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£30 for a new record when the CD is £8

Rarely pay more than 25 quid even for a double album and singles are often well under 20. A whole CD costs about a quid to manufacture the sleeve alone on an album can cost 4 times that. One of the problems is dealers price "gouging". Take a band such as Electric orange who, partly because of exposure on the net, have a pretty solid sales base for vinyl. Their latest was a triple album that came out 30 quid. Dealers were buying half a dozen copies and immediately putting them out at 50-55 quid cos of the limited supply. They've done exactly the same with the recent repress of the Electric Orange album.
 
Graham H said:
Without the infrastructure that is in place to manufacture millions of dad rock LPs and CDs, (4 million LPs and 40 million CDs sold last year according to The Guardian), the interesting indie labels wouldn’t be able to afford or produce what they do.
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True. Though the other side of this is the interesting indie labels have a devil of a time getting anything pressed in a reasonable time because the plants are busy churning out Asia picture discs for Record Store Day...
 
I'm going back to CD as my default because the quality of modern vinyl is so unreliable. It's not just in terms of the first play - a few to many are scratched / warped - but because of the speed with which they wear. Newer recordings pick up glitches and clicks too quickly for me, even with a good quality cart. I've a 40+ year old bog standard CBS copy of Kind of Blue which still sounds pretty good. The surface noise on by 2014 mono release is twice as intrusive.

Sometimes I get lucky - Matthew Halsall's Fletcher Moss Park sounds pristine are a lot of regular listens - but it is too much of a lottery. CD hasn't got the aesthetics, doesn't sound a rich but the reliability factor, together with the cost element, still makes it my preferred choice even if the utility of the frame makes it a bit soul-less.
 
kjb said:
Sometimes I get lucky - Matthew Halsall's Fletcher Moss Park sounds pristine are a lot of regular listens - but it is too much of a lottery. CD hasn't got the aesthetics, doesn't sound a rich but the reliability factor, together with the cost element, still makes it my preferred choice even if the utility of the frame makes it a bit soul-less.
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Funny enough I took two copies of that exact album back to Piccadilly Records because it was badly pressed with some horrible scratchy noises on one side. Looks like you got lucky.
 
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