>> More About Grading:  
    I own and operate a small jazz-oriented record & CD shop in Oakland, Ca. I'm there perhaps 30 hours a week. In essence, I listen to jazz music for a living. (Well, okay, it's hardly "a living", but it's what I do.) I've developed a very high tolerance for all kinds of music and for jazz in particular. I listen to all "styles" of jazz, but not all with equal fervor. I've been in the record business, one way or another, most of my adult life. (I started in 19-mumble, mumble-.) But let's get one thing straight-I'm not an audiophile. Yet I know a scratch when I hear one and surface noise is usually not a mystery to me.

>> Playback Equipment:  
     The system I use in my shop consists of two tube-powered 35-watt mono blocks. A friend to the store built them for me. They are older Dyna-kit bases that were re-furbished and brand new tubes and other brand new necessities installed. My pre-amp is also tube-powered with no treble or bass controls or channel diversions. You hear what you hear, the music right out of the grooves (or bits, in the case of a CD). All you can do is control the volume. That's the way I like it, it makes listening simpler. I recently bought a new Music Hall MMF-2 belt-driven turntable. (It's along the lines of the old AR tables from the 60s.) The Goldring Elan cartridge & stylist in use are good, but not expensive. Both will be changed every three months, whether they need it or not. (They both get a workout, which is why I choose inexpensive.) I track at a little less than one & a half grams. The shop has a relatively high ceiling. So I use two big Infinity 3-stack speakers and to help fill up (or fill out) the space, a couple of smaller ARs from the 60s. I have a record-cleaning machine, which is used often. Also, I recently purchased a JoLida JD602 vacuum tube reference CD player. (It sounds great, by the way.) I relate all this in order to give you eBay bidders an idea from whence my grading comes.

>> Mint
      I rarely use "mint" to describe the condition of a record. I would probably have to have unsealed the album myself, or been in the room when it was done, in order to use that term. (I've sold some Mosaic boxes, which I've characterized as mint. That's because I knew the previous owners and "just knew" that they didn't play the things!) I sometimes grade covers as mint, especially if they are still encased in poly-wrap of some kind. So, if I hardly ever use the term mint (or Mint minus), what does that make "near mint"? You figure it out.

>> Sealed
      I've been in the business long enough to be suspicious of sealed records that are possibly older than when "sealing" was commonly done. Also, I know that sealing machines are easy to come by. So I'm very careful when I offer up sealed items. Most sealed albums, whose original-issue pedigree dates before 1965 or so, would commonly be in wrapped in loose, fairly transparent medium-gage plastic, of the kind in which many collectors now routinely use to keep individual albums safely stored. Younger collectors need to keep in mind that most record albums all the way from the late 40's through the early 60s were often offered for pre-listening in a record store's, or record department's, "listening booth". So sealing albums would have been counter-productive in this earlier era. The albums that were wrapped in this early plastic, or even early plastic "shrink-wrap" was usually sold out of venues that didn't have listening booths, like large discount houses or drug stores or some "up-scale" department stores. By the way, just because an album has a sticker which states "factory sealed" doesn't mean that is it thus. In fact, that should make a buyer doublely aware. I've seen those stickers in large rolls in a many record stores' back room. In all fairness, they were usually used to merely cover a previous price sticker of a truly factory-sealed item, but there is such a thing as hanky-panky in the record biz.