I had a customer last week who wanted to return a record. Not because it was damaged or the wrong title, but because the coloured vinyl didn’t match the mockup photo on the label’s website. His “ocean blue” pressing looked more like “murky grey-green.” He wasn’t wrong, and it happens more often than the industry wants to admit.

This is the coloured vinyl conversation we need to have.

The Appeal Is Obvious

Let’s start with why people love coloured vinyl, because the reasons are genuine. A well-executed coloured pressing is a beautiful object. Holding a translucent red copy of an album against the light, or watching a splatter vinyl spin on the turntable — there’s a visual pleasure that standard black vinyl doesn’t offer.

For collectors, coloured variants add another dimension to the hobby. Limited colour runs create scarcity, which creates excitement, which creates community. The anticipation of a new colour variant announcement, the rush to pre-order, the satisfaction of getting the pressing you wanted — it’s fun. I get it.

The Sound Quality Question

Here’s where I’m going to be honest, and some audiophiles will disagree: on a decent home system, most people cannot hear a meaningful difference between a well-pressed coloured record and a well-pressed black record. The key words are “well-pressed.”

The claim that coloured vinyl inherently sounds worse comes from the fact that additives are mixed into the PVC compound to achieve colour, and these additives can theoretically affect the groove quality. In practice, with modern pressing technology, the difference is negligible on most consumer systems.

Where I have noticed issues is with certain colours — very light colours like white and clear sometimes show more surface noise, and heavily mixed colours (splatter, swirl) can occasionally have consistency problems because the different coloured compounds sit unevenly in the press.

But let’s be real. If you’re playing records on a setup under $2,000 — and that covers the vast majority of my customers — you’re not going to hear a difference between the standard black and the limited blue pressing of the same album. Buy whichever one makes you happier.

The Pricing Problem

This is where my patience runs thin. The music industry has figured out that coloured vinyl is a licence to charge more, and they’re exploiting it aggressively.

I regularly see the same album offered at $39 for standard black and $55-65 for a coloured variant. That’s a 40-60% premium for what amounts to a couple of dollars’ difference in manufacturing cost. The colour additive itself is cheap. The pressing process is largely the same. The higher price is mostly margin.

Limited edition coloured pressings are even worse. Labels deliberately press small quantities to create artificial scarcity, then charge $70-80 for a single LP. It’s cynical, and it’s turned record collecting into a speculation market where people buy to flip rather than listen.

When It’s Worth It

I’m not anti-coloured vinyl. There are situations where I think the premium is justified:

When the colour is part of the art. If the album artwork and vinyl colour are designed together as a cohesive package, the coloured pressing adds genuine artistic value. Flightless Records is great at this — their colour choices consistently complement the sleeve art.

When it’s a genuinely limited run from a small label. If Poison City presses 300 copies of an album on red vinyl and 700 on black, and the price difference is $5-10, that’s a reasonable collector’s premium supporting an independent label.

When you just really want it. If a particular coloured pressing makes you happy every time you pull it off the shelf, it’s worth it. Full stop. Collecting is personal.

When It’s Not Worth It

Major label “exclusive” variants. When Sony or Universal press 5,000 copies of a “limited” coloured variant and charge $20 more, they’re banking on FOMO, not value. Those 5,000 copies aren’t rare. They’re just a marketing channel.

Retail exclusive colours. JB Hi-Fi exclusive on yellow! Amazon exclusive on green! Target exclusive on pink! This is not scarcity. This is retail fragmentation designed to make completist collectors buy three copies.

Picture discs. I’ll say it plainly: picture discs almost always sound terrible. The manufacturing process involves a thin vinyl layer over a printed core, and the resulting groove depth is shallow. They’re wall art, not listening experiences. If you want one for display, fine, but know what you’re getting.

My Advice

Buy the album because you want to hear it. If the coloured option costs a few bucks more and you like the look, go for it. If the coloured option costs $20 more for the same music on the same master, ask yourself whether that premium is really about the product or about a marketing department’s quarterly targets.

And for the love of good music, stop buying records you don’t plan to listen to just because they’re a limited colour. Open them. Play them. That’s what they’re for.