Folk vinyl deals on Amazon UK

Buying folk vinyl without overpaying

Folk is quiet music, and quiet music is where pressing quality shows up most obviously. There is nothing loud to mask surface noise, so a noisy or off-centre disc is far more distracting on an acoustic record than on a dense rock one. It is worth playing a new folk LP through properly within the returns window rather than filing it after one side.

The British folk revival catalogue — Island, Transatlantic, Topic — has been reissued carefully in recent years, often from the original tapes with the original artwork, and those editions do go on offer. Seventies singer-songwriter records from the major labels are repressed constantly and discount fastest.

Weight is not quality, incidentally. A 180g pressing cut from a mediocre digital source is worse than a standard-weight one cut from tape, whatever the sticker says. What matters is the transfer, and where a label has done it properly they almost always tell you on the back of the sleeve.

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