Vinyl Collectors Unite!

[botley]

@The Doctor why not grab another cartridge within your budget? The Ortofon Red you have is good but you can go up to something like the Blue Quintet in that range (some recalibration will be necessary but it's a simple enough upgrade).

Regarding the NIN/Bowie set: I'll preface this by saying I'm no audiophile by any means, but I listen to a lot of records and I've heard ones that sound good and ones that sound bad, and this set falls strongly in the 'sounds good' category.

Edit: there's some weird stuff happening at the beginning of a few of the Bowie songs. Sounds like skipping but I don't think it's the record, I think its just sloppily edited to cut the time down. Not sure though. Like at the beginning of We Prick You it sounds like he's starting to talk but then all of a sudden they're going into the song. Not super obtrusive and I still highly recommend this set for NIN fans, but I found that odd. I probably won't listen to it much anyway since I'm not a huge fan of 90s Bowie (I know that's sacreligious around here, but I wish he just played the original arrangements of the older songs instead of updating them all, which just makes them sound more dated today ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Edit 2: also, Under Pressure sounds like crap for some reason. It's like it's from a different source or something. The songs immediately before and after it sound fine, so I don't know what happened there.

Yeah, been spending a little time with it since I got mine from Earache (thanks @eversonpoe — hope things are calm enough around your place to enjoy some soothing music with baby!). Except for the weird scratchiness in "Under Pressure", and a couple of annoying skips in Bowie's set just as you mentioned (so I'm pretty sure they aren't just faults in my copy), this is... fine. It's mastered a little quietly, however, and since the source is a monaural DAT dub, it's definitely not up to the official standard of either artist. However, since it looks like we're not ever going to get a complete authorized representation of the entire show (Ouvrez le Chien is the closest thing Bowie's estate is going to give us, seemingly)... this will have to do.