Vinyl hunting - where and how

It’s dawned on me rather late: I could have saved myself hours of hard toil over some LPs in very bad shape, had I ventured a visit to the ebay flee market. I did it this summer and was amazed by the number of records I could have rebought in finer condition than some few of mine.

Well, it was interesting anyway. If you are patient enough you can find real bargains. The vast majority of course is of recent issues collectors have dumped after having replaced them with their CD incarnations (I can hear the gnashing of teeth by vinyl fans!) Most of them are sold for a fraction of their shipping cost.

But there are some surprises too. I haven’t yet found a good explanation of this mystery – there must be one. Perhaps later. For the time being let me put it on record: the most expensive LPs in today’s market are by women violinists! Johanna Martzy, Erica Morini, Ida Handel – artists that used to have a low or medium box office (and have charged analogous fees) share top box office in today’s used LPs market! I mean… hundreds of bucks. Ginette Neveu is expensive too, but nowhere like Martzy! Then second come women pianists: another surprise here - Ingrid Haebler sells for $$$s! Can't fathom why, for the life of me. Perhaps collectors grew weary of Uchida’s tres sec Mozart and need to breath fresher air – even though sanitized-filtered, like with Mme Haebler. Monique Haas is running high fees too, and so are Guyomar Novaes and Maria Tipo. Male stars like Glenn Gould, Horowitz, Sofronitzky, Gilels and Richter go for nothing. Males in general are a dime a dozen. Only Enrico Mainardi’s unaccompanied Bach cello suites reach such hights. And Ludwig Hoelscher runs him close.

As to labels – some Wenstminster sets get high prices, the majority goes for cheap. Same with some Remington’s. Mercuries are high runners too.

There is an artist-fetish in the vinyl buyer, today, but there’s also a brand/label fetish: LPs once famous for their sonic excellence (Mercuries, DECCA ffrr/ffss and LXTs, some Wenstminsters) are sold at very high prices. Added to these now -and rightfully so- you have East German LPs - Eterna etc -. They have always been better recorded and pressed on higher grade vinyl than their competitors of DGG - to say nothing of the much better orchestras active in the eastern sector. And there is of course the pure vinyl-fetish – and here more modern issues give place to older products, when vinyl was high grade, resisted stylus damage and wasn’t dished or misshaped and the like, as later products used to be.

In all these, there still are treasures that go for nothing – you get them cheap. All you need is read carefully the sellers small print as regards LP condition/gradings and chiefly shipping charges. Some sell cheap but rob you by way of postage. East-coast USA sellers charge you more than their West-coast colleagues – nobody knows why. And German/Austrian sellers prefer being paid by bank transfers which is cumbersome and dangerous. Not all of course. And the English insist on selling in English Pounds – of course.