Quote Originally Posted by poppachubby
Kay Starr? Never heard of her (him?). 172 grams means good score noob, bet it sounds great. What style of music? I take it you tend towards the singer/songwriter types..."vocalists"?
Kay Starr is one of the top female jazz vocalists from the 1950's. I'm just now getting to know her music. I do a little exploring in the Female Vocal section every time I go to Half-Price Books. They're certainly my favorites. Even though I'm there for the one-dollar records, I check for the ladies to see if anything new of note has arrived. I'll pay the asking price for them, without waiting and hoping for them to show up in the clearance shelves.

I had been toying with the idea of a handful of Kay Starr records that showed up in July. Two of them were bad condition, so they were out. But two were marginal and one was pretty questionable. I went back and got the two marginal ones and gave them the vacuum treatment last night. One is pretty worn on the inner tracks, but I'm going to give it a spin on the Technics linear tonight and we'll see how that goes. It has a linear contact AT stylus and it can sometimes play bad-condition records better than the MMF-5.

I sometimes kind of wish I had either a removable headshell or a cartridge like the OM where I could change out stylii on the MMF-5. But I do have a nice Ortofon cartridge for the linear, so I might try getting some different stylii for it.