STOP Using PVC Covers on Your Vinyl Before It’s Too Late!

i love my vinyl collection and i know that you love yours too but is your love destroying your records if you own vinyl records this is maybe one of the most important videos you'll ever watch i'm andrew from polygram auctions and in this video i'm going to tell you how to save your vinyl from destruction although the market for vinyl is only a fraction it once was in the 1970s and early 1980s the record cleaning and vinyl protection industry is bigger now than it has ever been the internet is packed with specialist sites selling a vast array of accessories for your vinyl from sleeves and storage boxes to premium products like ultrasonic record cleaning machines but there's one highly destructive element which no product can protect against and that's temperature more specifically heat now if you're a regular viewer of this channel you might be thinking at this point i tuned in with some beatles content where is it well this video was inspired by a horrific experience i had with this uk mono pressing of revolver but more about that later on buy a record today and there's precious little information in it for people buying vinyl for the first time it's assumed that if you buy a record now you already know how to look after it but it wasn't always so back in the 1950s and early 1960s record companies went to great lengths to educate the record-buying public on how they should look after their records important warnings and instructions were printed on virtually every inner sleeve this ranged from which stylist to use how to set up your equipment and of course how to handle and store your records this deca inner sleeve from 1967 is the gospel as far as vinyl storage and care is concerned now most of it is common sense but there are some really important points on it i want to emphasize number three says protect records from all sources of heat such as fires sunlight radiators hot water pipes amplifiers etc and number four records should be stored at a moderate uniform temperature away from heat and dust in an upright position without appreciable applied pressure and without leaning either way and before anyone else mentions it these box sets behind me are empty for us record collectors there aren't many things more exciting than receiving a box of records to the post which is just what happened to me last week now i will add at this point that the companies selling this collection were not vinyl specialists and so i didn't bother asking for a detailed condition report which on reflection maybe i should have done this box contained a collection of vinyl albums from the uk which i'd bought as a single lot it wasn't described in any great detail but from the image provided on the seller's site it appeared to be well looked after so i went for it but as soon as i opened the box i sensed trouble or rather my nose did as it was hit by a heady mix of stale cigarette smoke and chemicals anyway from what i could see this was a single owner collection most of it was 60s and 70s pop but i could see a few diamonds in the rough i.e original beatles albums the majority of the albums i.e the trashy unimportant ones looked fine and appeared to be barely played however the important ones such as this copy of revolver had been lovingly but unfortunately for me been preserved in a thick pvc cover i guess the original owner thought he was doing the record a favor after all these heavy pvc covers look great when they're new they're thick sturdy and looked like they would protect the record against anything but whilst that may have been true when this cover was new it's a different story 40 years later i never have to buy bubble wrap again that's for here's another one oh it's sticky it's sticky it's very sticky yuck an indication of just how nasty this was going to be was how the plastic cover had adhered itself to the flip backs edges you coming it is coming out okay [Applause] coming to the back so i'll come on you wow sorry i'm not really paying much attention to the camera there because that's it i've done it i've done it wow i've done it without taking any of the the paper off which is a bit of a relief uh yeah this one's uh got a bit yellow down the edge obviously from a smoker's house uh but otherwise it looks okay it's a bit off white but however this victory was short-lived when i took the disc from the inner sleeve and saw every vinyl collector's worst nightmare don't think this is the first place it's not ah look there's the mottling on this side look look at that can you see that's from that pvc inner hasn't affected this side at all it's of course the dash 2-2 but look that is a classic example of plastic migration from these pvc covers there was also what appeared to be a beautiful monocopy of the 1964 german compilation album the beatles beat okay oh that's really kept that cover really nice and clean that is really really nice the pvc outer had done a great job in protecting the cover the front and rear panels looked like new but what had it done to the vinyl let's hope that we haven't got any plastic migration let's see original odeon inner some stuff from the tyrol or the schlager stuff or the easy listening there's beetles for sale and cliff and all the other german stuff on the other side and oklahoma ah there there is there is some look there it is again just on one side so what was going on and what had caused this terrible blight and why was it only on one side of the disk and not the other well the culprit was something called plastic migration which is all to do with pvc and heat pvc or to give it its full name polyvinyl chloride is the world's third most widely produced synthetic plastic product it's an incredibly versatile and useful material and without it we wouldn't have the vinyl record at all because that's exactly what they're made from pvc is a thermoplastic made up of 57 chlorine derived from industrial grade salt and 43 carbon derived predominantly from oil or gas via ethylene it comes in two basic forms rigid like this or flexible like this record cover in order to change it from this to this ie make it flexible you have to add plasticizers now these are basically acids or oils which in addition to making it highly flexible also make it more reactive to heat if your covers get too hot the first indication that something is going wrong is that they begin to distort producing this rippling effect more seriously if exposed to heat for a longer period the plasticizer can start a reaction called off-gassing also known as outgassing or degassing the process is simply the airborne release of a chemical in vapor form you'll know when it's happening because you can smell it it has a very distinctive odor very similar to that of fresh paint now not only are these fumes highly toxic but they will also leach through the card of the record sleeve and react with the surface of the vinyl record and it's this which causes the clouding or mottling just like we saw on that side of the revolver record and what's worse it's impossible to remove no amount of cleaning with any solution even the magical isopropyl alcohol will shift it i've seen some people try to buff it out using some of those creams you use to remove scratches from your car's paintwork but i wouldn't recommend using that myself not only can these cloud your records playing surfaces they can also make a real mess of your record sleeve for example take a look at these copies of sergeant pepper and beatles for sale which came in another collection i acquired several months back they'd been lovingly stored in thick gauge gatefold pvc covers but with tragic consequences the oils in the pvc this time had leached outwards and had turned everything into a sticky mess this says stereo oh it's very i don't know what's happening with that oh it's one of these double ones oh dear these uh yeah that is really greasy and really oily i'm not touching that anymore yuck that is disgusting same again with this one i think i can hear that yeah all right i'll just get the record out although i was able to clean most of it off with some isopropanol and lighter fluid some of the damage was irreparable but let's now return to the question i asked earlier on about why only one side of this revolver album was affected by the off-gassing as you may know these early uk albums comprised a laminated front panel with an unlaminated rear the reason one side was unaffected by the off-gassing was that the lamination on the front panel acted as a barrier to the gas and stopped it reaching the playing surface the playing card rear panel had no such barrier and therefore allowed the gas to leach through onto the playing surface with such catastrophic consequences now i know there may be some skepticism about this analysis so let me give you another example this is a 1979 uk first pressing of pink floyd to the wall album as with all first pressings its front panel was blank the wording was initially printed on a six and a half by four inch piece of flexible pvc which sort of naturally adhered to the front panel the problem with that was that if like this copy it was left in place and subjected to heat the sticker over time would begin to off gas now unlike the revolver cover this skate vault isn't laminated it's got a sort of egg shell finish and therefore doesn't provide any protection against off-gassing so what you can see here is that the vapor from the pvc sticker has leached through the cover and left a cloudy shadow on side one of the disk which is the side that was facing the sticker worse still is that every time the stylus passes over this mark on the vinyl it makes a faint whooshing sound something which thankfully does not occur on the revolver album even though the damage appears more extreme now this off-gassing or de-gassing subject isn't new it's one which has been discussed many times over the years amongst collectors so i'm kind of surprised and disappointed to see companies who should know better still offering these pvc sleeves online not just for lps but for 45's too this site is currently offering packs of 100 of them for 50 pounds or 65 their description for these covers reads quote most collectors would agree that pvc is the ultimate protection for vinyl well no they don't for all the reasons i've just been talking about so do yourself a favor and steer well clear of them better still go and check your covers and if any of them are pvc throw them away if you're not sure if yours are pvc just give them the smell test if they smell like fresh paint or petrol get rid of them but if you can't use pvc covers what can you use if you want to protect your albums with covers safely use polythene although polythene and pvc are both thermoformed plastics they are totally different unlike pvc polythene or high density polyethylene hdpe has no chlorine molecules and more importantly does not degas in the same way pvc does and therefore is much safer to store your records in back in the 1970s and 80s when i first started buying 45s i used to store all of them in these which being lined with polythene were perfectly safe but the only trouble with these is that you couldn't put the sleeves inside them so i began putting them into paper covers which in turn went inside card covers and then put everything together inside a pvc cover they look great until a couple of hot summers in my flat when i noticed that the playing surfaces were going cloudy so make sure your 45s have polythene outers and not the ones made from pvc of course if you want to be totally environmentally friendly you don't need to use any plastic sleeves at all personally i use these polythene covers for shipping records and for temporary storage temporary because unless they're valuable all of my albums go onto the shelf as nature intended sleeve free i just like to see the spines on the shelf as long as the room doesn't get too hot and they're stored upright with a reasonable amount of pressure on either side the records will be totally fine i hope this video has been useful and informative and may have saved some records from the horrible fate of plastic migration feel free to share your experiences with this and indeed any other storage tips in the comments so we can all help each other and save these wonderful things for future generations i'll be back soon with some regular beatles programming but that's all for this time so i'll say bye for now and thanks for watching you

Channel: Parlogram

Views: 435,511

Keywords: vinyl cleaning, record care, the beatles, revolver album, plastic migration, pvc, record cleaning, vinyl community, unboxing, vinyl unboxing, parlogram, parlogram auctions, polythene covers, vinyl covers, lp covers, collectible vinyl, rare vinyl, plastic migration test, record cleaning machine, vinyl community 2022, record cleaning solution, overall migration test for plastic

Id: P_z5oa24cd4

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 24 2022