After having been a vivid collector of CDs back in the days (I sold all of them some 15 years ago…), I started collecting vinyl and depend on streaming services ever since. Currently, I make use of a Quobuz subscription and Roon to manage my library which also includes various high-res downloads stored locally (with backups in the cloud).
But I miss physical media, and vinyl doesn’t cut it for me. Don’t get me wrong, nothing beats listening to a good record with a dram of Scotch, but quality wise, it’s nowhere near digital sources, at least not within any reasonable price point.
Where to go from here? Paying for high-res downloads I often can stream at the same time feels strangely unsatisfying, while falling back to CDs might be an option, but leaves out higher quality tiers. Physical alternatives such as HDCD, SACD or DVD-Audio seem more or less a niche for enthusiasts of classical music (if not dead), with a very limited catalogue.
Can some of you share my feelings? How do you deal with it?
Vinyl Only. I just prefer the sound of classic jazz on it. I’ve been buying the blue note tone poet and other high quality issues like crazy the last couple years. Quality early releases are so hard to find and way too much $ I just can’t justify the cost and may not sound better… I haven’t bought a cd in 10 years or so, entire collection is converted to lossless audio (1600 or so cds) and i stream anything new / high resolution. My CDs are in boxes in garage storage. So for me, it’s jazz on vinyl, everything else is CD streaming or online streaming. I first started streaming when benchmark released the dac1 USB which was maybe 2006?