New To Vinyl Tip: Listen To New Records ASAP

For my birthday in October my family purchased a record player for me. I had thought about getting one for years but had never pulled the trigger, so they did for me.

There are tons of tips and articles out there for people new to vinyl, but for me I think the most important one is this: play your new vinyl immediately.

I’d say 99% of all pressings are just fine, but records are still a physical format that can suffer from poor quality assurance.

I purchased NIN Pretty Hate Machine from DeepDiscount.com in March and both the original copy I received and its replacement were defective, skipping on side two, track one. I sent the second one back and asked for a refund. This pressing appears to have come from Bicyle records.

Second, I purchased The GoGo’s Beauty and the Beat from Amazon. Same story, only this time the actual tracks laid into the vinyl were warped, causing the tone arm to swing from left to right, evidenced here. Both copies I received did the same thing, so those also went back for a refund. It may not seem like much, but when I throw on a record from 1979 that I purchased for $1 and the tone arm moves to the center steadily without weaving one wonders about modern QA practices.

There’s lots of fantastic vinyl out there, but they’re still pressed by humans who are inherently fallible.