Have you re-visited analog, or did you never leave?


From early 78s through the LP, CD, downloads and more, where do you stand on what you feel sounds the best now?

The cassette and 8-track tapes were a disaster...sonically. In this site being an "audiophile" site, were are your thoughts on the best you/I/we can do sonically in todays world?

My favorite FM station/D.J. plays records, mainly Jazz and great vocals...and with the limitations of FM, it is still one of the best sounds I get from my system.

If you care to share, I would enjoy hearing your quest for "the absolute sound" and where you stand on that quest in our current world? Thanks. I hope you had a safe and happy holiday season.

whatjd
I was ready to leave analog, in the mid eighties, being fed up with crappy, noisy vinyl, but I couldn’t afford a CD player and CDs.  Then my lps were destroyed in a flood, and the stores were switching to CDs, and no second hand vinyl at that point.  So I bit the bullet and bought a CDP, but could only afford to buy a few CDs a year for many years, until budget CDs came along and my financial situation improved.
  Around 2000 with second hand lp stores popping up I got back into analog.  At first it was fun but I quickly remembered why I hated it in the first place, and by then the recordings that hadn’t been digitalized previously were available in  versions that always bested analog.  Sold off my analog rig, gave away the lps, haven’t looked back
I've been a fan of recorded music since 78s were still sold at the drugstore and AM was the only commercial broadcast audio media.  Thanks to my audiophile, solder-wielding dad, I was also there at the dawns of bona-fide Hi Fidelity and Stereophonic.  Quadraphonic, too!!!

I'll cut to the chase.  As much as I've come to embrace digital in the past 20-30 years, I've never even begun to give up on vinyl.  It never occurred to me to get rid of my shelves & shelves of 33's & 45's.  They sounded fine and continue to sound fine. Why should I embark on the herculean effort to replace them with digital material?  A couple of ticks and pops?  Yes, it didn't hurt that the first digital often sounded pretty bad, but it didn't take especially long for the tech to largely come up to speed.  Now in my golden years (oh, I hate to say that!), I enjoy music from a variety of sources, including getting together with my friends and breaking out the musical instruments.
Still have my first album I bought in 1972 and it plays cleanly. My father and I built Dynakits and I listened to his jazz and classical albums while he taught me to care for them (have his vinyl on my collect now also). In 1978 after my original Rotel DD turntable and my entire system was stolen at college I visited Cambridge MA and was able to buy the pseudo-granite plinth Optonica RP3636 and Signet 5 cartridge to go in a new system. Still have that turntable currently stored in its original box.  My system has progressed significantly since that time and today includes excellent digital but never went away from analogue and it still is the focus of my system.