Excellent sounding LPs

@dayglow 

I appreciate your response. My record collection leans heavily toward Jazz and Vocal, with a good mix of Classical and Pop/Rock titles that I consider musically essential rather than purely audiophile.

For context, my digital library, a mix of CD rips and DSD downloads, spans music from all over the world with over 900 albums across 95 genres. This library does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to playback. 

If I had to break it down my records collection, I’d say roughly 70% Jazz/Vocal, 5% Classical, 15% Pop/Rock, and 10% Miscellaneous. Out of those, probably 95% meet what I’d consider true audiophile-level sound quality, carefully selected based on provenance and mastering studio’s. They are well-mastered, well-pressed, and consistently engaging. As with any collection, you are bound to have few that may not be perfect sonically, but they stay in rotation because of their emotional pull and historical importance. 

As tempting as it is to keep buying vinyl, I simply don’t have the space to store them properly. It’s a constant battle between the heart that wants more records and the shelf space that says enough already. Been there done that with my 5K plus cassette tapes and CD’s collection through 80’s ~ 90’s. 

At the end of the day, that balance between fidelity and feeling is what keeps the music collection meaningful to me irrespective of the format. 

@lalitk 

This is also my philosophy.  I have my high quality Albums from the late 60’s, 70’s, early 80’s, then, I switch to Digital.  Either playing my late 80's, 90's, 2000's CDs & SACDs directly, or playing the ripped versions (.wav, .dsf) directly -- all through the same DAC.  From there, I use Qobuz Hi Rez streaming for all the later and new stuff that I do not want or is cost prohibitive to buy, ie. thousands of songs - again all playing through the same DAC.  Overall, this gives me "audiophile" quality, for a huge amount of music, and the music format that makes the most sense for the timeframe it was created.

+1 @hjdca 

@rvpiano “Playable LP’s”

lt sounds like you are possibly overthinking this whole sound quality thing. Music lovers try to extract the best they can from their records, and accept recordings with their set achievable limits.

You must have enjoyed all those old records as they are still there. If you are now worried, all convulsed up with audiophile quality, your old music listening love boat may have already sailed.

If your music enjoyment has suddenly evolved around quality and not loving the performances, maybe then something has changed. Could you have possibly grown allergic to your own system?

For me, even back in the day, when I bought Vinyl, then, played it, sometimes I thought, "shoot, that is not a very good recording...  Bad luck.."  I also avoided "live albums" unless I knew they were well recorded.  So, it is not that I did not enjoy the music, it is just that everytime I played an inferior sounding LP that I really liked, I would wonder if there was a better version, and usually there was....  By the same token, if the CD sounded better than the vinyl version I had, I would play the CD.  For Vintage Rock, there really are some huge differences for some LPs depending on the pressing and the manufacturing location.  Actually, maybe it is just me, but, I enjoy music more when it is playing on a top notch stereo, which also translates to a quality recording....