First off, I did collect 78s. The oldest were acoustic Feodor Chaliapin sides, horrible sounding recordings. Later, I was given a big expensive box of Chaliapin sides on some sub-species of PVC from Melodiya. They were still horrible sounding. I recall opening the box, it released the stench of Soviet bureaucracy.
I collected many different 78s, including a lot of Charlie Parker on Dial, Savoy, Comet, Musicraft, other imprints too obscure to recall. When my wife's "Aunt 'Vi' passed, nobody was interested in her 78s but me. She had an eclectic collection, mostly swing/dance sides, but also such jewels as "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine" by Harry "The Hipster" Gibson, B/W "I Stay Brown All Year Long" and the original 78 issue of "Earth Angel" by the Penguins. Being interested in the history of recording, I hunted down copies of the first LPs, though most were relatively uninteresting performances of classical music, "needledrops" of pre-existing 78 recordings. I recall "South Pacific" being a very early title.
A lot of my collection habits were formed by reading the Absolute Sound altogether too much. I was focusing on the first stereo London/Decca classical issues, the RCA "Living Stereo" series and the Mercury "Living Presence" series. For those that indulge, some of the most sonically holographic LP recordings, capturing both the sound of the instruments themselves and the venue in which they were playing in an eerie fashion. In that regard, my favorites were the Blue-backed Londons, with cinematic 3-D stereo imagery. Many of those recordings reappeared on the "Stereo Treasury" budget re-issue series, said to be pressed from the same stampers as the originals. The Peter Maag/LSO Mendelssohn records were particularly remarkable in that regard.
Somehow, I managed to be working in shops selling physical recorded media as the big revolutions in the market were happening. I was working at Wherehouse Records during "peak vinyl" in the mid-seventies, then Ray Avery's Rare Records as I became obsessed with Charlie Parker and buying the many 78s they had for only $1 a pop, like the magnificent Dizzy Gillespie "Manteca" with his Afro-Cuban Band on RCA, one of the most dynamic recordings I have heard in any medium. I worked in an Odyssey record store on Telegraph in Berkeley for a couple of months before the whole chain folded, three months after getting the job when a number of factors dragged a number of these record chains down. When I worked at Tower, Berkeley, 1984/1986, the transition to CDs had begun, the Tower Classical annex on Telegraph had a huge section of cut-outs, including practically everything on Harmonia Mundia France and a number of titles from Astree, an audiophile feast. When I started to work at The Musical Offering two years after that, the transition was nearly complete. That meant that Amoeba and Rasputin's were flooded with clean, barely played LPs for almost nothing, particularly if one was looking for classical titles. And, as of 1988, I still "knew" an all-analog chain sounded better. Only took me a couple more years, what with becoming a semi-professional recording engineer and the introduction of the DAT recorder, to realize that an all-analog chain might not be "all that". I used the microphone patterns and lay-outs of early stereo recordings, like those that were issued as "Shaded Dogs". And being a recording engineer worked for me until it didn't, another—and too personal—a tale.
You mention "Time Out" and "Kind of Blue". Had no problem getting Time Out, though, as I find it Kind of Boring, didn't pursue it much farther than buying a clean early pressing once and then ignoring it. I had been obsessively collecting the absolutely hypnotic KOB for decades, including decades when you could easily find minty six-eye stereo copies for around $5, which I did. Also owned a clean six-eye mono and an early SACD, can't recall if it was a single-layer SACD or not but it sounded great. The current CD also sounds great. An LP I loved as a child is the Ellington/Strayhorn/Tchaikovsky Nutcracker Suite. Steve Hoffman made a fabulous sounding LP remaster, like it better than the CD transfers.
But my true passion in instrumental Jazz is the incomparable "Bird". I got my job at Ray Avery's Rare Records in Glendale California, when I realized they had more Yardbird sides than anyone else in town, including the Wherehouse in Eagle Rock where I was working. I could easily find first issue clean first pressings of his Verve titles, but Rare Records also carried the superb Japanese Verve pressings of "Swedish Schnapps", "Now's the Time", "Bird 'n' Diz" and others. They also had the Sayoy box from Arista, the Dial box on Warner Brothers and the superior pressings of the Dial sessions from Spotlight UK, the best vinyl pressings of the Dial sides. They also had the original Dial sides on Dial, the 78s, usually for $1 each. I got an EP box of Bird's Big Band sessions on Verve while working there. Found a multi-disc 78 set of "Captain from Castile" in the dumpster on the way to work. I wheeled and dealed with Ray and got the highly collectible "KoKo" and "Now's the Time" on Savoy in the process. Not to mention the Ray Norvo 12" sides on Comet for only a buck a pop, the early Bid 'n' Diz collaborations on Musicraft, and the hilarious Slim Gaillard sides on
I forget what do you expect 50 years later you young punks!
Actually the 1970s, but I digress.
Four years after bombing out in Berkeley, I had a job at a Borders, in charge of what was then the biggest inventory of CDs in Fresno, including that Tower Records down the street further south on Blackstone, later to be acquired by Rasputin's when Tower folded. 2001 was about the time I started at that job, a few years later Napster happened, the I-Pod happened, the Amazon tablets happened. You know the rest. By 2009 I was working for the IRS and LPs started to sound "mangy" while the entire Britney Spears catalog on CD could be found at Rasputin's for 25¢ a disc. Live by the hit, die by the hit. I guess plenty of folks were interested in Britney, until they weren't.
Which reminds me:
I managed to find plenty of HT gear at the best local thrift, got me a 5.1 system with an Oppo player that worked until it didn't and about three turntables that never did. This was a time when turntables were falling out of the sky and a lot landed in my yard. Very messy. This is when I fully entered the 21st century. One of the last LPs of mine that I had to dispose of—having decided that I had to make a clean break from an out-of-control addiction, that I had to quit cold turkey—was among the first bought in 1970, the Toscanini/NBC Symphony recordings of Haydn's "Surprise" and "Clock" symphonies, an object retained out of pure nostalgia. It certainly had nothing to do with its sound quality, which was vile, BTW.
I'm still eyeing the disposal of the last big thing in the wake of the next big thing. Playing paradox and learning to play behind the beat is the secret. We all know the next big thing creates FOMO, resulting in the last big thing getting unloaded:
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The next (current) big thing is streaming. Yesterday's purchases at the Lacey Public Library where I am a volunteer total $13 including Blu-Rays of "Inside Out", "Zootopia", "Aladdin (the original Robin Williams masterpiece), "The Good Dinosaur" (I'm sitting on the fence with this one), "Minions"—Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!, Cough, Cough, Cough (fall over), "The Martian", all three original "Star Wars" movies, albeit with the grotty digital "enhancements", "Finding Dory", the sequel to "Finding Nemo", which I am still looking for, "Guardians of the Galaxy" and finally the complete Essanay & Mutual shorts of Charlie Chaplin in a 7 DVD boxed (sorta) set.
I still have that collector's urge, but being an inveterate cheapskate, my collection habits move with the times.
Over to you, Ray.
) and wanted to find the four disc B-Sides CD box (Downside Up). £27 or so when newly released, they ran our years ago and surviving CD sets are now a hundred quid or more. At least some or most are on Youtube, but this influential band remains popular and I'd have thought the record company could run another batch off every so often, surely?
Sonically, the Dias is as inert as a turntable can be, the tonearms developed from the Mentor arm I had and using an arm pipe from an arrow shaft or similar I gather...
