Cure on vinyl is great, but I definitely wouldn't pay the $250 for Disintegration. Assuming it's an original pressing, it's about an hour of music crammed onto one disc, and missing two songs, including the excellent Last Dance. I've read that the CD version of the original releases is the best format (that's what I have, although I first bought it on cassette when the album initially came out). What other Cure albums does he have for sale?

Agree, I have the double-LP reissue in my collection already. My bad on the price here ... they're asking $200 and not $250.

They're shown at the 5:26 mark and 24:27 mark of the video. Not sure which ones are still left, I imagine some are gone already.

And pretty much no one talks like that out here unless they're from the Maritimes. Maybe Paff has a Newfie filter on his cellphone ...

Just tellin' ya what I heard, man.

Well, I suppose it is entirely possible that his ancestors emigrated to the prairies during the great Rupert's Land migration between 1871 and (roughly) Nineteen Aught-Six. Or he just could have been having a bit of fun with the American on the line ...

My apologies, Paff ...

It's amazing how I thought this or that 'record' would be worth something one day or at any current time, but ones I bought and got rid of are the ones that have ridiculous pricing today
I had the Bowie ones from the video as well as some of the Cure ones, but those were lost here and there are handed off to friends or whatever. It was mostly because I replaced them with CD

That was so annoying in the 80s, when CDs, LPs, and cassettes would have different track listings due to limitations of the formats. The Cure's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me album had had the track "Hey You" cut from the CD for time, and other albums would include a bonus track on the CD and/or cassette that was missing from the LP.

The first one that comes to mind for me is Synchronicity by The Police, which had Murder By Numbers as a bonus song on the cassette but not on the LP. I think record companies were doing this as a way to discourage people from taping the vinyl album onto their own cassettes at home with a 'buy our cassette and get bonus song(s) that you won't find on the LP' kind of deal.

Yeah, that always bugged me as well. I bought the CD of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me after hearing my friend's cassette of it, and I was disappointed that it was missing "Hey You" because I actually like that song. How about the Standing on a Beach compilation, where only the cassette has all the B-sides for the singles, that was the best version.

Yeah, that was a frustrating one.

The LP had thirteen tracks. The CD had those thirteen tracks plus four more tracks. Then the cassette had the thirteen LP tracks plus the twelve b-side tracks. And the LP and cassette were titled "Standing on a Beach" and the CD was titled "Staring at the Sea." (Or was that the other way around?)

I remember getting that CD from Columbia House, then I was at a record store and saw the cassette that had a bunch of songs listed that the CD didn't and was quite pissed off.

Luckily I bought it on cassette so I was good. The cassette was definitely called Standing on a Beach, and I know the VHS music video collection was called Staring at the Sea, but yeah, the CD might have been as well, maybe because its track listing matched the VHS?

^Yep. Can verify Standing on a Beach, as I just looked at my wife's copy.

I've been on a mission, lately, to track down my old mix tapes. It is driving me crazy. Wife came out with a bag of tapes, and I was so relieved, until I looked at them and realized they were all hers, and none of mine. I NEVER would have tossed them, so it's particularly frustrating, as I am pretty much out of places to look.

Also trying to find a working 8 track player. One was advertised on FB (in your neck of the woods, cultshock, hopefully not you! ) as "looks good works good," but when I asked the seller if he could demo it working, he said I could bring an 8 track to test it??? Waiting to hear how he knows it works, if he doesn't have an 8 track. I don't feel like making a 1/2 hour drive just to find out 'if' it works. Perhaps this belongs in the pet peeves thread.

Nope, it's not me selling it. Maybe by "it works good" he means it powers on when he hits the on button, it wouldn't surprise me. I only have two old 8-tracks from when I was a kid, two of the KISS solo albums, but the little foam thingies behind the tapes have dried up and fallen off, so I'd probably need to fix that in order to make them play properly.

I threw away all my tapes (mixtapes and prerecords) during a move around 18 years ago, still kicking myself for that stupidity (yet I hung on to my two 8-tracks), and I'm usually someone who hangs on to crap like that from my younger years.

Yeah, I know you would've said that it 'works well,' so I was pretty confident that it wasn't you.

We bought our house 27 years ago, so I still had a cassette player in my car. I know I had them here. And my still having 8 tracks is more proof that I wouldn't have thrown them away, although your post calls that logic into quesiton.

And, yes, the foam pads commonly go, but can be replaced. The other thing is the metallic splice that is used to detect the end of the tape/track. The adhesive on many of those dries up, necessitating a repair.

Back to the search!

Very true, I read "Works good" and thought "Ugh".

I am surprised at myself for throwing away all my cassettes but keeping my two 8-tracks.

Here's the 8-track player I got for Christmas 1978, it had a speaker in the front and back that you could separate to get the full stereo effect. Spiffy!

8 Track was a really horrible format, wasn't it?

A bit before my time -- but I remember some old tapes lying around the house when I was a kid. I remember my mother had a Joe Cocker tape and I thought his name was Joe Cooker.

I've read that 8 track is/should be higher sound quality, but I'm not sure the logic works... It is a wider tape (6.35mm vs 3.81mm) but that works out to 0.79375mm per track, while cassette would be 0.9525mm per track (stereo, 2 sides).

Although, the tape speed is faster on 8 track (9.53 ips vs 4.75 ips), which is likely why it should be higher fidelity.

Of course, 8 track has some really annoying limitations... No possibility of rewinding, due to the way the infinite tape loop spools, and the likelihood of having a track switch in the middle of a song.

Double the tape speed sounds real likely to me. I used to do a lot of taping and speed made a lot of difference.

Yeah, it makes sense. Multiplying it out, there's a definite advantage to space for the 8 track data at about a 1.67:1 over cassettes.

When I was a kid my parents had an 8-track player in their car, and an 8-track recorder as a part of the "family stereo system" in the living room (seems like every home had one of those in the living room back then). That way my dad could tape all of his records to listen to in the car (like we did with cassette tapes in the 80s). It was a crappy format, the track changing in the middle of a song was annoying, and plenty of my dad's tapes got eaten by the player in the car, boy did that piss him off.

Yeah, I can't speak for the actual audio quality of 8-track, but I do remember the tapes getting mangled frequently. Which also happened with cassettes, but less frequently. And I never really understood they way they worked (infinite loop or something?), and they were out of fashion by the time I was in kindergarten, anyway, so I never bothered to learn much about them.

Might have to look them up youtube; I'm sure I can find many exhaustive and detailed explanations of how they functioned.

We had the family stereo system (Sears brand!) with 8 track, but me being me meant I took it apart when I moved on to a 'real' stereo system.

Not surprisingly, no reply from the FB marketplace seller that somehow knows it works, without a tape.

And yeah, it is interesting how the infinite loop works. It spools out from the middle, and winds up on the outside. It's most likely that any eaten 8 track is due to the splice coming apart.

Waiting for him to update his description from "Works good" to "It's broke".

This sounds fantastic in my new living room setup ... added a Polk PSW110 subwoofer to the mix as well.

If there are any interested KISS fans here, RCP just picked up a couple of nice additions to their stock ... Record Collectors Paradise | Edmonton AB | Facebook

Scroll down a little past the Wayne Shorter and you'll see them. Not sure about the prices, just send them a quick e-mail if you're curious.

Hey Paff, how were the albums you & your friend received?

Just picked up the licensed reissue of this single on 12" vinyl. Don't want to pay four figures for the original 7" single and don't want to buy a counterfeit copy, so this one it is!

I haven't opened mine yet, maybe I just want to look at them a little longer, still sealed. Plus, I'm doing a little surgery on my sound system, trying to add an auto switcher so my vinyl plays through the speakers with my vintage receiver, then my home theater setup runs through the same speakers. Before I actually had the HT system feeding into the vintage receiver, and it was all a big pain in the ass.

I just gave my friend her records last week, don't know if she's opened them yet either. But we loved the Bowie concert shirt from the Serious Moonlight tour. They just don't make shirts with that cut anymore. It was like stepping into a John Hughes movie.

Oh, and one of the titles I ultimately passed on was Let it Bee, the debut from Voice of the Beehive. I found an American seller on Discogs with a "mint", "unplayed" copy much cheaper so I got that. You probably already see where this is going by my use of quotation marks. It's neither mint nor unplayed. The shrink wrap was long gone, and there were signs of wear on the vinyl. Now, it's still the best copy of the record I've ever gotten, and I'm keeping it, but it's NOT mint. He probably could have gotten away with an "NM" designation, but mint is mint as in brand new and this was not. I gave the guy a neutral rating on Discogs and he tears into me saying I should have just returned it blah blah blah. I don't see where I'm in the wrong. People suck.