Has anyone finally decided to sell their Turntable and Vinyl collection?


It Maybe a little strange to ask this question here since clearly this is a forum for folks still loving and using Vinyl.
So I am looking for some feedback from folks that play very little of their LPs these days and have decided to sell all of it (or already have). I have thought about it for years seems like a hassle trying to sell your TT and or your record collection, that is mainly why mine stays put (not because I use it).

Anyway if you have sold - (Not if you’re keeping it forever)

Have you regretted it?
Or is to nice to reduce the clutter and happily move on?

Some people would never sell their analog rig and collection, I get that.





dougsat
It’s a very personal decision, but growing up my experience with LP was not so good.
I had to dust it off often and do the manual operation in order to play it every time. I hated it.

No, I REALLY hated the fact that I had to get up and change each LP manually.

When CD was in full swing, I got rid of all my LPs.
Yes, I used the 300 Sony DVD changer, but still I was not happy
with disc maintenance (like scratches etc) and search limitation.

When the MP3s came out I ripped all my CDs and got rid of all the CDs.

Now it has been a while since I have been slowing building
lossless formats (flac, ape, alac) collection, I guess I have enough to play for 100 years.

AND YES, I love my DAC and my music collection which I can instantly search for an album or song.

Do I regret selling all my LPs and CDs?
Hell NO!

I NEVER miss the analog phones with dials.. DO YOU?
I NEVER miss the film camera..DO YOU?

I will NOT miss my Porsche with all the combustion engines
since I NEVER enjoyed the MAINTENANCE portion of it,
I just WANT to DRIVE all day long.

I HATE the combustion engine MAINTENANCE EXPERIENCE,
I just put up with it because of DRIVING EXPERIENCE.
YES, I will jump all over it when electric Porsche becomes main stream.

To me, LPs and CDs are like ANALOG PHONES and FILM CAMERAS...
JUST OUTDATED...

WHEN was the last time your favorite artist recorded and released in LP ONLY?
Probably LONG AGO... NOT ANYTIME SOON...

BTW, does this mean I hate old tech?
NO, I use TUBE as main and SOLID STATE as sub...

To me, LPs and CDs are like ANALOG PHONES and FILM CAMERAS...
JUST OUTDATED..

So is sitting stuck in front of a hi-fi system listening to music. You could just use earbuds attached to your phone and get music anywhere you want.  Few things look to the rest of the modern world more "outdated" than the audiophile sitting between a pair of speakers doing nothing but listening, much less caring that much about the sound.

But audiophiles find the gear part of the pleasure of listening to music.

Books are "outdated" in the sense you don’t need them to deliver the reading content anymore. But they are far from "outdated" insofar as they offer a tactile, collectable experience, and allows one to unplug from digital life for a while, which fill desires many people have that ipads etc don’t fulfill.

Similarly, turntables and vinyl are only "outdated" in the narrowest scope of being a "convenient, performance-leading music delivery system." That sounds pretty comprehensive, but it’s clearly not. Turntables have an aesthetic, tactile and engineering appeal to many of us that no CD player or iphone app can replicate. Digital delivery has not "caught up" to turntables in that regard. Same for records themselves. Many of us find a world of difference between the aesthetics and tactile nature of how LPs look and feel, vs CDs or collecting music digitally. I can see the album art when streaming a song via my ipad app, but it doesn’t produce anything like the satisfaction of buying and owning music on an LP, which is not only more aesthetically pleasing but feels more like actually "owning" the music and ’having a music collection" instead of something virtual.

Then there is the sound. Vinyl tends to sound different than digital sources. And in a way that many of us actually really like, so even if digital could *in principle* mimic the same sound, in practice it normally doesn’t, and thus turntables/vinyl provides an experience and meets a desire that digital does not.

And of course there is the previously mentioned fact that a great proportion of vinyl users find it encourages more focused listening, and encourages listening to more than one song on an album, where access to a vast digital catalogue at one’s finger-tips tends to encourage a more fidgety, surfing-music experience. If you look at articles on the resurgence of vinyl and/or follow people getting in to vinyl - and the reddit vinyl community is a good one - you will see this aspect of vinyl mentioned over and over.

None of that of course means everyone has the same goals or experiences, and given other desires a fully digital system/streaming etc will be a much better choice for some people.

But there are desires among music lovers and audiophiles that are not in fact met as well by digital sources as they are by turntables and vinyl, hence they are not "outdated" in that sense.





I'm with @prof on this question. For me the joy of audio is a lot about cultivating my ability to focus on sound. Vinyl grabs my attention in a way that digital never has. It feels like an actual event happening while digital reproduction feels like just the picture of an event, no matter how 'accurate'. And now that i think of it, the experience of handling vinyl albums may also facilitate that focus. I am one of those people who find digital libraries to be distracting. It's sort of like dating in New York city - the  amount of choice is so overwhelming that it keeps you from ever landing in one place. The dirty little secret of life and audio is that limitations can be productive. total freedom is really a mixed bag.