Listening habits.

I have been in to real to real and records since 1963, today, I still have some nice real to reels tape decks and a nice turntable, but I also listen to cassettes and DVDs and I still do some recording with my tape decks. I’m 81 years old and as Long as my hearing is good. I will never stop listening. 

Nice to be hanging out with music lovers around the globe. I am an equal opportunity format listener. I think, I prefer vinyl for older rock and jazz for the timeless experience. Putting on Meet The Beatles album reminds of buying my first record and putting on the old Wildcat fold-down all in one phonograph when I was around 7 years old. I find the quality of new vinyl a bit hit or miss and sometimes comes with skips and other strange sounds that don't clean off. Also new albums in new Zealand are NZ$60.00++ and good used ones between $30-40.00+. Whereas CD's sound consistently good over time (new or used) and cost less. I recently bought a couple Boz Scaggs CD for $5.00 each. I also enjoy streaming for exploring new music or albums I can't find online or in local shops. I find the sheer amount of music available to stream 'overwhelming' at times. I have an Technics SU-G700M2, Esoteric K03 CD player and an Auralic Aries G1.1 transport (Esoteric is the DAC with Audioquest carbon USB). Although I like the ritual of playing albums and CDs), I enjoy listening to music in all formats. To quote thefile, "I’m 62 years old and as Long as my hearing is good. I will never stop listening". 

I'm 68 and started listening to vinyl when I was 13.  Through college my vinyl collection continued to grow.  Then CDs and SACDs became available and I bought a NAD disc player.  Vinyl still sounded better.  I upgraded my disc player to a Meridian 508 and was amazed at how great the little discs sounded.  We moved and I never really got my turntable back into play because the silver discs were easy and sounded good.  One day, a friend heavily into vinyl brought his turntable over and set it up on my system. He was on a mission from God to convert me back to vinyl.   I was able to A\B discs and vinyl.   Some SACD's sounded  as good as, but not better than the vinyl equivalents.  I was intrigued.  So I bought a Nottingham turntable to replace my Pioneer college table.  While I truly enjoyed the lack of pops, clicks, and other noise of cd's, I slowly realized that for me, something subtle was lacking on digital end.  At that time, my digital end was much better than the analogue end.  Then SACDs seemed to be replaced by streaming, and many titles I had in vinyl weren't in production.  Sooo, back to more vinyl listening.Over the years, and several moves, my wife has harranged me about toting the vinyl around, telling me we should just get rid of it, for God's sake.  Fortunately, I stood my ground.  While in college, I always took good care of my vinyl and used a discwasher brush before each play.  I began to clean my lp's ultrasonically and was impressed with how the tonality of the discs improved with less, but not eliminated, noise.  I have heard high end digital systems-top end esoteric into MBL radialstrahlers and prefer my current vinyl set up.  Now I have thousands of little silver discs in garage storage and my wife now is on my case to get rid of them!  My Meridian disc player died 5 years ago and is too old to ressurect.  I still have Sony XA5400ES disc player, but I am VERY happy with my analogue sound relative to my digital sound.  To be fair, at this time my digital set up isn't nearly as strong as my vinyl set up.  I will likely upgrade the digital set up at some point just to see.  In my system the vinyl has an almost palpable texture that I haven't found in the digital domain.  But you never know...

Vinyl with a small number of CDs that I got when vinyl was on life support with albums only offered on CD, Those CDs are either unavailable on vinyl or cost prohibitive because of their scarcity. Plus I can listen to CDs in the car or while washing it. I actually disconnected my CD player 10-15 years ago when it broke and played the occasional one on a bluray player which I disconnected.

I bough a decent inexpensive Rotel one on closeout about a year or so ago just to be able to listen to a group of CDs on my home system. I was surprised how good some of the better produced ones sound. Some are terrible, just like vinyl.

I refuse to stream. Too many things our there and I have more than enough to make it a pleasant surprise every time I play a record once every 3-4 months. I try to keep decisions to a minimum.