Help me stay with Vinyl.

“I wish not to go to the dark side of digital.”

While I appreciate your sentiments this is no longer the case. Digital has come a long way, visit a friend or dealer who has a good digital (streaming) setup. If you approach this with an open mind, you may be in for a very pleasant surprise. Until then, continue enjoying your vinyl system.

@lalitk  posts with wisdom, stunning progress in musicality and with high quality streaming, millions of albums...great for discovery and enjoyment 

I buy most of my vinyl from one of my local record stores. However, I'm not much of a jazz fan and my record store does not focus on jazz. That said, I buy quite a bit of vinyl from dealers on Discogs. My findings are that they are almost always over-graded by one or two levels, i.e. NM- graded records are actually VG+, etc. Rarely have I ever bought a M or NM used record that I considered accurately graded.

Discogs is pretty good. But it all depends on what you really want. If its good clean silent vinyl, good luck. The record you buy and open and it plays silent is a myth. That never was. No matter how much time and money you put into it, the best you will ever do is get it down to a dull roar. 

So my advice is, chill. A certain amount of noise is inherent in the medium. Fortunately, along with the noise comes the magic. The magic is the whole reason for putting up with the noise, and its totally worth it.

I do find it a bit depressing however that everyone notices the noise varies from copy to copy, but no one notices the magic varies as well. Lots of pressings are dead quiet, but have dreadful sound quality (cough cough MoFi cough cough) and a lot of guys actually seem to prefer that to noisy records with unbelievably beautiful sound quality.

Go figure. Whatever. Know thyself.

If you want silent you are doomed to a life of frustration. Unless you go digital. Then you are doomed to a life of no magic.

You pays your money and you takes your point of view.

I get  most of my vinyl from Acoustic Sounds; never had a complaint. All the digital guys talk about how digital has gotten "better" recently. Fine, but it will never be a real time linear reproducer like vinyl is; it will always be little chops of zeros and ones. If we had digital ears digital reproduction would be superior but that's not what we're dealing with. I do have more cd's than records, but I keep a log of time on my gear, mostly for tube time of use, and my log shows more than twice the hours with analog than digital.