Whenever there's both a vinyl and a styrene version of a release, I'd prefer to have the vinyl. But sometimes sellers (especially on eBay) don't say which they have. Even on discogs where there's quite a bit of info on different pressings, many of them aren't correctly listed as styrene. (I'd just ask the seller, but sometimes they don't know how to tell or they don't respond.) If I'm lucky I can tell from photos whether the label is glued on. But otherwise, without having the record in my hands, are there ways to know which material it's made of? One thought I had was that maybe certain pressing plants only used one material or the other in certain years. Can anyone tell me whether that's true? Are there any other factors along those lines that I could rely on?

The obvious is probably Monarch who did loads of styrene.

If you have a photo of the label you can also compare to discogs since smaller labels didn't always care if the label layout was slightly different from different pressing plants (i.e. different fonts, credits in different positions).

Previous topic here...

https://www.soul-source.co.uk/forums/topic/351631-styrene-west-coast-vinyl-east-coast/

On 11/02/2022 at 19:29, Ephraim said:

Whenever there's both a vinyl and a styrene version of a release, I'd prefer to have the vinyl. But sometimes sellers (especially on eBay) don't say which they have. Even on discogs where there's quite a bit of info on different pressings, many of them aren't correctly listed as styrene. (I'd just ask the seller, but sometimes they don't know how to tell or they don't respond.) If I'm lucky I can tell from photos whether the label is glued on. But otherwise, without having the record in my hands, are there ways to know which material it's made of? One thought I had was that maybe certain pressing plants only used one material or the other in certain years. Can anyone tell me whether that's true? Are there any other factors along those lines that I could rely on?

There was point when Discogs did not have a tick box for styrene so many are still lacking that info. Also there are lots and lots of Discographers who don't even know there is a difference

8 hours ago, Chalky said:

Previous topic here...

https://www.soul-source.co.uk/forums/topic/351631-styrene-west-coast-vinyl-east-coast/

Thanks for that! Looks like some pressing plants used both materials, but still useful guidance about in that thread. I hadn't realized there was so much variation in the quality of styrene.

7 hours ago, Blackpoolsoul said:

There was point when Discogs did not have a tick box for styrene so many are still lacking that info. Also there are lots and lots of Discographers who don't even know there is a difference

Ah, I wasn't sure how long that option had been around.

I can understand casual vinyl listeners or sellers being unaware of the difference. Good thing to know about, though. Serious sellers should be careful about it I think!