The Blue Note Thread

JohnnyCashFan said:
Amz has preorder due on 3/9 now so just maybe that one makes it out.

btw, I spoke to a couple local shops about these and they were not really interested in ordering them in. Perhaps they are were worried about the junkie non Capitol bn pressings they still have sitting in there store, that's my guess, and there fault (they should be able to be sent back to the distributor for credit) but there not big jazz shops either.
Click to expand...
Vinyl cannot be returned to the distributor or label, sealed, detective, or for any other reason. The only thing worse for a record shop than dead inventory is returns.
 
JohnnyCashFan said:
After a wash on the record cleaner mine is playing really nice, I must of got a copy with a lot of gunk. Really enjoyed it 3rd listen tonight. I'm lucky to have heard the Classic Records pressing, that's still my favorite for it's warmth, but this one is fine now.

"Is that what you wanted Alfred" ;)
Click to expand...

I've given mine a wash, and still having a few problems to be honest, I'll give it another wash.

It could well be be my cart or TT set up, I need to find some time & go through the setup properly. But definitely a problem with the trumpet part way through the first side of the Joe Henderson. Also got a small issue on the Cannonball Adderley.
 
RHANDMJ said:
Vinyl cannot be returned to the distributor or label, sealed, detective, or for any other reason. The only thing worse for a record shop than dead inventory is returns.
Click to expand...

Huh really? That’s a real shame. Books are the total opposite— bookstores can return unsold stock. That’s also a problem though, makes publishers less likely to take a chance on a new author, or at least they won’t do a large print run and risk getting stuck with a ton of back stock.
 
Andy said:
I've given mine a wash, and still having a few problems to be honest, I'll give it another wash.

It could well be be my cart or TT set up, I need to find some time & go through the setup properly. But definitely a problem with the trumpet part way through the first side of the Joe Henderson. Also got a small issue on the Cannonball Adderley.
Click to expand...

I have a few niggles here and there on the Somethin' but for $22 I don't think I would return it. I also hear a edit on one of Miles muted trumpet parts thats odd (near the end of One For Daddio). I wonder if the master tape is damaged and they had to port in the part from another source.

Andy said:
I've given mine a wash, and still having a few problems to be honest, I'll give it another wash.

It could well be be my cart or TT set up, I need to find some time & go through the setup properly. But definitely a problem with the trumpet part way through the first side of the Joe Henderson. Also got a small issue on the Cannonball Adderley.
Click to expand...

Proper table setup is important.

You might want to carefully scrub it, there is gunk in the grooves. The edge of the record also had debris. Easy enough to send Don an email about QC.
 
Last edited:
bother said:
Huh really? That’s a real shame. Books are the total opposite— bookstores can return unsold stock. That’s also a problem though, makes publishers less likely to take a chance on a new author, or at least they won’t do a large print run and risk getting stuck with a ton of back stock.
Click to expand...
I know that unsold stock gets provided to certain retailers dirt cheap (I can think of at least 2 places near me that get tons of unsold stock and sells for like 20% of initial retail), and I'm not aware of anything of the sort like that for vinyl.
 
bother said:
Huh really? That’s a real shame. Books are the total opposite— bookstores can return unsold stock. That’s also a problem though, makes publishers less likely to take a chance on a new author, or at least they won’t do a large print run and risk getting stuck with a ton of back stock.
Click to expand...
Yes - fact. I've said it here many times, but it bears repeating - when you send a record back to a record store, or Amazon for that matter, for some minor imperfection or a seam split, or a couple of pops, or because you have a Crossley player, or just because you don't like it...the store eats that cost. Straight off the bottom line.

So if retrurns are high - prices have to go up.

Deadstock is dead stock, and there are no cutouts anymore. Either sit on the inventory and tie up your capital, or discount them. No returns.

I get the argument of "I paid good money and the QC is shitty." But also, you are buying what is essentially an obsolete technology that is being run on 50 year old machines, manually, where the supply industry - lacquers, parts, vinyl pellets, cutting needles, etc., has dwindled to a very few suppliers - one or two in most cases. The manufacturers do the best they can with what they've got. Perfection is no longer 100% guaranteed.

The record store can't do anything about quality. They get what they get from the distributor. They have to eat any returns.

Distribution sucks, all the infrastructure was dismantled long ago. There are two distributors in the United States, they are both terrible. Here in Canada, the majors don't even bother to bring in vinyl in a lot of cases, and can't distribute it properly. Major labels don't give a shit about vinyl, they actually hate it. They are all in on streaming, and the sooner they can get rid of all physical product, the happier they will be. So they haven't really invested in infrastructure and pretty much do it grudingly, because they still have to.
 
JohnnyCashFan said:
I have a few niggles here and there on the Somethin' but for $22 I don't think I would return it. I also hear a edit on one of Miles muted trumpet parts thats odd (near the end of One For Daddio). I wonder if the master tape is damaged and they had to port in the part from another source.



Proper table setup is important.

You might want to carefully scrub it, there is gunk in the grooves. The edge of the record also had debris. Easy enough to send Don an email about QC.
Click to expand...
What exactly would you expect Don to do about "QC"?
 
RHANDMJ said:
Yes - fact. I've said it here many times, but it bears repeating - when you send a record back to a record store, or Amazon for that matter, for some minor imperfection or a seam split, or a couple of pops, or because you have a Crossley player, or just because you don't like it...the store eats that cost. Straight off the bottom line.

So if retrurns are high - prices have to go up.

Deadstock is dead stock, and there are no cutouts anymore. Either sit on the inventory and tie up your capital, or discount them. No returns.

I get the argument of "I paid good money and the QC is shitty." But also, you are buying what is essentially an obsolete technology that is being run on 50 year old machines, manually, where the supply industry - lacquers, parts, vinyl pellets, cutting needles, etc., has dwindled to a very few suppliers - one or two in most cases. The manufacturers do the best they can with what they've got. Perfection is no longer 100% guaranteed.

The record store can't do anything about quality. They get what they get from the distributor. They have to eat any returns.

Distribution sucks, all the infrastructure was dismantled long ago. There are two distributors in the United States, they are both terrible. Here in Canada, the majors don't even bother to bring in vinyl in a lot of cases, and can't distribute it properly. Major labels don't give a shit about vinyl, they actually hate it. They are all in on streaming, and the sooner they can get rid of all physical product, the happier they will be. So they haven't really invested in infrastructure and pretty much do it grudingly, because they still have to.
Click to expand...

Why aren’t there cut outs anymore? What even were those? I own a bunch but honestly never thought about it. This shows my age.

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying— sometimes it seems like QC standards are a little high— I don’t think i’ve ever returned a record for minor imperfections, and only returned a few used records that were egregiously mis-graded— but I don’t hold it against folks that do.
 
bother said:
Why aren’t there cut outs anymore? What even were those? I own a bunch but honestly never thought about it. This shows my age.

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying— sometimes it seems like QC standards are a little high— I don’t think i’ve ever returned a record for minor imperfections, and only returned a few used records that were egregiously mis-graded— but I don’t hold it against folks that do.
Click to expand...

Were some of those promo's for radio stations or were those always emboss stamped ?

Reddit says "They are cut-outs. Unsold copies of records were shipped back to the distributor, where they were "cut out" by drilling a hole or sawing a corner. This signified that the artist would recieve no royalties from this copy. ... The label marked them with the "cut out" and sold them to stores at discount."
 
JohnnyCashFan said:
Were some of those promo's for radio stations or were those always emboss stamped ?

Reddit says "They are cut-outs. Unsold copies of records were shipped back to the distributor, where they were "cut out" by drilling a hole or sawing a corner. This signified that the artist would recieve no royalties from this copy. ... The label marked them with the "cut out" and sold them to stores at discount."
Click to expand...
That's interesting. I was always under the impression that individual stores did that themselves so people couldn't pretend they grabbed albums from the bargain bins that weren't supposed to be in there. Some of the cutouts I have certainly seem to be amateur drill/hacksaw jobs to have been done by a label, but I'm not sure they would have made a machine to do it or anything. Maybe both are true.

Before my time though.
 
bother said:
Why aren’t there cut outs anymore? What even were those? I own a bunch but honestly never thought about it. This shows my age.

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying— sometimes it seems like QC standards are a little high— I don’t think i’ve ever returned a record for minor imperfections, and only returned a few used records that were egregiously mis-graded— but I don’t hold it against folks that do.
Click to expand...
In the vinyl era, a record had a selling life of weeks. If it didn't sell quickly as a new release, it probably died quickly, and if the label misjudged it's sales potential, they would be left with a ton of stock that wouldn't move. So they needed a way to move that dead or no longer moving stock. The way was to wait a few months, or a year, until the record was totally not moving at all and retailers had returned their stock, and move it to cut-out bins by punching a hole of cutting the corner of the cover.

In that era, label sales reps were on the road filling the shelves of record shops, telling them what to stock up on and how much. Often product was in stores on consignment or extended payment terms. They wanted product on shelves, and lots of copies. They made commission that way. But that often didn't work out - history is full of albums that should have been huge but were DOA on record shelves. The stores just shipped them back to the label.

Most places, cutouts went to a discount retailer to move, not regular record stores. Many big cities had a bunch of low-rent cutout stores. Bigger stores or mainstream record stores usually didn't want to handle cutouts, there was a taint there.

There aren't cutouts because the record labels don't have to worry about distribution and inventory anymore, and there would be no point - pressing runs are very small compared to the vinyl era, so why bother to do cutouts when you have a few hundred copies in deadstock? That would start a run on value if people could hold out for the possibility of a discounted cutout, and it would wreck the collector's market, which largely fuels the vinyl market now.

And record stores don't buy on consignment or on extended terms anymore. It's 30 days if your store has credit with the distributor, 15 days for some, cash up front for others.

I do hold it against folks who have unrealistic expectations about vinyl, returning frequently even multiple times.

I pay for it, and so do you.

Vinyl takes work, it always has. It's not like a CD where there isn't any noise, pops, clicks.

I have returned obvious bad flaws - a massive warp, a terrible scratch. But those happen to me very rarely. I do have an issue with mis-grading of records, which seems to happen way too many times. Not from Japanese sellers, though, or many EU sellers. U.S. sellers seem to think that anything that looks fairly good they picked up at the Goodwill store is NM, and they don't even bother wiping the mountain of dust off first.
 
Last edited:
RHANDMJ said:
I do hold it against folks who have unrealistic expectations about vinyl, returning frequently even multiple times.
Click to expand...
I agree generally, but I think there’s a worthy distinction between “regular” releases and the premium-priced audiophile vinyl.

If Impex wants to charge an arm and a leg for a 2 lp 45 rpm AAA release and promote it in a way that allegedly justifies that premium, then I expect them to deliver. I don’t demand perfection, but I also don’t expect constant surface noise on a record with many quiet sections.

I’m singling them out only bc I had that experience with Legrand Jazz, and I was a bit shocked bc other Impex I have are pristine, and every review I’ve seen says the opposite about that record. But that was my experience with that one.

I think that’s the only record I’ve ever returned.
 
Threw on Somethin' Else. Aside from some initial static pops, this is fantastic. Next up is Page One, though I have a version from Poland that sounds great and cost $6 when Deep Discount had a sale last spring so I didn't need to double dip with the Classics version.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top