- Thu Sep 25, 2014 8:26 am
#32638
While I really like what Death Waltz and Waxworks are doing (Regular releases besides the expensive/rare variants). I find it absolutely impossible to defend Mondo: My order of Jurassic park has been a nightmare, and I had to turn to ebay to find a decent playing , black version. (which still has some weird low frequency distortion in parts) I am seriously considering just throwing my 65€ colored version in the trash, it's that bad, I could make a cool clock out of it, but that would only remind me of the money I wasted.
I have emailed them several times, but never got a response. Sadly I have had very similar experiences with other labels. (I am Shark for example)
So my gripe is not with the extravagant editions themselves, I have been known to splurge on stuff like Lustmord's "Sixty stone" edition, and absolutely love it.
My gripe is with the idea that it's accebtable to potentially (and often actually) compromise sound quality and longevity for a cool "swirl"/"splatter"/"transparant" color.
This is particularly frustrating when there are no regular vesrions, or when labels randomly insert the "variants".
The most common defect besides excessive surface noise are "Stitching", where the press "rips out" parts of the groove when releasing the record, and "Non-fill" where the liquid vinyl does not distribute evenly through the stamper.
Both defects occur mostly because the temperature of the mixture is off, and are a lot more common in (multi)colored and particularly transparent vinyl. Both also sound pretty similar: a repetetive pattern of "wooshing" or "Hissing" sounds, more often then not in a single channel at the beginning or end of a record.
These problems don't have to last the entire run, often the temperature stabilizes during pressing, so there might be records that don't have the flaws, but it sometimes affects so many records that exchainging them is useless.
I have had to return DOZENS of records with these defects over the last 2-3 years, almost all of them colored or transparent versions. (And alot of them, unfortunately, soundtracks from the labels present on this board)
This has several reasons:
The carbon black used for black vinyl actually strenghtens the vinyl, it also makes it smoother and more coherent, making pressing mishaps less likely to happen.
It might be worth mentioning that when vinyl pressing plants order "black vinyl" they can opt for a plastic compound especially developed for records, but when they order colored vinyl, thet just get regular plastic pellets, which might just as well ended up as toys or other plastic products and do not contain an effective homogenizing agent.
More often than not, different colors require different temperatures, increasing the chance of something going wrong even more.
This is why alot of colored vinyl often feels softer, sounds noisier, and wears a lot faster.
Now maybe, some modern black records no longer use the "real" vinyl mixture, but a different black colorant, and maybe effective vinyl mixtures have been developped in other colors (M.O.V.'s solid color pressings are surprisingly quiet and tough mostly)but in general, I'll always prefer black vinyl.
Pressing defects are also MUCH more visible on a black record, so any seasoned press-opereator will see something is going wrong and do something about it. If the press operator misses it, than there's still the chance the people from the record label spot it before they get shipped out.
And IF a black record with non fill gets through to the customer, I can simply take it back to the store and show the shopkeeper something's wrong with it, even if he doen't have a turntable on hand. That is, IF i was able to purchase it locally, and not at some webshop halfway across the world that somehow doesn't think my emails are worth answering.
(Hence my aversion against "exclusively sold by....")
