6 Fun Facts About Vinyl Records
- Heather Jacks
- Mar 9, 2016
- 2 min read
Do you remember the first record you ever bought? I do. It was T-Rex, The Slider.
The year was 1981
Minimum wage was $3.35
Although the record was ten years old by the time I discovered it, it still cost $15.00, which was an investment of magnificent proportions, to a kid, working as a dishwasher, scraping dried eggs off plates at Denny’s Restaurant; that’s at least six hours of manual labor. But, it was this record, and this moment that cemented my vinyl obsession.
Over the years, vinyl has come and gone, evolved and changed. Here are some fun facts surrounding our collective love of these Frisbee shaped discs.
There are a lot of expensive, rare and valuable albums around; from the mythical Wu-Tan Clan to a signed copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and beyond. But, according to Popspike.com, one of the most expensive records ever sold—(sold on eBay, no less), in 2006, was of the Velvet Underground, for a mere $25,000. Why the high price tag; the production process, which is acetate. An acetate, is pressed before the master is created so vinyl records can be mass produced. It’s used as a reference so an engineer can tell how all the duplicated vinyl records will sound once they roll out of the pressing plant. This record is followed a rare copy of Pink Floyd’s Meddle album pressed on blue vinyl and a SEX PISTOLS – God Save the Queen – GENUINE A&M AMS7284.
Most records are black, but there are some rare ones that come in a range of different colors. I have a gold one, from Simple Minds in the ‘80’s. The vintage colored ones—not from current times-- can be considered valuable for collectors, because they are hard to find; and there is actually a different in the sound. Simply put, colored vinyl breaks down faster—or wears out quicker--when played, than black discs.
Did you know that vinyl records can be traced back to 19th Century France? French scientist, Leon Scott, created a thing called the ‘phonoautograph’, which was meant as a visual tool, but ultimately, it became the foundation for the gramophone.
The first 12-inch recording was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. RCA Victor made long playing records for home use in 1931. There were two varieties; 10” for home use and 12” for ‘serious’ music. The ‘serious music record’ was call a Victorlac, and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra recorded Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, as the first.
This may seem obvious, but, the best way to store records is vertically, not horizontally. If you want to preserve your records collection for as long as possible, don’t stack them up! If you stack them, this can damage the records on the bottom of the pile and they will be impossible to salvage. The best way to do that is to store them vertically on the shelf.
Brazilian tycoon, Zero Freitas, has the largest vinyl collection in the world with a whopping 6 million records in his personal possession. Allegedly he started buying vinyl with his pocket money, but now buys entire stocks of records, when music stores go bust. That’s a little more than pocket money!
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