In 1987, I was in college and saved up for almost a year. I wanted to buy a CD player and enough CD’s that I could have a party and not run out of music to play. I wound up saving enough to buy the player and thirty CD’s. Picking which thirty of my vinyl albums to replace first was tough.... But I did it! I went down to J&R Music World on Park Row and got my CD player and 30 CD’s. I didn’t ditch my turntable or vinyl, but rarely used them after that. Just kept replacing the vinyl albums bit by bit and then of course new CD’s by artists as they came out.... Growing up with vinyl, you had a different feel for it as opposed to as a nostalgic exercise. I was sick of pops, scratches, skips, replacing the stylus... I also hated it when you had a party where people were dancing and the record would jump... But the thing I loved the most about listening to CD’s was being able to hear the bass again. As vinyl ages the first thing to drop off is the bass. Among the first 30 CD’s I bought was of course The White Album and Sgt. Pepper’s. I remember putting on Sgt. Pepper’s and the bass just LEAPED out of the speakers. I was like, holy crap!!! Paul McCartney is a Bad Ass!! I still have some of those original 30 CD’s that I bought in 1987, but I wound up replacing a bunch of them. The studios rushed out a lot of older albums onto CD using poor masters or second or third generation copies, just to have something on the market.... I eventually wound up with over 1000 CDs. I transitioned to high resolution audio around 2017, so I ripped all my CDs as uncompressed AIFF and they are still the bulk of my music collection. I have replaced many of them with 96K or 192K high rez versions when it made sense. But I tell you, the CD files still sound great, they don’t skip, pop or jump, sound the same after forty years, and don’t take up a whole bunch of space. I treasured my vinyl albums but, to answer your question, I definitely left vinyl in the rear view as soon as I was able to. Biggest problem with CD’s? No album cover to roll your joint on!
- ...
- 78 posts total
- 78 posts total

