It turns out that PVC, or polyvinyl chloride—the stuff used to make Starbucks gift cards, imitation leather wallets, inflatable pool unicorns, the pipes under your sink, and Billy Idol’s pants—is also the main ingredient in phonograph records. And today we’re living in the silver age of PVC. Not the golden age, since records are no longer the dominant medium for recorded music, but these days we’re lucky to again have access to a remarkable amount of music stamped on top-quality hot plastic.
Better still, as listeners have become more knowledgeable and demanding, vinyl releases have become more scrupulously sourced, pressed, annotated, and packaged. Many of today’s records show an unprecedented level of care and transparency about their production—and sound terrific to boot. Some of these new records happen to contain old music, and a listener interested in buying a classic jazz title like, say, Sonny Rollins’s Way Out West has more choices than ever, ranging from the helpfully ubiquitous to the thrillingly exotic. Thanks to online resources like Discogs, they can choose between a wonderful-sounding 1957 original on the Contemporary label, a still-superb mid-1970s Contemporary reissue made with the original stampers, a delightful 1988 Japanese reissue from Victor, a 1992 Analogue Productions reissue mastered by Doug Sax, a 2003 version from the same company mastered at 45rpm by Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman, a 2018 set with an additional LP of outtakes from Craft Recordings, and last year’s two highly limited reissues from the Electric Recording Company in the UK—one mono, the other stereo—that are currently averaging more than $600 on the resale market. These are only a few of the available options, and no doubt more will be released in the fullness of time.
In practical terms, this abundance means we are awash in great-sounding copies of landmark records. Consider the reissues of (BMG/Pye Records/ABKCO BMGAA09LP), John Prine’s eponymous first album (Atlantic (Columbia/Legacy 88697680571), and John Coltrane’s (Atlantic 75203) currently residing on my shelf. The original versions of these records are difficult to find in good condition and range in cost from pricey to midlife-crisis insane. And in the case of and the Prine album, the first pressings don’t sound all that great anyway. The four reissues, mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, sound excellent, and, except for the Kinks record, can be had for the price of two tickets to see at your neighborhood cineplex. If only in regard to new vinyl, it is a quickening time to be alive.
