Which is great until it’s time to buy a record sight unseen on eBay, Discogs.com or elsewhere, and then suddenly those vinyl grading terms mean a hell of a lot more.

This video is one point of view on grading vinyl records, and the background music is fun, too. There is a great amount of personal preference built in to grading vinyl records, but once you get used to the grading systems and know what to look for this whole topic is much easier to deal with. Again, some of this is really down to personal preference–how much wear is acceptable to you?

–Joe Wallace

Jack White started Third Man after his recording contract expired with V2. The White Stripes signed with Warner to record Icky Thump, but Jack White pulled off a shrewd deal to keep the rights to vinyl pressings…and Third Man wasn’t far behind with reissues of the back catalog, plus new releases by bands like The Dead Weather.

If you’re into learning about the entire saga of Third Man, have a look at this excellent interview with one of Third Man’s major players, as published by Collector’s Weekly. It’s a pretty interesting look behind the scenes at Nashville’s prime iconoclast labels/record stores.

Lovely to watch, isn’t it?

My major complaint with most of the vinyl documentaries I’ve seen over the past year and a half is that the filmmakers all seem compelled to spend an inordinate amount of time discussing why vinyl is superior to digital. This is completely unnecessary and really sounds like a sales pitch. But that doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of this production in the long run…

And while I’m feeling feisty, additionally vexing to a nitpicky writer/editor is referring to more than one record album as “vinyls”. People! “Vinyl” is both singular AND plural.

–Joe Wallace

Is this the most expensive turntable ever built? If it’s not, it probably was at one time. But with all that fine, precision German-built analog attention to detail, can it really compare to the ultra-high tech wonder that was my first record player ever?

Really, no amount of $650,000 high-tech inventiveness could ever create the thrill of discovery comparable to what I had as a kid plopping down this Power Records vinyl (see below) down on the Close ‘n Play and hearing the psuedo-Morricone Italian crime soundtrack music blasting out of those crap speakers.

I realize now that the music on the following clip was the gateway drug for my now-insatiable soundtrack collecting obsession when it comes to Morricone, Stelvio Cipriani, Piero Umiliani and others. Strange that you can pin down a lifetime of music obsessions to a single, very obscure record heard as kid:

P.S. The story on the Batman: Stacked Cards vinyl is HILARIOUS. Listen all the way to the end to hear Batman ruminating that a frontal lobotomy could return The Joker back to “normal society”! Hell, yeah–let’s save time and bother and lobotomize EVERYBODY!

–Joe Wallace

So that’s why I keep posting the technically oriented and gear-related items–there are plenty of others out there who relate to this sort of thing every bit as much as the collecting and I am very happy about that. This is a clip on vinyl mastering that was shot at SXSW in 2011 and I’m definitely on the prowl for more of these…

–Joe Wallace