Hard To Find Records...TAs beware!!!!!!
Hello again my fellow TAs!
After having my 3rd terrible experience with Hard To Find records, I feel it’s time I let the world know what they are like. I, personally, have decided to no longer use them. I am starting this thread to warn others about using www.htfr.com because of the really dodgy shit that's happened to me. Let me take a moment to explain...
Firstly, I ordered 'Sasha & Maria- Be As One' from them mid last year, at a cost of £14.00 including shipping ($20.00 US). It was the usual slow service... it took about a week to arrive even though I live in England, but that I can put up with.
When it did finally arrive, I opened it up and found it was a 4 track EP. Fine I said. I put it on the deck and pressed start... and thought to myself "This isn't the start I remember". It had had about 2 minutes cut off from the beginning. So I wasn't happy. Anyway, I left the tune to play... and 4 minutes later, there was some crappy fade out and that was it! Also the actual quality of the recording was appalling! It sounded like an mp3 at 96 KBPS! I was absolutely furious! The clowns at Hard To Find records had totally butchered a brilliant 13-minute tune. What the rip-off bas**rds appeared to have done is taken the tune, made some crappy edit of it, used a vinyl cutter to press the vinyl and then charged an extortionate amount of money to buy it! I was horrified that they could get away with something like that... but I said to myself, 'I've bought lots of vinyl from them and this is their first ever blunder, so I'll let it go and just put it down to bad luck.'. Fool that I am!
Anyway, a few months later I decided I wanted a copy of Underworld- Dark & Long (Dark Train mix). A classic tune from the movie ‘Trainspotting’. And it was available to buy from HTFR at a cost of £15.00 including shipping ($22.00 US). When it finally arrived, I was once again appalled! It looked like I had been ripped off in nearly the exact same fashion. The quality was crap again and it was quite obvious that I had been sold a copy of their copy, which they must have been holding for ransom in their shop! And I had been charged yet another ridiculous amount of money!! At least this time it was the full version… By this point I was getting more and more annoyed with these cowboys and subsequently shopping for vinyl at other (better!) sources…
Now I’m not 100% sure if this 3rd blunder was down to HTFR, but with their track record it wouldn’t surprise me…
A short while later, I decided that I wanted Members Of Mayday- 10 in 01. When this was released in the UK it was over 2 different vinyls with different mixes on each. So at around £7.00 each, it would cost over £14.00 ($20.00 US) to own both, because of shipping. So I went online and did my usual search to find it, and in the end everywhere was sold out except for 2 places…. HTFR and recordstore.com. Each of them had 1 of the vinyls, so I made an order from each of these stores. The 1 from recordstore.com arrived, swiftly and in the original sleeve and everything. The one from HTFR arrived a few days later in some crappy (obviously copied), cheap sleeve. But it had the right mixes listed on it so I didn’t mind too much. Now if this is down to HTFR then they were really sly this time, cos the vinyl was fairly good quality sound and it even had the right mixes printed on the label… it was just like the 1 I got from recordstore.com but labelled with the other mixes. When it actually came down to listening to the tunes, it would appear they had correctly copied the Paul Van Dyk Club mix onto the vinyl… but the other 2 mixes were supposed to be on the other vinyl! So I’d bought a record expecting the Tok Tok remix and the EK mix only to find I now had 2 copies of Paul Van Dyk Short mix and the PvD members only mix! Unbelievable! So this time HTFR had ripped me off for about £9.00 ($13.00 US). £7.00 for the record and £2.00 for the shipping. Now if I’m wrong about this then I apologise to HTFR for making them look bad. But let’s face it, after the other 2 huge blunders it wouldn’t exactly shock me to the core if they were responsible!
So, in total, I feel they have ripped me off for £38.00 ($55.00 US). Maybe I should have learnt my lesson the first time around… but I didn’t and so I paid the price (literally!). So it’s up to you guys if you still wanna use this record store for buying vinyl… I can only tell you what has happened to me and pray that you don’t! I know I will never buy from these guys again.
lateRZ,
barryfigiel
Last edited by barryfigiel on Jan-22-2002 at 23:20
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