My focus since around 2006 has been to curate a very large collection of "standard" pressings though many are highly collectible, from the late 60s and early ’70s- the goal was to get the best sound possible from "ordinary" pressings (though many are now hard to find, small label, private label or simply in the province of record collectors). I never considered myself a "collector," more an itinerant dilettante who finds something and "surfs" it for other material I like. Very little of what I listen to these days is "audiophile" issues though I kept a lot of that stuff-- it sits in an adjacent room and includes psych, prog, blues, jazz and a ton of classical. As to %s, I could not say-- I am usually in a mood to find something I haven’t listened to in a while, and since I can go shopping at home through the stacks, can always find something to scratch the itch. I culled about 5,000 records out of around 17,000 and bought another thousand or so since, after dumping a similar amount shortly after arriving in Texas.
Any playlist of a listening session would mix acoustic jazz with roots/slide, some hard psych, a classical work and some soul. I can go from Sly Stone to an obscure psych band, it all depends on mood. Having a lot of records just means more access to more different things. To me, all of that is "justified" and it isn’t based purely on sonics. I kinda got out of the "audio spectaculars" a while ago-- and it was pretty liberating. Take a chance, try something new and different or old and different. My cleaning is quite rigorous and pretty much everything is in top playing condition (I have spares of some that are not quite up to par but haven’t parted with them yet- they have some collector value--I just have no urgency to do another purge, which will no doubt come). I don’t stream. I do have an SSD from which I can play local files digitally, but that’s mainly for stuff that isn’t on vinyl, demos, some material I was sent for work back in the day, etc. My serious listening is pretty much all vinyl.
It’s getting harder to find clean copies of some of this stuff just like fresh old high end tubes. I suspect there will be another turn-over when my generation passes on to that great listening room in the sky. In the meantime, carpe diem!
