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I remember when CDs were very very new the first review of them in an audiophile magazine a friend subscribed to. The reviewer was quite unhappy.

The next month he reviewed a different player. He basically retracted his opinion of CDs but said the player from the previous month was obviously terrible, at least the particular one that he did his review on, if not the entire brand.

And for audiophiles themselves, I notice many of them seem to have very poor taste in music. Like do you really need $50,000 of equipment and sand weighted speakers that weigh 700 pounds each to play 1968 bachelor pad music?

"I notice many of them seem to have very poor taste in music."

Great response and critique until that point. I'm old (52) enough to have seen quite a few media changes too. I recall that when you were off your tits at a party, and discussing music, you tried to find common ground. That could lead to some impressive contortions!

Can't say I ever spent much on playback hardware. I generally went second hand for speakers/amps etc. Once the Walkman was invented and then rather a lot of Chinese (and other copies were available) clones appeared then you could ruin your hearing close up with seriously decent quality sound on the move. I was still walking around with a mini cassette player with wired ear plugs in my jacket's breast pocket until around 1993ish.

I did lay out something like £200 on a pair of decent headphones for use at home. They make anything from O Fortuna to Ghost Town via say Schehehererherereherezade, Finlandia and One sound rather ... Special.

The term "audiophile" describes someone who indeed spends huge amounts on their audio setup.

It is different than someone who appreciates music, which it seems like you do.

I will have you know I have great taste in total harmonic distortion and frequency response!

The next month he reviewed a different player. He basically retracted his opinion of CDs but said the player from the previous month was obviously terrible, at least the particular one that he did his review on, if not the entire brand.

He could have been right both times. Many early CDs were just plain awful. Same with the first couple of generations of CD players, even some pricy ones. The early development of MP3 and other lossy audio codecs recapitulated the history of digital audio pretty well: lots of truly crappy recordings got passed around.

Like do you really need $50,000 of equipment and sand weighted speakers that weigh 700 pounds each to play 1968 bachelor pad music?

I've never understood audiophiles. How can it make sense for me to spend more money on my equipment than the freaking recording studio spent on theirs? Do these people think studios use $10,000 power cords on their sound boards, and atomic clocks to drive their ADCs?

I love records (78s and vinyl) for the tactile and visual experience-- and the fact that I can get something for a few bucks at the thrift store and not feel too bad about my toddler ruining it trying to put the needle on. To that end I have stuck to cheap, sturdy, school-grade equipment and mostly secondhand records.

It's so fascinating to me that an inert physical disc is engraved with sound waves that are reproduced by dragging something along to return them to sound, in the case of the 78s without the need for anything electrical in between. It's an added bonus that it has zero opportunity to inspire screen time for my kid, who absolutely doesn't need to stare at a screen while listening to music.

in the case of the 78s without the need for anything electrical in between.

For fully mechanically recorded records you have to go back to pre-1927 Edison Diamond Disks. Or the real deal, Edison cylinders.

Edison cylinders are actually rather good recordings. The mechanical playback system. with no amplifier, introduced most of the distortion. Modern playbacks, using a modern record pickup with a suitably large-sized stylus, are quite good. Here are some from cylinders made around 1900.[1] Those include Sousa's band playing Sousa's marches, led by Sousa himself.

The ultimate playback device is IRENE. This was built for the Library of Congress. It does a full 3D scan of the entire disk or cylinder surface, and a detailed 3D model of the surface is created. That's turned into audio by a program that simulates a stylus tracking through the grooves. IRENE is used on very old, fragile items. It's even possible to put broken shards back together in 3D and recover the audio.

For real authenticity, there are reproducing pianos. These are player pianos, but with a better recording system, one capable of recording key pressure while a live pianist played the piano. While the Duo-Art system had binary-coded pressure values, the Welte-Mignon system was analog. Mostly. Here's a Welte-Mignon roll being played.[2] The holes at the outer edges of the roll are encoding the key pressure. The ones in the middle indicate which keys. MIDI, from over a century ago.

If you're going to go retro, go all the way. If you just want to listen to music, it doesn't get any better than 24 bit audio. (16 bits may not be enough for really soft passages, where all the high bits are zero and you may be down to 6 bit audio.)

[1] https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/photosmultimedia/recordings.h...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8K5Yh0aLhA

I do have one of those Edison diamond disks in my collection, though no playback device that can handle the vertical signal in the groove. My ~1917 Silvertone phonograph does fine for me with the more conventional 78s.

My grandpa used to tell me that they donated the clockwork out of their record player as scrap metal for the war effort, so they listened to music by spinning the records by hand and holding a fingernail in the groove. That's something you can't do with pretty much any other recorded medium, aside from print.

There is a certain ceremony involved with choosing and playing vinyl that cannot be recreated with digital media. That, to me, is the magic. In modern times a full digital setup is going to provide a more "faithful recreation" than anything analog.

There is also some with CDs, but vinyl's the real deal. The record cleaner brush. Inspect the needle for dust. Be sure the record is properly seated. Sit back and enjoy.

Just watching the record spin is so incredibly satisfying.

Yes, a connection to the physical world.

Sometimes especially on Zoom I look at my cabling and think it's amazing that images of other people and their voices are going through that cable.

Only on Zoom and similar video conferencing. For all other uses I don't even think about it.

You may find VR social environments interesting.

I'm not going to say the date but my birthday is exactly 4 months before a certain holiday. So some years back (too many, alas), on this holiday and 4 months after I turned 33, my friends put on a party to celebrate both the holiday and my 33 1/3'rd birthday. Naturally, LP records were played.

Hopefully the night ended with a screening of the third Naked Gun movie?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110622/

Damn, we didn't think of that.

You're better off for it

Watching the reels spinning at different rates and the tape moving on an intricate path, in a high-end open-reel tape recorder with multiple motors and multiple heads, e.g. a Revox, was even more satisfying.

Been there. Browsing vinyl involves flipping fore and aft and is very tactile. Browsing tape and CDROM involves running your eyes over them but you can run a finger along them to get another sense involved.

Loading a record is quite the event: slip out of the card sleeve, then slip the dic out of the waxed paper sleeve and pop it on the spindle without scratching it. There is of course the correct way to handle them that if you are around or older than my age (52), you already know - the delicate fingers on the rim and your thumb on the centre.

I can remember my Dad going to the "biggest NAAFI in the world" (Rheindahlen) and coming back with a brand new record player in around 1978 or 79. This thing could handle something like five LPs at once and play them sequentially.

Pissing around with Spotify isn't quite the same and I do understand why people enjoy the theatrics but to be honest: I turned my CDs into FLACs and ditched the tapes a long time ago. I still prefer to buy my music by the CDROM and rip it to FLAC or mp3 or whatever - now that is me showing my age!

I did the same as you but iTunes Match for $25 per year is my ‘vault’.

It’s very convenient especially now that lossless is an option.

I have a few songs ripped from CDs over the years that I’ll be very unhappy to lose if iTunes Match ever goes away, since I’ve lost the CDs and as far as I know they simply aren’t online. Such a great service.

Same. A couple of the cds ‘rusted’ and no longer play. Others lost in moves etc.

I hope we get plenty of warning before they axe it. Imagine that being a google service?!

If your Apple ID gets accidentally suspended because of a false positive from the "can't turn it off" clientside CP local file scanning that Apple is planning to roll out to all of our devices, you won't get any warning.

You mean the hash search.

Can we not flog this dead horse?

I used to just look at the titles on the spines of my records (back when I had them) to decide what to play. I'd look at one and listen to the music in my head for a few minutes before deciding whether to actually put the record on, or else look at the spine of another record and do the same thing. I could spend hours doing that, and by that time I had to go do something else. I got a whole concert with no equipment at all. That's when I decided I wasn't an audiophile.

>> The end result is a bunch of nerds ruining their credit scores

Hilarious and well put! Speaking as an erstwhile musician, this has been my theory about Guitar Center's business model since the 90s.

I recently got a record player and have been amassing a small collection of my favourite albums. Including the reasons you gave, my excuse for buying/listening to records is I like having a physical representation of albums I like, and something that won't disappear because a contract expired with a streaming service.

Stick with it. I discovered some great music buying random stuff from the <$5 section. You'll meet fun people at the right record stores (if you're in Minneapolis, I have some suggestions). Every once in a while one of your LPs will turn into a nice investment piece. If you haven't tried repairing/restoring your own turntable, I recommend it. The engineering inside all the little mechanisms in an old turntable are fun to tinker with.

There definitely was a short period in college where I needed to spend money I barely had to upgrade my system. This was when CDs first came out. I could tell, when listening through my stereo (as compared to plugging my headphones into the CD player) that there was a ton of extra noise/distortion and most importantly, a very high noise level (audible hiss). Ended up having to go to Salvation Army to buy a $25 used receiver and the speaker store to buy a pair of $200 speakers before I got decent results. Even after that, I had no end of problems with the analog cable. it took a long time to switch to digital.

Nowadays I can get excellent audio quality watching good Youtube videos or streaming from my preferred music site (I only listen through headphones now).

I'm super glad I was able to get to the quality level I liked for fairly cheap.

Is this not the experience in every human community?

For the record, I like your approach to music enjoyment.