Home Grown: Mint first presses and a Clearaudio wood turntable

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Because every record collection has a story.

Home Grown is our series profiling you lot and your excellent record collections. Taking our cue from the brilliant submissions to the #VFRecordCollections thread on Instagram, we want to share a little of your hard-earned love for vinyl with the world.

Each week, we’ll be profiling a different collector from around the world and finding out what makes them tick. Want in? Send us a pic of your collection and a few words about your collection to [email protected].

Name: Philipp Klemm

Location: Phoenix, USA (and Wesel, Germany)

Size of collection: Between Germany and the US, which became my home in 2008, my current collection includes around seven hundred albums and three hundred singles.

Due to several moves – and also changing music preferences – there were moments where the collection had to lose some feathers. I am constantly looking out for mint first press editions of my all time favourite releases, which sometimes leaves me with three or four copies of the same album that are traded for the next “target”.

How long have you been collecting for? I began collecting vinyl in my teens and recall De La Soul’s ‘A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays” being my first true obsession and purchase. I was 12 at that time. Mowing the lawn and washing cars became the ticket to music for me.

My parents had a lot of vinyl and were disco lovers, which probably coloured my taste for upbeat music. Throughout my DJ’ing years the collection began to grow in areas of house, disco and funk. Later on we added specific areas of pop, rap, punk and some classics. In the winter season you will hear the voices of Doris Day, Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline through our windows. In general I am very drawn to the mid-century in the US (furniture, cars, architecture, etc) but I must admit that the early disco exposure keeps coming through in many of my current choices.

What part of your set-up are you most proud of? Early on I started experimenting a lot with HiFi and professional audio equipment, building my own speakers when I was just thirteen or fourteen. It was much more than a hobby to me and became a significant part of my professional life for ten plus years (own an event company).

Today it would be very hard to choose between my favorite two items, the Leben CS300XS, a handmade integrated tube-amplifier from Japan, and the Clearaudio Concept Wood, which is a stunning and well-built turntable from Germany. I’d say the Clearaudio has a slight edge though. Before I used several Pro-Ject turntables with great results as well. Since vinyl came back to stores in vast scale, there are many great choices for well designed turntables out there as well. I will certainly try out some of them in the coming years.

What does your record collection mean to you? To me vinyl is a great preservation method for my favourite music and connected memories. Cared for properly it maintains its dynamic character, yet grows older with me in other ways. More scruffs, the cover fades a little, it might get bent out of shape here and there…a great companion to go through life with (after my wonderful wife, of course). There are a great list of albums I have not yet added to the collection…stay tuned, it is growing weekly!

Follow Philipp Klemm on Instagram