Fluff on the Needle
It’s a new year, but TASS* volunteer Terry Hyde celebrates an old technology with the resurgence in popularity of vinyl LPs
HMV is just about the last terrestrial chain-store that sells recorded music. But in there now, you will notice racks of new LPs at a premium price, and not just re-issues of old albums, but the latest releases by hot new acts. Kids who weren’t even born when the CD was invented are now buying record decks and vinyl records. Recently, there has been an equivalent boom in sales of used vinyl, and here in Tavistock, if you want to buy high quality used LPs (or even new ones), then Tavistock Audio on Market Street is the only commercial place to go. (Bob, the owner, will also sell you a decent record deck to play your LPs on.)
In Tavistock, only 2 of our 10 charity shops make some effort to sell used LPs: Oxfam on West Street and St Luke’s Hospice on Paddons Row. As for charity shops generally, I’ve noticed that
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many have stopped trying to sell vinyl at all. The problem is that if you dump boxes of unsaleable tat in the corner in the hope that someone will be stupid enough to buy, this is not ‘trying’.
Ironically, the shops I love are precisely those that do have boxes of unsorted LPs on the floor, typically all the same price (lowest seen so far: 25p) because this is where I cherry-pick. These shops have no one with the time, training, knowledge or skill to sort the wheat from the chaff, to check the LPs and price each one according to its market value. I get a frisson of anticipation at this point, plus the certain knowledge that my knees are going to punish me later for spending so much time kneeling down, checking LPs. These boxes will be dominated by tatty scratched classical records, gargantuan Reader’s Digest box
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