 |
 |
I was once given a very large pile of LPs that had been in a mostly dry basement, except there had been a heating-water pipe burst a couple years before they were given to me. They had been drenched but not soaked -- some not touched at all, others obviously exposed to a lot of water. Everything had been left in place and had dried naturally from the hot air of a small basement with a furnace in it. Aside from a bunch of ruined sleeves, no records were in that bad condition. I did QC checks on all of them because the original owner had kept them in surprisingly excellent condition as far as limited playing with good equipment. He had just left them there when my friend bought the house and my friend doesn't do LPs. Since most of them were not my taste or I had on CD already, I donated most of them to the Salvation Army store and went no further with them. The 100 or so that I kept were either very old, original pressing LPs of various things or were audiophile reissues. For those, I tossed the damaged sleeves, cleaned the records on my VPI machine and continue to enjoy their content and, in the case of the MOFI and other audiophile LPS, their quiet surfaces. For the records I kept, there was no damage too severe to fix with a VPI cleaning. So I'd say it's worth a careful assessment before you toss an LP that got wet, but if it got soaked and is all gummed together, it probably can't be saved. But, if it were an LP that I really treasured, I would let it dry out and see if the warping/shrinking of the cardboard and paper, combined with the oils in the LP material, lead the sleeve/cover material to separate from the LP and leave an LP that can be cleaned and played without problems -- I'm sure this won't happen every time. I think Steve's first point about not being aggressive with a wet sleeve/cover is key. As for replacing commercial LPs via eBay and other online stores, I've been very unhappy with the quality of many that I've bought, including still-wrapped NOS LPs. THe problem is that most that are still wrapped haven't been stored well and are of junky late-era pressings. On the other hand, I've been very happy with others, despite the fact they were (lovingly) used. One guy sold me his late father-in-law's jazz collection for the cost of media mail because he had tried eBay, gotten one bid on one auction and didn't want the hassle anymore. I sent him extra for packing time and gas to get them to the post office and he said he used it to buy a nice bottle of wine and toast his father-in-law. The records, meanwhile, were in excellent shape and the collection had a lot of stuff I did not have on LP or CD. It's kept my transfer chain busy when no paying work is on the turntable. One final thought. People who are used to CD's lack of background noise and are critical listeners who are bothered by things like rumble, ticks and pops to the point of not enjoying the content will NEVER like ANY LP, so it's a fool's errand to try and "convert" them. I personally do not like LPs very much but a lot of content I like was never released on CD's or was so poorly remastered that the LP sounds better, warts and all. Over the years, I've been surprised and dismayed to see just how much material never made it to CD (some of this material is now seeing the light of day as vastly-inferior iTunes super-compressed digi-files, which is worse than being kept in the vaults since that as much as guarantees it will never see life in a modern high-fidelity format). I believe the copyright laws need to change and material that languishes in vaults forever or is doomed to re-release in some inferior headphones format needs to be put in the PD sooner, but that's a whole other discussion. -- Tom Fine