PLATTER & PLINTH

Records to Buy

What to actually put on the turntable. First records for a new deck, starter collections by genre, and which pressing of an album is worth paying for.

The rest of this site is about the machine. This part is about what goes on it — which is the half most turntable buyers get wrong, because a deck arrives with a stylus, a mat and no music, and the first purchase after it is almost always made in a hurry.

There is no mystery to buying records well, but there are three places people reliably lose money. They buy a scarce or collectible pressing before they can hear the difference. They pay a premium for a heavier disc believing weight is a sound specification. And they buy a box set for the two albums they wanted. Every page below is built to prevent one of those.

What we do and do not claim. We have not heard the specific pressings on these pages, and we do not review music — there is no score, no star rating and no listening impression anywhere in this hub. What we do instead is read what the label actually publishes about a reissue line, check that the listing is a real, in-stock vinyl release before featuring it, and say plainly when a maker publishes nothing at all. Blue Note documents its mastering chain in detail; most rock and hip-hop reissues document nothing. That difference is itself the most useful thing a buyer can know, and it is on every page.

Prices move faster here than anywhere else on the site. Pressings sell through, get repressed under a new listing, and swing in price week to week far more than turntables do. So no record page quotes a price in its prose. The buttons carry the live figure and the date it was read, and if a listing dies the link still lands you on a useful search rather than a dead page.

New to all of this? Start with the first ten records to buy. It assumes you own a turntable and nothing else.

Everything in Records

Where to start, by situation

The turntable just arrived. Buy from the first ten and stop there until you have played them. Ten records is roughly where most people discover which direction they actually want to go, and buying thirty first is how you end up with a shelf you do not listen to.

You already know the genre. Go straight to the starter collection — jazz, classic rock, hip-hop, soul and funk, or indie. Each one is ordered for someone building from nothing, not for someone completing a collection.

You found four versions of the same album. That is the normal state of affairs and it is what which pressing to buy is for. If the versions differ by a reissue line name rather than by a year, read audiophile pressings explained first — the differences between those lines are published, and they are not what most people assume.

You are buying for somebody else. Vinyl gifts is sorted by how well you know their taste, and gift pairings puts an album together with the accessory that makes owning it better. Before you consider a box, read are box sets worth it — the arithmetic usually says no.

Three claims to stop believing

“180 gram sounds better.” Weight describes the lump of vinyl, not the groove cut into it. A heavy disc from a mediocre master is a heavy disc from a mediocre master. There are real reasons to prefer 180g and sound quality is not directly one of them — the full version is here.

“Colored vinyl always sounds worse.” The effect is real, smaller than claimed, and very dependent on which colored format you mean — picture discs and splatter are a different proposition from a solid opaque color. Here is what actually changes.

“An original pressing is always the best one.” Sometimes, for some titles, in good condition, at a price most people should not pay. A fifty-year-old record has had fifty years of handling, and a current all-analog reissue from the original tapes is a genuinely competitive object. The decision procedure is here.

Before you buy more records

Two pieces of hardware do more for your records than any pressing upgrade will. The first is a stylus in good condition: a worn tip does cumulative, permanent damage to every record it touches, which makes it the one component where neglect costs you the collection rather than the sound. How often to replace a stylus has the manufacturers’ own hour figures.

The second is somewhere sensible to keep them. Storing records upright, out of sunlight and in decent sleeves is free if you do it from the start and expensive if you do not. And if your records are already noisy, a cleaning kit beats replacing them.

If you do not have the turntable yet, start at the turntable roundup instead. Buying records for a deck you have not chosen is the one order of operations we would talk you out of.

Elsewhere on Platter & Plinth