If You Are Serious About Listening To Vinyl

Yes, that’s a good point.  I do miss ‘albums’ whether vinyl, cassette, or CD, that pushed me to listen to what the artist created beyond just the tracks that were mass marketed. Today, it seems like you really only hear the stuff that’s highly promoted.  

In some ways, I have to say Sonos radio helps to somewhat recreate that in that I can pick a genre station and am likely to hear a track that I have not heard of before, and probably would not have found on my own.  Pandora is pretty good for that too.  Amazon, on the other hand, feels like it just gives me “top 40” tracks.

Maybe the best of both worlds could be implemented by providing traditional looking (and sized) album sleeves, but with an added barcode or QR code that would link to an album database providing an image for display, lyrics, and trivia. This would be a melding of old and new mindsets. Of course there would need to be a phone/pad sized version to attract the youngest listeners.

Seriously?! Even given the claims about how the Sonos amp line in serves vinyl better than that on a Sonos Five? Or all the largely discredited claims for cables?

Some years ago, there was a BBC survey on the vinyl resurgence that uncovered that the large majority of people buying new LPs do not have or even intend to have a player; most have bought it as wall art or for other ways to display the album art.

About the only thing about vinyl being played now is the scope it gives for tinkering to create the illusion that listening to music is an active and not a passive effort: audio kits are appliances and not instruments such a things like guitars, the playing of which is an active effort the entire time music is to be heard from it. Vinyl is like valve amps, where there is also the same tinkering around, changing the valves in a quest for better sound. That even involves things like hunting down Soviet inventory of valves because the original ones made in the West in the 1930s that the Soviets copied, are not to be had.

After some time, most people get bored with all this tinkering once they realise that it does nothing more for them than letting them tinker. And once there is an option to be had to allow them to quit tinkering.

All good fun, but not to be confused with improving on the SQ what even Spotify/others offer today, streamed to good kit. Kit that now costs a fraction of what vinyl and other legacy type HiFi kit used to cost.

The car analogy is also common, but misplaced. Driving a car is an active effort, interfacing all the time with the external environment. Although most cars are like appliances these days, the ones that are not allow them to be used as more than that in an active way. And even there, my automatic car that has all the manual features that my stick shift has, except the clutch pedal, allows for a full replication of the stick shift - an option that I rarely use. Because if I shift to sports mode in the dual clutch automatic it offers almost all that the fully manual option offers. But none these options would make sense if driving the car was to be a passive thing like even listening to vinyl is, once that needle is lowered to an ever deteriorating groove.

On the car thing here is a fun fact - all cars have their engine note suppressed to comply with noise regulations. But some offer that sound piped in to the speakers inside, to create that illusion of the old engine note just for those inside the car. The BMW Mini is one example.

One lives in hope. I have boxes of CDs in the lofts. I think I will now have to pay for those to be cleared. My children never showed any interest, and I cannot see my now ten year old granddaughter do anything different. If it fits the decor, your kit may get picked up like the old Victrola/HMV kind of things are, for mounting for show in rooms where they fit the aesthetics of the room.

I was thinking more along the lines they ‘might’ take ‘em to sell them on eBay, or similar auction site in a couple of decades time - I’ve seen some ‘run of the mill’ albums I have, like Pink Floyd ‘Relics’, (as an example) fetch £100+ and I have some ‘Yes’ limited-edition albums printed in blue vinyl, which might fetch a little more. I also have quite a rare album from Frank Zappa/Mothers of Invention from the early 70’s in one of the boxes and some singles/45s from the 1960’s. So collectively, they might (one day) help the grandchildren, or their children, to fill their piggy banks.

As you say though Kumar, at the moment very few are interested in such things - these ‘old things’ certainly no longer appeal to me, personally speaking. It’s just so much easier these days to stream higher quality audio.

Admittedly I do miss looking/flipping through records at record shops and the album covers/artwork etc. but I much prefer the convenience and quality of ‘the here and now’. 

You may be better served selling out that stuff now and keeping the money in a piggy bank account devolving on attaining a desired age milestone, because you know the value of what you have.

Physically, the records will outlast tapes and may outlast early CD’s. The initial 1980’s CD’s were estimated to have a 30 year lifespan. I have not bothered to verify this. Perhaps I should investigate this because I have some unplayed 1982 original issue CD’s packed away.

This does trigger a trip down memory lane. Though I still buy 2-3 CD’s a year, I’m not playing my collection much anymore. I however only have one CD that is not playable anymore - Eric Clapton’s Just One Night double CD that lasted not even ten years.

I’ve kept my Marantz CD-player and use a Connect (gen 2) to play my CD’s. I still own a Philips turntable and some records, all bought before I bought my first CD-player, what must have been a Philips CD207:

Yup agreed. I have a lot of tracks I had never heard be that from listening to the currated playlists from artists or the genres.
That is also why I use the “this is” playlists on spotify a lot when I find a new artist I like. A lot of times their mass marketed songs are good but there are some golden nuggets even in their older more niche work.