After having been a vivid collector of CDs back in the days (I sold all of them some 15 years ago…), I started collecting vinyl and depend on streaming services ever since. Currently, I make use of a Quobuz subscription and Roon to manage my library which also includes various high-res downloads stored locally (with backups in the cloud).
But I miss physical media, and vinyl doesn’t cut it for me. Don’t get me wrong, nothing beats listening to a good record with a dram of Scotch, but quality wise, it’s nowhere near digital sources, at least not within any reasonable price point.
Where to go from here? Paying for high-res downloads I often can stream at the same time feels strangely unsatisfying, while falling back to CDs might be an option, but leaves out higher quality tiers. Physical alternatives such as HDCD, SACD or DVD-Audio seem more or less a niche for enthusiasts of classical music (if not dead), with a very limited catalogue.
Can some of you share my feelings? How do you deal with it?
OP, I completely understand where you’re coming from. I have been collecting music since I was a kid and moved exclusively to CD when they became available. I kept my vinyl but never bought anymore other than things that were not available on CD. I have since gotten into the high res CDs (SACD), and continue to collect those and regular CDs. I use portable music players and use a flash drive with my car stereo but take the CD when I want the best sound. I have been streaming at home a lot over the last five years or so and buy the CD if I discover a new artist I like. If something happened to my music collection and I lost all of it, I most likely would not replace it with physical media. It’s just too much and would be too costly. If losing my collection wasn’t losing much, and if I was younger, I would pursue replacing my physical copies but as I am getting closer to retirement age, it just wouldn’t make financial sense. I would most likely just continue streaming and if something wasn’t available I would just have to accept that or settle for YouTube quality.