Post Your Physical Media! (Vinyl, Tape, CDs, etc)

I had gone all digital and then at some point I wanted a vintage stereo. So I now buy vinyls, I have a few cassettes I'm not using, just in case, and even a few DATs. The CDs I buy because I have a 2011 car with a CD player, a hard drive, but not streaming capaiblity. Plus, CD is pretty advantageous for long pieces of music, both in terms of storage and listening ease. The Wagner tetralogy by Karajan is 14 CDs... imagine that in vinyl.
As a rule I usually buy classic stuff in vynil, that has been released on that format originally. I don't really see the point of buying an Andy Sneap record in an old school analog format.

I stopped getting music physically a while back when I noticed degradation and disc rot on what I did have and I mostly only listen to music at work on my phone anyway. Also some of the stuff I've been listening to lately it's been tough even finding digital versions to buy in the US, looking at you Wednesday Campanella. I do still get games physically most of the time though. My latest games in were a couple of Asia exclusives.

Kinda missing my turn table after reading these posts. I sold on all of my vinyl for a large sum 2yrs ago, though

I started a thread about cassette tape collecting on here years ago and I remember it quickly dieing after getting nothing but negative comments about "but muh fidelity, " "but muh practicality, " and "but muh dead formats are for hipsters". Now almost every "underground" metal band is releasing stuff on tape and vinyl. All I'll say is that people around here are really behind the curve .

I've been so far behind the curve for so long, I seem to always end up ahead of it.

Some cassette's...

I rearranged my media shelf and put all my CDs on it. Concert DVDs get their own section at the top left too.

My disdain of streaming and digital only purchases have kept me buying physical mediums ever since I started making my own money. In my early years most of my listening was on cassette tapes, but that was not as much music as it was audiobooks. I did have a couple of music cassettes though, but at that time I was too young to have a clearly formed musical preference.

CD's was the format when I finally began to passionately listen to and collecting music, and for the longest time CD's was what I bought at every given chance. To this day I still have a decently sized cd collection.

A few years back I finally caved in to vinyl. I think the main reason was because I watched my DJ brother having fun with vinyl, and I just loved how "hands on" the format is. I started out really slow by buying the odd release here and there, but all of a sudden escalated to the point where I had weekly arrivals of limited and special pressings of my favorite albums, so even though I've only collected vinyl for a couple of years, I do think I have a pretty decent collection, where most of the vinyl are limited/special/numbered/rare pressings.

It's not a practical format, no, but it has so much warmth and character, and I often find that the sound is far superior to the digital releases. I do keep mp3 versions of all the albums I buy on vinyl too, so I can put them on my phone to listen to on the go. My preferred buyer scenario is when the purchase of a vinyl includes an mp3 download of the album. Sometimes there's a cd version included with the vinyl, in which case I can make an mp3 version from that. If nothing is included with the vinyl I will buy the mp3 version.

Spotify can go and have intercourse with itself! I won't support a platform that pays the artists so poorly. I would rather buy an album twice than supporting that platform.

The latest vinyl haul consists of these 2. They are both bands I saw live on a festival earlier this year, and both blew me away big time. The first one, Lamentari, is straight up symphonic black metal. The second, Defacing God, is kind of blackened death metal -ish. Both bands are from Denmark.


Currently waiting for 4-5 new vinyl releases to arrive. I preorder a lot!

EDIT: Oh, and I totally forgot to mention my collection of live dvds and blurays. I have some good stuff in that collection, but my favorite of them is for sure my Devin Townsend Project - By A Thread dvd box set, which I had signed by the entire Devin Townsend Project band at a VIP Meet'n'Greet back in 2017. I also got to take a goofy picture with the entire band, where Devin and I make goofy faces with thumbs up. He might not be my most played artist, but he is my biggest idol for sure!

Yeah, when I started buying music, it was cassettes, then I became a CD snob by the early 90's, then I became a vinyl snob around 2000, but now I just collect it all (or those three anyway, I'm not even gonna touch 8-tracks or reel to reel, I don't need more music addictions).

The new Crypta just arrived, so that's gonna be my morning.

Heh, I wish I could go back and have my cd collection earlier life

I have ~600 CDs, ~ 250 LPs, couple dozen concert DVDs and Blu-rays.

I’ve been using Spotify Premium for a few years now, mostly for the convenience and as a way to discover music that’s new to me. Sometimes it’s music that came out last week; sometimes it’s stuff I grew up on; sometimes it’s from before my grandparents were born.

Spotify is great for checking music out, and it sounds okay in the car (unambitious older factory system), and on Bluetooth earbuds at work, but I would never rely on it or other other streaming platform as my only source of music.

I have a real distrust of media companies and artists when it comes to stewardship of my favorite music. Too frequently I find that the only version of an album on Spotify is some remaster, remix, or re-recording that’s not what I’ve been listening to for thirty years. I also don’t want to depend on a streaming platform for anything to be there at all on a perpetual basis. I don’t think people putting music or other media out for public consumption should be able to “erase” it by pulling it from streaming platforms. They can pull it, sure, but if someone likes it enough that losing the ability to stream it would ruin their life, then that person should own a physical copy. Ditto if the artist, say, hates one of their old albums enough that they decide no one should ever listen to again. The public owes it to that artist to keep their privately held physical copies as potential evidence in future proceedings.

So I still buy CDs and/or LPs whenever the music takes on a particular importance to me, especially when I find a good deal on it. I have a CD player in the car, mostly used on the drive home after buying a new disc. At home there’s an old Pioneer Elite single-disc and a Sonos Port paired with a snooty outboard DAC. There’s also my manual belt-drive turntable, a decent electronically controlled FM-only tuner, and programmable 10-band stereo graphic EQ that I try to use very judiciously, when I use it at all. All of that runs into an old analog preamp and power amp from the ‘90s, driving a pair of point-source stand mounted speakers from the hi-fi world.

So I tend to collect mostly vinyl and CDs, but I picked up some extra shelving recently for a much-maligned media that still holds a place in my heart, the lowly cassette! Yes, I've heard it all before; they degrade over time (turns out, so do I, so we're all dust in the end), they can get chewed up or damaged (a decent refurbished deck can go a long way to avoiding this), they have audio hiss (again, good player = big diff.), but at the end of the day, I acknowledge their shortcomings while still enjoying them, and the fistfuls I can grab at pawn shops for next to nothing.

I'll always love these lil' guys, even if they share Mr. Dangerfield's fate on the respectability front. And now they got their own dedicated shelves to hang out on (no longer sharing shelf space with their natural enemy, the CD).

Technotronic, wow.

Andromalia said:

Technotronic, wow.

Click to expand...

Can't leave the jam un-pumped up, now, can we?

The resurrection of this thread has prompted me to buy a Technics RS-B505 for spares or repairs....

Proud of this one.

There are still more things from my childhood that I need to recover from my parent's house

Since I got the shelves for my tapes, I've opened up a lot of space for my CDs. Looked a little gappy, so I propped open some of the digipaks to fill it in a bit better. Might focus on CD collecting for a while since I'm running out of space on the vinyl front, and they're sooo much cheaper than records, and even new cassettes.

I actually pre-ordered this back in February, but it only shipped very piecemeal, and my piece was not in the initial meal. A couple of times I followed up, a couple of times I got assurances the allayed my desire to cancel outright, but right when I had given up hope, finally, FINALLY, it arrived.

Probably one of my biggest one-time orders (and this isn't even all of it), took a couple of months to make it to my door, so that was stressful, especially since tracking wasn't working all too well. Thank glob I got it, would have been out a pretty penny with this;

David Bowie, Kate Bush, Julie Byrne, The Jimmy Castor Bunch, Danielle Dax
Danielle Dax, Descartes A Kant, Detente, Dwarves, Peter Gabriel, GUNSHIP
Nina Hagen, Herbie Hancock, The Hues Corp, Linea Aspera, Bob Marley, Mgla
Our Daughters Wedding, Plasmatics, The Shirelles, Tomb Mold, Stevie Ray Vaughan

Just ordered the only copy I could find on the entire internet of this legendary sludgecore masterpiece. It wasn't cheap.... but neither am I. I'll post some highlights from my collection when it arrives.