How do you listen to your music these days?

[Sombrero]

I still spend hundreds of pounds a year on vinyl as personally no other format comes close. I used to buy a lot of vinyl a few years ago but then kind of stopped and stuck to downloading mp3's. I sold my turntables for some spends for a holiday and was going to get rid of a lot of my records but luckily decided against it, as looking back now i would've regretted it a lot. Fast forward a few years and i got fed up of buying mp3's and downloading a file onto my computer. It just isn't the same as owing a physical item and the feel and sound of vinyl. Having gigabytes of music on a computer hard drive just doesn't compare to a real record collection to me. Anyway, i went out and bought some 1210's got right back into it and love it again. Just can't beat searching for tunes in a record shop, or buying online and getting a load of 12" delivered by the postman.

Nice one. Out of interest, how old are you? (nearest decade)... and you're preserving vinyl and postmen !!!

 

[Nige F]

I use a jukebox as old as I am - and a Pro-ject deck ( 90`s ) through a Leak amp (60`s) driving a pair of KEF`s ( 70`s) . A Bush radio in the Garage , tuned to the Light Programme

 

[LargeWrench]

I still spend hundreds of pounds a year on vinyl as personally no other format comes close. I used to buy a lot of vinyl a few years ago but then kind of stopped and stuck to downloading mp3's. I sold my turntables for some spends for a holiday and was going to get rid of a lot of my records but luckily decided against it, as looking back now i would've regretted it a lot. Fast forward a few years and i got fed up of buying mp3's and downloading a file onto my computer. It just isn't the same as owing a physical item and the feel and sound of vinyl. Having gigabytes of music on a computer hard drive just doesn't compare to a real record collection to me. Anyway, i went out and bought some 1210's got right back into it and love it again. Just can't beat searching for tunes in a record shop, or buying online and getting a load of 12" delivered by the postman.

Nice one. Out of interest, how old are you? (nearest decade)... and you're preserving vinyl and postmen !!!

I'm 24. Probably sounds surprising that i buy vinyl considering my age but i've always been fascinated by it! An older cousin of mine had a huge collection from the late 80's right up to the early 00's. It was mainly all electronic music but he also had some funk, soul and jazz. Myself personally i'm mainly into electronic music. House & techno and your earlier electronic music like underworld, 808 state, future sound of london e.t.c. The only downside is the cost, the average record is at least £7.00.

 

[EddieM]

I sold my old cassette deck for nearly £140, now really who would honestly want that, i was gonna bin it!!

If it was a Nakamichi I could understand it. Most people never got to hear how good cassette could be.

really? tell us more....

No wasn't a Nakamichi Dragon, they do go for a lot, it was an AIWA ADF990F, a good deck in it's time. I was happy, buyer was happy. An old classic, also sold, a rega planar 3, zeta arm linn k9 cartridge, and and audiolab 8000a integrated amp, all nice stuff sounded so much better than the stuff available today.

 

[JBR]

I sold my old cassette deck for nearly £140, now really who would honestly want that, i was gonna bin it!!

If it was a Nakamichi I could understand it. Most people never got to hear how good cassette could be.

It's not the equipment, however good it may be, it's the medium. Cassette tapes can stretch, lose their content due to stray magnetic fields, even distort in high temperatures.

I'm old enough to remember 8-track tapes too. They didn't seem to last ten minutes, at least in my car!

 

[ntb]

I sold my old cassette deck for nearly £140, now really who would honestly want that, i was gonna bin it!!

If it was a Nakamichi I could understand it. Most people never got to hear how good cassette could be.

really? tell us more....

The key thing to getting high performance out of cassette (and turntables) is very high precision engineering because you are trying to extract tiny signals from moving media in contact with moving parts. Any misalignment, vibration, errant RF signals or variation in media speed degrades performance.

Bearing this in mind, most transport mechanisms, even in quite expensive decks were mass produced out of stamped parts, usually with just one motor driving the whole affair. They worked, they just didn't work well.

Nakamichi were utterly obsessed with getting the maximum performance out of cassette and applied the engineering needed to get it - to the point of calibrating their machines for specific blank tapes. The factory settings were for TDK D, SA, and the TDK metal tapes but you could specify calibration for your own preferred tapes if required. Their kit was extremely expensive as a result but even the entry level players would leave you hard pressed to distinguish a recording from the original if you ignored the fairly minimal tape hiss (almost no hiss with metal tapes).

If you look on Ebay at the moment there is a Dragon (the top model) with a buy it now for £750. Perhaps a bit optimistic but new, that would be around £6k in today's money.

 

[EddieM]

well at the time, a revox reel to reel was the utter defacto standard, best not to get me started on old hifi, i was an uber bore on it.

lets face it valve amps were still, the uber best, krell, etc.

That said, it's a bit like wine, if you can't tell the difference, but really if you cant tell the difference between an mp3 and something played properly, you really need your hearing checked!!

 

[ntb]

The results you can get with reel to reel are stunning. I once heard a second generation copy from a BBC master tape of The Goon Show from the 1950's. Nothing you can buy on the high street comes remotely close in terms of sound quality. The digital era of recording and playback sacrifices performance for convenience and cheapness.

 

[wobs]

I also have some music on my computer as mp3s and similar, but you cannot find much of my sort of music available to record online.

What sort of music would that be?

 

[JBR]

I also have some music on my computer as mp3s and similar, but you cannot find much of my sort of music available to record online.

What sort of music would that be?

Classical organ music.

 

[longdogs]

I sold my old cassette deck for nearly £140, now really who would honestly want that, i was gonna bin it!!

If it was a Nakamichi I could understand it. Most people never got to hear how good cassette could be.

It's not the equipment, however good it may be, it's the medium. Cassette tapes can stretch, lose their content due to stray magnetic fields, even distort in high temperatures.

I'm old enough to remember 8-track tapes too. They didn't seem to last ten minutes, at least in my car!

I remember my parents having an 8-track system when I still lived 'at home'. the sound was fantastic. I still don't get why most modern recordings fail to use true stereo - where you can here different instruments/voices from individual speakers. What a waste of technology.

 

[TerryMI5]

In the car, with my subwoofer blasting the bass!