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?
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It’s a waste of the earth’s resources.
I burn stuff to minidisc still. Buy CDs and rip them to lossless formats for my DAPs.
Spend some of my time at r/minidisc
Have a pile of cds but moved onto vinyl and love it
There’s still a variety of factors to still buy physical cds if you can find them for cheap at thrift stores or used market places. As for buying digital downloads from stores like HdTracks, ProStudioMasters, 7Digital, or Qobuz, it depends if you to like to eq or not and have a source to which can make music sound really exceptional. I still buy digital downloads from the online stores I mentioned above because I like eqing on my Cowon Plenue music player and having that on the go with my IEMs of choice. I do use the ifi Go Blu bluetooth dongle when I want to carry light on the go but that device, while great, just can’t compete with the software and hardware available on my portable music player to make me really immersed in the music.
I purchase a few LP’s a year only for collecting and am normally in no rush to play them. Pretty much all streaming via Tidal these days.
Cd, and for video media: Bluray, 4K Bluray. I am not subsribed to any streaming platforms.
Sadly, no. I have a decent collection but, I like to listen to Tidal most of the time
Vinyl, often secondhand japanese editions. Couldn’t care less for CD’s, somehow I cannot stand them.
I buy a lot of CDs and vinyl every year. I trust scientists when they describe the limits of human hearing, so no point in hi-res digital sources. As they say, it’s the mastering and recording that make the difference. That said, I do trade vinyl rips with friends who have quality turntables for the convenience of digital, and I rip my CDs in ALAC format.
Streaming isn’t for me. I want to own it, if I like it.
Vinyl.
Yeppers, I buy a lot of vinyl. I collect Daft Punk, so I have a ridiculous number of their albums.
About 800 SACD and DVD-A discs.
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.
CD
I run a podcast out of a night club, I almost always buy vinyl at shows and have the band sign it. every now and again buy on discogs or at a record store.