Parity

For a younger person, choosing between starting an LP playing system & buying LP’s vs. going full digital is a reasonable proposition. For old guys, who already had a healthy LP library when the CD was introduced, and continued buying them for the next twenty years (used ones being dumped by people buying into the CD hustle, and the few new ones being manufactured), the situation is quite different. Who in hell would suddenly ignore his 5,000 (or whatever) LP’s and switch to digital?! That’s why many old guys have both analogue & digital players and music collections.

@thyname and @rvpiano: Audiogon member @slaw---whose opinions I greatly respect---having worked long and hard at optimizing his LP player and the system it feeds, decided he didn’t want to do the same for digital sources, so eschews CD’s/SACD’s/etc. altogether.

Though I understand and respect that decision and stance, in my case there are just too many albums I absolutely love---both Pop and Classical---that have been made available only on CD for me to not have a disc spinner. I don’t expect the two formats to sound the same, but then we all know sound quality amongst LP’s varies greatly too. There are plenty of CD’s that sound better than some LP’s, but even if they didn’t I need and listen to them because of the music they contain.

I’m a music lover first, an audiophile second. I don’t use my recordings to make my system sound good, I use my system to make my recordings sound good, or at least as good as they can. That applies equally to LP’s and CD’s/SACD’s. It is Steve’s position that a system optimized for one will inherently be less than optimum for the other. Comments and/or opinions on that position? Are the two formats so inherently different that each needs a playback system optimized for itself?

@rvpiano: No offense intended, but this is what happens when you make sound quality your first priority. I've been there myself, but now make my next musical selection based on what I'm hungering for musically. If it is also in good sound, wonderful, that's a bonus.

Being an audiophile has its benefits and pleasures, but is also in a way a curse. Remember when you loved music you heard, long before you became obsessed with sound quality? If it truly is---as we all claim---about the music, then we have to act like it is ;-) .

Dang @rvpiano, 4000 CDs! I know how much wall space that eats up---I have somewhere between 3500 and 3600. My six CD racks (three wide, two high) take up almost an entire wall, floor-to-ceiling. On the opposite wall are the LP's (of which I have never counted), the racks for which leave only enough room for one set of stacked Tube Traps.

A related issue is the ratio of the number of LP’s in your music library vs. the number of CD’s/SACD’s, and the relative time you spend listening to each source type.