I'm a couple of years older than you, but my trajectory is similar, but without the radio station gig. I still have the first record I ever bought with my own money, Iron Butterfly "Heavy" and it's still in at least Very Good Plus condition. Most of my old records are in t least VG condition because I didn't carry them around from party to party. I used to record LPs onto cassette to preserve the vinyl and to this day I still record to mp3 for use in the car. Friends used to be surprised that I maintained my vinyl collection and that I even kept my turntable up and running. But now that vinyl is 'back' (at least for now) they kind of understand.bill_g wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 1:05 pmI'm 70 this year, but my music tastes are about 20-30 years back. I bought new Cat Stevens and Creedance albums in the 60's. I had Led Zepplin before any of us even knew who Led Zepplin was going to be. I chuckled when my boys dug through my old milk crate in the 80's to find it. They didn't realize how old it was, but it was still in rotation on the radio. In the 70's I had Pure Prairie League, America, and Eagles. In the 80's I moved on to The Cure, Cars, Go-Go's, and B52's. In the 90's we were paying towards the almighty mortgage, and elective album purchases became history.neonzx wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 11:02 amYou and I are closer in age/era than I thought.bill_g wrote: ↑Tue Dec 05, 2023 8:11 am The really kewl thing about Daft Punk is the song title is also the entire lyrics. That is just so handy when deciding which song to listen to.
https://youtu.be/K0HSD_i2DvA?si=47xk-q71ynZzm142
I didn't get back into music until the 2010's when I was a volunteer at KBOO, our local leftist commie LGB kitchen sink station that played everything. That's when I was turned on to Fela Kuti, and a whole bunch of other artists new, newish, fell of the chartish, old, and ancient. I helped convert the massive library they had from vinyl and tape to digital meaning I had to play it in real time, clean it up if possible, and presevere the of best it. I got one hell of baptism, and new appreciation for genres I probably would have never found on my own.
My LP collection slowed down and eventually stopped when I moved to Australia just as CD's were coming in. For a while it was often a hard choice between something new on vinyl or duplicate something old on CD. But during this period, I did hear a lot of new music from Australia. The Saints, Chain, Sky, Crowded House, Midnight Oil, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, Skyhooks, Jo Jo Zepp, ... But I probably concentrated on digging deeper into Blues and Jazz than I had in the past.
I used to kind of turn up my nose at CDs, though SWMBO loved the convenience. I once despaired that a favourite album (Alan Parsons Project "Tales of Mystery and Imagination") would never be redone on CD, so I bought a computer audio program, recorded it myself and burned it to CD. Two weeks later I found the album in a record store and bought just to do the right thing. The commercial product was crap compared to my version, and I ended up giving it away. I have decided that part of the problem at least was that it was remastered during the height of the "loudness wars" when they screwed up a lot of 'classic' stuff and killed the dynamics.
I have in the last couple of years catalogued my collection into Discogs for insurance purposes (but my primary database is Collectorz dot com Music Collector). I was shocked to find that my vinyl collection (just under 1500 albums) was theoretically worth more than $66k (Australian dollars) and the CDs (over 1000) almost $19k. Of course, I'm not selling, and those numbers don't include the value of the hundreds of Australian releases that don't have any sales history on Discogs. I have very few 'collectable artifacts' - records are meant to be played, not locked up in a vault someplace.
Of course, you can't fix a scratch, but old records that sound noisy can usually be brought to life with some thorough cleaning. A bit of TLC on your old turntable, a new belt and stylus/cartridge, and you too can be experiencing the joys of getting up every 15 minutes to turn the record over.
