My asking for CDs for Christmas/birthdays has long been an open joke in my extended family.
A nice way to go about it, if you have a willing vendor, is to set up a wish list with them and then just hand out the vendor’s contact details to everyone who wants to buy you a present. They say how much they want to spend then you go in to the shop just after your birthday and pick up a pile of music you want. A good vendor will keep a list of who bought what for your thank-you letters.
Mark
Hi, I lost hearing (broadly down to 40%) in my right ear 18 months ago due to labyrinthitis the little hearing I have even with a NHS digital hearing aid is distorted, had various private trials and whilst they offer various additional features, none have improved my actual audio experience.
But no one has talked about this feature you have mentioned cros hearing aids could you tell me more?
Thank you if you can
My right ear is not great and I lost the hearing in my left ear in 2020. I have a standard Oticon aid in my right ear, which works really well. In my left ear I have a Cros aid, which is basically a microphone, with the bit that goes in the ear canal serving only to keep the aid in place. The Cros picks up the sound from the left and sends it by Bluetooth to the right, standard, aid. This means that I can hear what’s on the left perfectly well, though I do have some fun moments when I hear people talking but because I can’t see them I have no idea where they are. Working out where a helicopter is is also amusing.
That aside they are brilliant things. You need to see your GP and ask for a referral, specifying very clearly that you’d like a Cros aid. The NHS Cros contracts are generally held by hospitals, as it’s a specialised thing to fit.
Most GPs won’t know what you are talking about, so take a note of this and do some research online. Your bad ear won’t get amplified sounds but into it, so you won’t get distortion. Nor will be get any sense of soundstage from the hifi but you quickly get used to it, and it’s why I sit off axis.
Please feel free to ask if you need to know anything else.
Ownership, control, reliance on various 3rd parties for access for listening, high risk of obsolescence (although maybe a welcome trigger for upgrade!)
Vs
massive convenience and immediate access of most music.
The cost piece-not clear that’s true or entirely clear. It appears cheap, until subscription ends. Then it’s v v expensive I.e. you have nothing at the end of it.
If you will always listen to new music albums regularly every year. Then it works
If like many people you listen to mainly favourites, then after year 2/3 it’s not so cheap. I found (when I got my end of year account summary, I was listening to same stuff all time-but maybe that’s me)
I don’t like economic rent generally albeit it’s v pervasive now.
YMMV of course.
Thank you for the information, I will investigate further.
Fabulous thread which has drifted this way and that. I read @JonathanG original post a while back but held my thoughts back to see if anything new was thrown up. I’m not sure it has.
I moved from vinyl in 1990. Had a collection of a mere 350 but didn’t have the space in my parents home and certainly didn’t plan on having my own space consumed by it. For me vinyl sowed the seeds of its own destruction by being high maintenance; poor quality far too often and an increasing PITA when I wanted to sink into an album but had to get up from my prone position every 20 minutes. Nothing has changed on any of those fronts for me in the subsequent 34 years. It remains all those things but with added comic gimmickry (coloured vinyl, pointless 180g vinyl etc.).
I grew up in era which we now look back to and think vinyl was cheap. It really was not. I can remember being on Supplementary Benefit as a student (student jobs not being a thing in my locality) and just about being able to afford one £3 album every 2 weeks or less. I find it absolutely fascinating that we now talk of not wanting to take a punt on vinyl unless we’re absolutely convinced by it but back in the 1970s and 1980s that’s exactly what we did. I’m sure many traded in those albums which turned out to just not be that good or had multiple poor tracks on them but many of us didn’t. I have many artists I came to love through buying a crap album with maybe 1 great and maybe 2 or 3 promising tracks. Nowadays artists producing such stuff simply don’t get the chance to stay the distance. Another black mark for vinyl then. Having to get up to manually skip tracks 3 and 5. I was ready for CD.
Quick sidebar - I do take the point that it seems odd to quibble over £30 albums whilst owning a multi thousand pound system but it’s important to remember that only a small proportion of owners will have spent £20,000 in one go to get a £20,000 system. For most it’s an incremental thing because of a limited disposable income. Thus the thriving second hand market in things like Naim (I refuse to use “pre-owned”. You can’t pre-own anything. You either own it now or someone else did so in the past.). In that context it’s entirely consistent to fret about paying £30 for an album which may have been mastered to sound like sand in a storm.
All this to note that my attachment to music as a thing to own started to loosen when I disposed of most of my vinyl at Vinyl Exchange. I have retained some singles; 12” singles and albums attached to specific memories and largely retained things which more by accident than design turned out to have more financial value than I ever imagined. I never felt the need to display any of them though and not once have I felt the notion that the memory or experience would somehow be incomplete if I didn’t have a vinyl system to play them on. They have lived in the garage and aged as badly as me and I’m okay with that. Memories preserved in aspic strike me as pointless. If I wanted to be reminded of my first kiss I don’t need to pull the 12” single out to stare at or listen to. For 30 years I just played the CD single and for the last 4 I just stream it. The Beatles In Mono boxed set on CD brought me back closer to specific memories of my Nanna than the original vinyl ever could. My dead uncle flogged those 45s to death but they lived again uncannily on CD as did he and her. I think it’s very easy to convince yourself of an attachment to a thing because of a memory but the thing is not the memory. The memory is the memory.
Moving from CD to streaming hasn’t reversed that feeling. The ripped CDs (1,725) are in 2 flight cases under the bed. I’d happily be rid of them. Would love to tell you they are retained for nostalgic or copyright reasons. Nah, they’re still here because I do 2 backups to portable HDDs at the end of every month and… I simply don’t trust them. The thought of re-ripping 1,725 CDs a 2nd time doesn’t thrill me. Having the option to do so is a huge reassurance though.
Going back to the OP I think it triggered many statements which may be your truth right now but not necessarily the truth going forward. @JonathanG mentions being unable to browse streaming in the way you might vinyl or CD. Well yes and no. I spent years seeing nothing better than my perpetual long stare at my CD boxes, which eventually gave way to both 
”I’ve not been in that box on that shelf for ages.” just as much as “I can’t decide. Let’s play that again.”
I got very bored of evangelical streamers telling how much “easier” browsing “everything” was when streaming and then looking at apps where that patently wasn’t the case. Yes, it was “all there” but that didn’t by default make it all accessible. I later realised it’s entirely app dependent.
Not my job to make the case for one app over another but the integration of Tidal and especially Qobuz into apps rather than using Connect features both makes browsing by genre, album, artist or other tags way easier but also allows me to recreate the excitement of the Saturday trip to the record shop when I wake up on a Friday morning and can spend 30 minutes over coffee browsing their respective new releases. If you can’t replicate that feeling when streaming then maybe explore other devices and their apps. That joy is still there in different ways.
Whilst I’d gladly not see my CDs again, I realised that streaming mostly doesn’t provide the experience of browsing a CD booklet. I’ve zero interest in browsing vinyl in a similar way.
Many make the case for lyric sheets etc, but out in the suburbs (not the London suburbs) you might have got ELOs gatefold with a pull out space ship but we got the Portuguese import from Woolies on third generation vinyl in a white inner sleeve. People romantically assume the former is what vinyl looked like for everyone and literally can’t imagine why the majority moved on but the reasons we did so were many, compelling and overwhelming. Your nostalgic experience was not ours.
So, anyway, under one sofa we have 4 box drawers full of CD covers and booklets. A fair few CD back covers. Streaming doesn’t really do those. It seemed criminal to lose them having given the vinyl away allegedly so fecklessly. Access couldn’t be easier. And yet… I’ve almost never bent down and pulled a box out to support listening to an album. Turns out that, for all the very specific, varied and lifelong memories, nothing matters as much as the music.
And yeah, sure streaming doesn’t have everything but ripping CDs will take you a long way on that. I’ve waited about 40 years for this years Frank Chickens compilation on CD but we got there in the end.
So, for me, if you feel streaming doesn’t have the browsing experience you want then look at other streamers and other apps. That experience is very much out there now. If you feel the need to own then maybe it’s time to ask a very long hard “why”? You can keep many cherished items and memories but ultimately the memory is the thing rather than the thing.
What irritates me about the Connect apps is that you need to start a play & then select the target device - jarring 
A very good post that mirrors much of my experience.
I agree vinyl sowed the seeds of its own destruction in the eighties. Those of us who were there and had a decent HiFi need to look back at all those records that arrived warped, or defective in some way. I went through 4 copies of one famous LP, before I gave up, and accepted the dire quality of the pressing. The advent of CD seemed like a miracle. I still remember hearing one of the first ones at my brothers flat. A friend of his brought the player along. We were astonished.
I still buy CD’s from a specialist record shop in town that we are lucky to have. It specialises in Classical and Jazz. Opera is a big thing in my part of Italy. I have known the owner for thirty five years, and we chat about music and he recommends stuff that I have missed. It is the only reason I still buy CD’s
But I rip the CD’s to my streamer and the little Astell & Kern personal audio as soon as I get home. The booklets are often interesting.
My record shop has recently moved in a new direction. The owner is buying large collections and stock from record shops that are closing. I can pick up a CD for the cost of a download. They are also benefiting from the vinyl revival, with LP’s costing €40 a shot here.
But I am starting to buy more and more downloads from Bandcamp and I have discovered some other download vendors. Over Christmas, I trawled though the Jazz best of lists for the year and found some good stuff.
Finding things on the Hard Disc attached to my steamer is easy with a good filing system. I do not have to delve through hundreds of CD’s in the CD cupboard. My teenage vinyl is in another cupboard and has lain untouched for years.
Streaming is still a step too far for me at the moment, but it is probably the most logical thing to do. Having the files means I can easily copy them to different devices. With a good pair of headphones (Sennheiser HD800s or Beyerdynamic T1) my cigarette box sized Astell and Kern portable has an amazing sound quality.
The big thing about the streamer is that I can sit on the sofa and control everything with my iPad. I can listen to a track again or jump over a boring track. I can also look up the details of the album on internet if I want to know something, whilst listening.
Thanks Nigel.
I think the things audiophiles consistently miss is that a system based around any format can be absolutely compelling. Vinyl holds zero monopoly on that and never will. The idea that you lose some emotional connection by streaming is one of those myths which will persist a decade or two yet because people vest in their existing formats and memories an import which really isn’t there.
Also, however, the demise of vinyl had nothing to do with the short changing of people with “decent HiFi” and everything to do with the side limit; the quality issues triggered in part by the oil crisis; the deterioration from the off in terms of crackles and pops. I want to add the excess of background noise but given the dominance of cassette I think that’s a hard case to make. Most significantly cassettes gave people the portability of the 45rpm single and a dansette but with the length of two albums and a device you could put in your pocket. Given the choice between quality and portability the majority will, and have always, chosen portability.
Yes, CD introduced the idea of something sounding “better” because there was no discernible noise but largely CD gave you broadly similar portability and far greater perceived quality for the majority of listeners as opposed to the small number of audiophiles.
Physical vs virtual media is the thread title but once again we have sunk into the vinyl vs digital rehashed arguments. I believe digital recording gives a better sound quality. A belief not a rigorous scientific fact with double blind tests. I also believe there are as many bad digital playback media products as there are bad vinyl media.
CD’s and packing data/ loudness wars spring to mind. That doesn’t mean the digital recording was at fault, just the production output.
As I referenced elsewhere, Phillips didn’t produce cd capability for hifi reasons, but for what they were good at, producing mass market consumer products, easy to use and cheap for the consumer. HiFi enthusiasts helped them market their product even if the 44.1 was designed for pcm and use of video tapes for audio.
Meanwhile physical vs virtual. For me I can afford to listen to more music via the digital services than I can by buying vinyl. The quality for me is superior to vinyl. The downside of potentially Amazon ( other providers are available) going bust and withdrawing the service is worth the risk of my small outlay.
I have kept three record decks to play my small vinyl collection and the odd new purchase, just because I like the look and feel of a pressed plastic disc. I can’t see me buying any more new cd’s.
I know I’m like a stuck record (terrible unintended pun, sorry!) but my listening is revolutionised since I’ve had the NDX2/NAS, and on the QB2 it just sounds fantastic from a local file, even using mains as ethernet, just superb.
The record collection and deck stays but there’s better ways to listen to music now.
Regards,
Lindsay
Can we not go with “for me” or “alternative/different” rather than the absolutist “better”?
Mike yes we can, that’s a very good point. And in my case it’s a Damascene moment!
I love the physicality of the vinyl, the interaction that I have with vinyl, holding that album in my hands and being able to read what is printed on the sleeves is all part of the experience, getting it set up to play is all part of the enjoyment.
Whilst I do use streaming it is minimal as choosing what to listen to is a PITA. But then I struggle with finding something to watch on Netflix or Disney or anyone of the other brands. With my vinyl collection I can flick through and choose very easily.
In addition I have something to show for my outlay, with any form of virtual media I have nothing to show for my expenditure. My kids, their mates and younger generation that I have spoken to in music stores has highlighted an increase in physical media purchased not to replace virtual media but alongside it.
Market reports that I have seen in recent months indicates that there is an overall increase in physical media purchases, this would suggest that for many having some form of physical media is important.
If I downsize my house at some point in the future then there maybe a need to review my vinyl collection but hopefully that decision is some way off.
I understand that for some the move to a complete virtual media setup is heaven and gives them everything that they want, and that is great but we’re all different and there is enough room out there for everyone to have a music setup that is personalised to their needs.
One thing to remember is that in any format, the quality of the recording we hear is dependent on the production upstream, from the recording to the mastering. I downloaded two digital wav files last week. One, God Bless iKapa. God Bless Mzantsi by Thembi Dunjana, sounds fantastic on my system. The other gratitude by Cassie Kinoshi’s seed, recorded live, does not have the same quality. BTW The jazz on the Dunjana album is wonderful too.
To complicate matters further, my music sounds very different, if I listen through my Sennheiser HD800s headphones, compared to my Beyerdynamic T1 cans. Some albums sound better on one or the other.
One thing about the digital download, that I like, is that I can buy music from the four corners of the world easily, and at a reasonable cost. I have recently bought two albums by two South African musicians; Dunjana, and Kyle Shephard. The postage costs for physical media were excessively expensive. The digital downloads cost €10. Postage costs of a lot of US labels are often more than the media costs. If these small labels are not distributed in your county or my case, Europe, downloading is the only practical solution.
To me, the best argument for virtual over physical is the “What Are You Listening To … “ threads on this forum.
There are ao many amazing titles there, which I can discover / try out / consume so much more easily virtually.
Physical has other virtues though!
I have over 900 albums on my Bluesound Vault 2, I used to own about 800 albums. I have winnowed my albums down to about 250 that I will most likely listen to some more, I kept all the music on my Vault. Point being I have all the music I WANT to listen to. Got a great deal on Tidal $0.99 a month for 6 months awhile ago, almost never used it, so I didn’t keep it. Over the past 15 years there have been several people who have tried to turn me on to new music. I am the “old guy” in my shop now and the young guys are always telling Mr. Greenlee you need to listen to music from THIS CENTURY. That being said Only 4 artists/groups have stuck 1.Lake Street Dive 2.Eva Cassidy 3.LaTasha Lee 4.Tiny Habits. Just recently picked up 10,000 Maniacs MTV unplugged in vinyl, have Dan Fogelberg 50th anniversary limited edition Souvenirs on pre order. So streaming is not for me
I do not have a dilemma I prefer physical media over streamed or downloaded music.
I do use streaming though for some things at home it is mainly for listening to music recommended to me be that a new artist or an unfamiliar album. I also use streaming on our narrowboat (when we can get a mobile signal) due to not having to store physical media in a restricted space.
At home, I mainly listen to LP records (I do have CDs too) and enjoy the musical reproduction from the medium and also the whole process of playing them, along with the LP sleeves artwork and notes.