Now that I’m selling on eBay full time my elder bro Karl
suggested we flog our old vinyl collection- most of it’s his and a lot of it I’ve
never listened to properly. Knowing that detailed information is the key to eBay
flogging I figured that it would be a good idea to actually test the records I was
hoping to sell in order see if there was any major scratches or problems that
might result in ANGRY NEGATIVE FEEDBACK.
Not having owned a record player for about a decade and a
half I went on the lookout for something to play them on. I didn’t want to fork
out 100’s of squids on a new ‘deck’ so I went on the hunt for an old fashioned ‘hi-fi’.
After drawing a blank on freecycle local ebay listings or gumtree I took a Misery
Bus into town and went mooching round the charity shops. 4th time lucky I found what I was looking
for. A British made Fidelity MC5 (really) all-in-one ‘phono’, ‘tuner’ and ‘tape
deck’. £20. I already had some decent speakers (80’s era Technics I’ve been carrying
around house move after house move hoping one day to find a use for them), so I
was all Ready-to-Rumpole with my Vintage Fi.
I got the thing set up and attached the speakers (by mashing
the bare wires into the little holes) and switched it on. And there it was again,
that forgotten pop and hum of an analog amp
(and thus I turn into a typical 40something banging on about analog. And vinyl.)
The sound was a bit wonky and vary-speed but a quick look on the internet (on a
website I forgot to bookmark and now, chillingly, I can’t find*) gave me the
solution and after cleaning the spinning rubber disk thing and the underneath
of the turn around bit the record goes on it worked fine. Fantastic.
So now I’m in the process of listening to and then listing
on eBay mine and my bro’s record collection. I’ll do a brief update/review of
each one as I go along. There’s quite a lot, and I’m just grabbing random
chunks of them each time I go round to visit, so there won’t be any logic or
order to them and expect a LOT of New Wave/Prog/80’s stuff (Karl’s records –
will no doubt be in the best condition and sell better), and Metal/80’s Rock
(mine- probably unplayable and unsellable). There’s probably some of my parents
Nana Mouskouri LP’s buried in there to.
*I remember it going on about the plural of Stylus is ‘Styli’
and not ‘Stlyus’s’s’ and they’re definitely NOT called a ‘needle’.
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