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Sort of embarrassing how often changes are made to the systems in this house -the out of date AA files a reminder of those changes. I've now updated the gallery etc.
A big move was made last week when the CD collection was sold. The albums are now on the music server and the CDs were never being played, but it was still a wrench to see them go just the same.
So I've seen all recording formats:
1. As a pre-teen I played with Edison cylinders on a player (still have it)
2. Moved to wind up gramophone with 78 rpm shellac discs and steel needles (shudder)
3. LPs played via a crystal Acos pickup on a variety of crude turntables
4. More sophisticated Ortophon cartridge and Garrard TT.
5. Stereo LPs & Decca cartridge, all sorts of arms .... Koetsu, Linn Sondek TT ... (hated CDs at this stage)
6. Sucked into digital via laserdiscs .... various CD players -> went through a stage of paranoia about jitter so had mods done to players + modded DACs
7. LP collection sold.
8. Collected heaps of CDs
9. Moved into a Meridian Sooloos server system which led into headphone listening and portable players
10. CD collection sold
I'll be 80 in a few months and with failing hearing the upgrade urge has just about died out. But it has been a long and interesting journey.
John
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
Follow Ups:
However, I would have never sold either the LPs or the Cds but then I am likely to never go to a digital music server. I like the feel of them and I like to watch my TT spin and music pour out.
I dabbled a bit with High rez from my Mac but really I could be bothered with all the riping of files...better to just put them on to a spinner and hear music.
Are you still using the gigantic Sound Lab electrostats?
Me too. Servers are convenient and I'm sure they can sound quite nice, but until they provide sonic advantages that FAR outstrip regular CD I'm not going to spend a lot of time and effort ripping. Besides, I need the exercise.I also prefer to keep and/or recycle manufactured items as long as possible, whenever possible.
Edits: 07/30/15
Yes, it was a b!tch to rip my library (over the course of several weeks), but I find the benefits to be enormous . I spend more time listening now that I've eliminated the ritual of locating the jewel case, shuffling the disk to the player and back again for each selection. And have rediscovered some old friends that I forgotten about using random play.
Having all your digital music accessible by six players of various sorts throughout the house is a beautiful thing. :)
Yes, still got the big electrostats and enjoy them every night we are home, but for A/V, not audio only. Hearing problems have steered me towards headphones. And, as posted elsewhere, we do share opera and other A/V material with friends from time to time so the superb music potential of the system is not wasted.
Maybe I'm getting old and impatient but jumping up and dowb to replace discs no longer has any appeal, although still necessary for DVDs & BDs although they do last a bit longer than the LPs used to! Listening via server is just so easy & user friendly. But I understand where you are coming from.
All the best,
John
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
I'm definitely with you there! I think what's daunting for a lot of folks is just the process of ripping one's whole collection to a hard drive - but the rewards are so worth it IMHO. And in any case, one doesn't have to do it all at once - I've got only about half my collection onto hard drive at this point.
Pop music is relatively easy but classical music can offer some hurdles. Track data can need changing because full data does not always download, or it might not be in appropriate form, ...... Yes it takes time.
But the end result here is that the collection can be accessed and played in 5 rooms of the house and access to any item it just a few keystrokes away.
So, if anyone reading this has not ventured into the server world yet, then do some serious investigation as it is worth it. Having said that I appreciate the reluctance to have to go through the hassles of learning how to control yet another software system and admit I held back on a PC based system for that reason. The Meridian system is not perfect but is relatively easy to use. Its biggest downside is the high cost but the upside is its flexibility and expand-ability.
John
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
did you sell them as a lot? Did you sell them online or local private sale?
Thinking of doing the same thing.
I am giving my collection to a local library and school in a low income depressed area.
Maybe you can get some sort of tax break doing that and have a feel good transaction
Rodney Gold
... to a contact I had made previously - he purchased all my LPs. I have had email contact with him for a number of years now and just happened to mention that I should get rid of my CDs as I was not playing them. He then offered to buy them .....but I had to offer them on a 5 year payment option as he did not have the funds to buy them outright. That was no big deal here as I was not desperate for the immediate funding. But I reasoned they were not appreciating sitting on the shelves so to sell them with no packing etc hassles was a no brainer.
There is still a demand for CDs although I sense that demand is diminishing so if you are serious about selling I would advise you to do so soon. In your situation I would suggest you advertise for interest on some of the freebie sites around to generate interest and suggest you are prepared for a payment plan if satisfied with the credability of the buyer - a toughie that one.
Good luck with it.
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
just as someone who lost 2 terabytes of files to a failed hard drive, I hope you have a backup :)
*
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
You own the disc but not the rights to the contents, but I'd pardon you in a heartbeat. I wish you many more years of musical enjoyment.
13DoW
You have touched on a sensitive topic. Copying CDs is just so easy and there is no question musicians are losing heaps of royalties as a result.
Attempts at copy control have proven futile and have resulted in us being forced to use HDMI for A/V with heaps of annoying handshaking problems.
I've less sympathy with some of the leading pop groups who rake in millions at concerts but am concerned at the plight of the classical scene where labels are vanishing one by one although fortunately Naxos is taking over some. I reads the orchestras in the UK are facing extraordinary challenges and many in the USA only survive through public philanthropy. Australian orchestras are still surviving through Government subsidies, But overall the prospects for stable employment by budding musicians looks bleak.
So could CD sales assist? Most likely, but with sales plummeting that is not a likely scenario.
And the biggest irony is that most support for classical music is likely in the future, to be not in the West, but in China where the emerging and affluent middle class is interested. There are already more practicing pianists there than in any other country but please let us not get diverted by Lang Lang!
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
Isn't it exciting having your music accessible at your fingertips for immediate playback without having to flip through a large collection of CD jewel cases? Congrats!
I was concerned that you sold your CD collection while relying on a hard disk within your Sooloss system to contain all your music, but then I read that you made backups.
That's good news because I've also read of people selling their entire CD collections and then losing their hard disk drive to a disk crash or operator error. Yikes!
Enjoy!
.... I've had the Sooloos system for 5 years now and there has been no sign of HDD problems. It is a RAID system so theoretically has an auto BU but, as we all know, nasties can occur in any processor controlled system so having dual drives is really no guarantee.
When I made the initial purchase the dealer persuaded me to go for Enterprise drives but I have since felt that was overkill. Recently I doubled the capacity in one RAID system by replacing the two enterprise 2 TB HDDs with ordinary Seagate 4 TB units and they have given no problem in the last 12 months. But then, even posting this is inviting problems!!!
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
Mirrored disks can be a two-edged sword.
The contents of one disk is automatically mirrored to the other which is nice if one disk fails. However, if there's an error, even if it's 'operator error', the error gets written to both disks.
If the disk controller goes bad and starts creating errors you have the same problem. The errors are written to both disks.
Still a good idea to have a totally separate backup disk or more to fall back on.
Enjoy!
Yes I do external backups, in fact keep two on hand. Better safe than sorry.
But if we cannot have full confidence with the mirror system one wonders if it is worth having at all.
John
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
Hey John...Breakthrough hearing technologies are on the way. Facing that demon down by upgrading my speakers and throwing away my TV.Beats electric shock treatment.
I always knew that you were on the "cutting edge" of hifi tech though. Keep on keepin' on...
Wollensak made some great CD players.........
...a musician friend in his 50s just became an Amazon reseller to unload his large CD collection after putting them all on a hard drive.
How did you sell yours?
.... the same guy who bought my LPs!!!
He used to own a record selling business but went out of it years ago and now has regular employment. However he had built up a circle of contacts who keep pestering him for more recordings.
The collection was sold for a song - about $2.50 each but I just could not be bothered with e-bay and, sadly, none of my children nor grand children are interested in classical music, so I took the easy option. Not that I'm immediately rich as he has been given terms to pay over 5 years.
He had to make a significant effort to get them - hire a van, spend a day driving to Melbourne, then take the ferry overnight across the water to get to this island state. But he also took back two surplus pairs of electrostatic speakers and a few other items so cleared out more than the CDs. Tasmania is a lovely place to live but its relative isolation comes with heavy freight costs making selling those speakers a difficult proposition to say nothing of the headache packing them. BTW the sale of the speakers was not on the agenda or discussed before he got here.
A nice guy, he stayed here for two nights and loved playing canasta, as my wife and I do. He is a competitive player but yours truly triumphed both evenings although I must confess it was more good luck than superbly skilled playing. Still great fun :-)
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
...selling CDs for $2.50 each as about as much as you could possibly get today particularly for a whole collection.
Special ones might have sold for more but a lot would go for $1 or less.
Last time I went to Amoeba in SF with my "bag o' CD's" (a couple of weeks ago), I got less than $1.00/CD IN STORE CREDIT! And, believe me, my CD's are immaculate. :-(
The buyer was kind of apologetic, but said they just have too many CD's right now.
So, yes - but my estimation, John did VERY well!
...I took about 30 CDs, a couple of MoFis and a few other audiophile remasters - $10 cash or $20 credit (I took the cash).
The irony is their CD bins seemed pretty empty and they had none of the classic rock CDs on my list I was looking for.
I think they are on their last legs buying and selling used CDs.
I was down at the Hollywood Amoeba last weekend, first time as I'm closer to the City, and they had all kinds of CD sales going on.
I picked up a half dozen good selections on LP.
See ya. Dave
John,
thanks for sharing your story. I'm curious about whether there is one particular type of music that, over the years, you find yourself going back to repeatedly.
..... these days my tastes are more for Baroque and Early music BUT, and an important BUT, with recordings played at random as per music server. 70 minutes of the one disc e.g. Gregorian chant, would drive me even nuttier than I am now, but spliced in with other early music it is a delight to listen to. I'm finding the lute and harpsichord music particularly appealing listened to in this fashion. I used to love organ music and, although it still appeals, it is not something I seek out.
We have music loving friends who visit every few weeks for av A/V night and we rotate though opera and other genre but that is about the extent of music on the main A/V system as my wife is not as keen on some of the less common classics - hence the headphones. The music from the server is piped around 5 rooms in the house and is easily controlled by an iPad anywhere now although that did require some wireless repeaters.
But I digress.
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
This (and the one by Dave Pogue) may be the most encouraging posts I've read on an audio forum in a long time.
For a life-long music lover like me, it is comforting to know that age, lack of ability to perform righteous air-guitar splits, or even poor hearing; won't curtail my love of listening to great music--unless I let it.
I can see myself now; smiling broadly while rocking out with my great-grandchildren as I introduce them to the hobby I love so much!
Thanks and cheers to you, gentlemen!
I presume you've got everything backed up at least twice - it just
wouldn't do to have some sort of catastrophic hard drive failure, now
would it?
I do envy you to some extent. But my collection of CDs just isn't
large enough to warrant putting it all on disc, and I don't want to spend
the time and effort to do it anyway. The nicest feature I can imagine
about having everything on disc is random play. That would be very cool.
Editing is VERY time consuming as the data, not the music, on discs often get corrupted. I have spent many hundreds of hours putting albums of classical music into a form I want. Sometimes the internet data base completely misidentifies an album so there is a lot of tedious copy and paste involved. This can be very challenging with Baroque and Early works which can have up to 30 tracks on a single album!!.
But, as my wife says, it keeps me out of mischief!!
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
Thank you! Music is still there...
Those 78s sounded better with an osmium tipped needle :).
... "Pop" music from the late 1920s and 1930s as collected by my late parents. Stuff I used to play as a callow youth. I have a special 78 needle in a Shure cartridge to use on a Dual 1019 but cannot be bothered hooking it all up. The sound would most likely be horrific through the main system anyway!!
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
At 86, I'm still buying LPs, CDs and open reel tapes. I must be nuts.
I hope to be able to do the same.....And gladly!
... in my case selling the collection puts a full stop on the temptation to get any more. Building up a music library satisfies the collecting urge and gives aesthetic pleasure in the music. And assembling systems to play it back replaces the Lego building urge.
What hobby could be better?
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
Dave,
You're not nuts. I still enjoy the ritual of looking through and selecting an LP and cueing up the TT as well as selecting a CD to put in my player. I do have music on a laptop and use a DAC with a USB port but I prefer the CD's and LP's. It's part of the listening experience for me.
NT
Yeh- im about to give away my 5000+ cd collection..all ripped .. backed up etc and now with TIDAL , at $9.95 a month for 16/44 I am sorted for new music..
Rodney Gold
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What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
We all wish you many, many more years of musical enjoyment (and sharing your posts with us here at AA)!
... Old!
Congratulations on the journey so far!
I still have all the formats and the hardware to play most of it.
However I listen mainly to my server based system, as does my wife, albeit often in a different room.... and the kids also listen to music and nearly always in a different room to where either my wife or I am.
I have never sold any audio gear or media and I doubt I ever will.
Good to hear you are still enjoying your music, no matter which form it takes.
Cheers and take care John.
Smile
Sox
And I see from your gallery we share similar interests as well as music!!!
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying many thousand albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
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