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Vinyl Buyers: The Premium Price Vinyl v. Cheap Vinyl Ratio

The market share of vinyl in new recordings is driven to a large degree by willingness of vinyl buyers to pay premium prices. Nevertheless, there is a huge pool of cheap vinyl out there; records that sold millions so there's hundreds of thousands of copies on the market and on down. To listeners who buy a lot of vinyl these days, what is the ratio of your budget between premium price/collector price albums vs. low price albums?

Personally, when I buy vinyl it's usually things that never came out on CD, which is often quite reasonably priced, but the sticking point is the price of pandemic era shipping, which is staggering. There was a seller of English folk music on Discogs who offered free shipping on orders over the equivalent of US $250, so I started tossing things and tossing things into the shopping cart (or basket, as they call it in Blighty) to get up to that figure. I finally wound up spending $350. I would say about $150 of that was collector-price items.
heretobuy
heretobuy OP
128 posts
 
I was referring to overseas shipping, not domestic, which is no sweat. For kicks I tried a few artists I’ve bought LPs of by mail on the linked site, and found none of them:

Trio Los Panchos
Compagnons de la Chanson
Owen Brannigan
Harry Secombe (singing not Gooning)
Malcolm McEachern
Peter Bellamy

You will not blame the domestic seller, I expect. These can be fairly commonplace overseas, but not here. The overseas shipping ask can be three times the cost of the record.
baylinor's avatar
baylinor
1,407 posts
 
Buy all your vinyl pressed prior to 1982. That way you are guaranteed to get analog pressings.
vinylshadow
489 posts
 
Here ya go @millercarbon 

https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/162865/Charles_Mingus-Mingus_Mingus_Mingus_Mingus_Mingus-180_Gram...
re-lar-kvothe's avatar
re-lar-kvothe
171 posts
 
The Record Archives in Rochester NY has vinyl as far as the eye can see. I get lost in there for hours each time I go. I search for old albums not pressed from digital sources, prior to 1982 I believe. There is a lot of pure analog stuff available. Just gotta practice diligence.
vinylshadow
489 posts
 
millercarbon is right about better records. Their prices WILL blow you away. Crazy. But I’ve never bought a record, nor will I, from there so I can’t comment on value.

What I’ve learned through the years is to research the best mastering of a particular record. Hoffman forums will help with that. Sometimes a remastered LP sounds a ton better than an original. Sometimes vice versa.

If you like jazz, buy Kevin Gray remastered Tone Poets and Blue Note Classic records
for $25-30 each. Buy from Amazon as they have a great return policy on any defective records.

I buy a ton of remastered records, some inexpensive some not. But you need to be selective about it.

Analogue Productions sells a lot of remastered LP’s for reasonable to slightly higher prices. Some they remaster and press with their company QRP, others are from good companies that do their own remastering and have outside pressing plants.

Discogs has sellers selling every kind of music. You just have to be certain of proper grading.

If you are looking for $5 used LP’s, sign up for Steve Hoffmans Forum and scan the classified ads. You’ll have a lot to choose from. You can usually count on proper grading and fair prices.

Jeff Beck Wired is one of my favorite albums. If you can, buy the Analogue Productions 45 rpm sets. Unbelievable. And their Blow By Blow 45 set is even mo' better. 
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