Russia reverts to vinyl

Russia reverts to vinyl

News

norman lebrecht

August 23, 2024

The state record label Melodiya is building a vinyl pressing plant in Novosibirsk, local media report.

Opening in the spring the aim is to press 100,000 LPs a year,  about one-third of the present domestic market. There is even talk of export potential.

Bring back the Red Army Chorus ar 33rpm.

 

Comments

  • PIshi says:

    Actually there is Vinylogy LLC from Moscow since 2008, if you purchase some old famous records from Amazon such as
    The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out or Just Blue’s SPACE, it is highly possible to receive a copy from them.

  • IP says:

    What’s wrong with barrel organs? Sturdy machines, and the technology is difficult to hijack with hostile and nontraditional content.

  • John Borstlap says:

    Russia was always rather backward, but now it goes willfully backward, to escape the aggressive weak decadence of the West.

    • Tamino says:

      except that the west has a revival of vinyl for quite some time already.

      • Andrew J Clarke says:

        But can the average Russian afford the hyper-expensive cartridges, turntables and valve pre-amps regarded as essential for playing LPs these days? Not to mention the multiple copies of pop diva releases in different coloured vinyl or different coloured sleeves?

  • Jean says:

    Could well be some money-laundering scheme ….

    Or a way to collect money for the “Z” army.

    (By the way: “Z” + “Z” makes a swastika)

    • Millicent says:

      How enlightened. Not.
      Research the actual origin of the swastika before commenting please.

    • Gubidici. says:

      You’re not very smart are you Jean , trying to make up funny conspiracies , while actual journalism about Nazism in Ukraine for an over a decade is already there , cough cough – Azov , for example .

      • M2N2K says:

        There are nazis in virtually every european country these days, but certainly more of them in Russia than in Ukraine.

      • M2N2K says:

        There are nazis in virtually every european country, but these days there are certainly more of them in Russia than in Ukraine.

  • J Barcelo says:

    I sure hope that in the last 40 years Melodiya has learned something about pressing vinyl. Back in the ’60s and ’70s I picked up a lot of material on Melodiya LPs that was completely unavailable elsewhere, like the complete Glazunov symphonies. The performances fine, the recorded sound always suspect, but the pressings were awful – gritty, noisy, off-center…horrible quality control.

    • Herbie G says:

      Yes indeed! Then there was the unique braying brass too. But the EMI pressings of the Melodiya tapes were something else, weren’t they? Same fine performances but silent surfaces – and even better are the CD transfers on Olympia, Regis and Alto.

  • David K. Nelson says:

    Red Army Chorus for sure but only if they promise to sing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

    You know we in the West gleaned a rather negative view of Soviet record engineering and quality because (in addition to an ingrained negative view of Soviet anything) so much of what we heard from Oistrakh or Gilels was from pirated multi-generations-removed quasi-bootlegs on Vox or Pickwick or unnamed budget labels. I recall one reviewer — and a respected one — for the old High Fidelity magazine who speculated that the Soviets must have still been recording using acoustic horns into the 1940s so bad was the sound of what we assumed to be the actual sound of Soviet engineering. He took a beating over that in the letters section of HF but the sound of those early releases at least somewhat justified his speculation. Then Melodiya gained some western partners and we could experience recent and quite vivid recordings from the 1960s, 70s and 80s — and even then, only later did we get to hear top quality reissues from an earlier era so we could learn just how up-to-date their recording technology abilities were going back at least to the early high fidelity days. And that also let us hear an earlier era of Soviet artists whose recordings never made it to the EMI or Columbia Melodiya joint venture series’. One good example, the marvelous violinist Yulian (Julian) Sitkovetsky who recorded wonderful stuff but in monaural sound (good clean mono but …. still mono) so the western labels had no interest. But violin fans were intensely interested.

    • Yuri K says:

      You in the West lost quality competition to Japan long time ago, so gloating about Soviet ingineering may be just poor consolation.

  • Joel Kemelhor says:

    Ah, but will the Melodiya record jackets still be sealed with glue that smells like fish oil ?

  • Robert says:

    Vinyl production has always been a toxic chemical and waste problem.

    And Russia has such a strong ethic of dealing with its toxic waste responsibly.

  • George says:

    As a vinyl audiophile some of my most treasured recordings are the Melodiya recordings of the Soviet era. In particular Tchaikovsky.
    The pressings and sound quality were undoubtedly Trabant rather than Rolls Royce.
    However, the recordings are so alive, and to hear great Russian music played with such passion by the Leningrad SO….

  • dt says:

    Would rather buy bullets for Ukraine. They sound better.

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