect these Hot 100 Hits became such that this was costing too much and beginning to take up too much space!

Then one day it dawned on me that 7″ 45 rpm singles might be worth a look. Now, before you say “Well Duh!” let me explain why up to this point 45’s just weren’t in my thought process. I grew up in the era of music production where the 12″ album had become an art form and not just a way to get a “hit” song out to the masses. Albums were conceptually created with song selection, cover artwork and various other extras such as lyric sheets and picture booklets included to make the whole package a sensory experience. 45’s were looked down upon as cheap and inconvenient items for teeny-boppers who would listen to their favorite song from their current teen-idol crush over and over and over again and then be thrown into a corner to collect dust once that idol had succumbed to another. 45’s were also the medium for juke boxes and disc jockeys.

Most 45’s that I was used to seeing at flea markets and antique stores were usually stacked haphazardly into boxes and bins with no protective sleeves, covered in dust and all kinds of icky substances. Little did I know, until I started to buy some, that the 7″ vinyl 45 is actually very resilient and can have even better sound quality than it’s 12″ counterpart. This is due to several design advantages the 45’s have:

• The first being that a 45 usually only has one song on each side of the disc. 12″ albums usually have to squeeze five to seven songs on one side which means there is less room for recorded information and, as such, sound quality can suffer. (There are entire books that discuss the reasons for this, so I’ll just leave it at that.)
• Another design feature is that 45’s are made to be stacked one on top of the other on those spindle devices in order to play more songs consecutively without having to get up each time a song ends to change the disc. Because of this, the center part of a 45 is raised higher than the playing surface to keep the discs from scratching each other while they are stacked.
• 45’s also were generally produced using higher gram weight vinyl making them more durable and able to withstand all kinds of mistreatment.
• And finally 45’s were cheaper to produce thus making them more affordable to the music buying public.

I was amazed at how these discs have survived. I have some very “ugly” looking 45’s with lot’s of surface scratch’s and abrasions that sound fantastic once they are cleaned up. These same surface scratches and abrasions would render a 12″ LP practically useless. I found the sound quality to actually be superior in many ways to my LP’s and better yet most of the 45’s I was buying were very inexpensive at 10 to 50 cents apiece! Jackpot!

It was at about this same time that another crazy idea popped into my head, driven by Mr. Bronson’s book – “What if I also collect all of the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 Singles in the 7″ 45 rpm format?!” Challenge once again accepted!

And so, Dear Reader this is how my vinyl quest began, and this blog is just another extension of my obsession with vinyl and the hunt for my next acquisition. Unfortunately for us madmen, vinyl has gained a new popularity especially among the younger generation of audiophiles and as such it is becoming harder to find good vintage vinyl at reasonable prices. We just have to search harder and farther afield to find it.

I hope you will follow this blog and come back to read about my adventures in collecting vinyl. I look forward to hearing from you and sharing our stories.

Keep it in the Groove!