Hi Oliver,
You’re not alone! I wrestled with that issue for quite a few years. Here is where I landed and how and why I think I landed there.
Firstly, I’m a child of the 60s, I grew up on vinyl. Punk was my musical awakening and I was deeply into new wave. Then at uni I discovered Stax soul, the indy scene, reggae and world music like Ethiopian Jazz. All of that was bought on vinyl and that core vinyl collection (maybe 500-or-so albums) is pretty much my “musical DNA”. I could never part with them and a means to play them will always be part of my life.
As I started to upgrade from my humble student room system I stayed with vinyl as I just couldn’t make friends with the sound of early digital. Although I tried a number of early CD players and DACs it was when I graduated to my first dCS system, an Elgar 4-box stack in 2002, that I seriously made friends with digital and started seriously buying CDs.
100-or-so discs had become about 1600 by the time I moved to Sweden in 2006 but being a technophile I had seen the writing on the wall, which at the time said “computer audio”. I sold the dCS Verdi in the move and have never owned a disc transport since. Over the next few years I ripped about half of those CDs to FLAC and still have them sitting on a NAS. Streaming was obvious to me and I was in there from the very start, first with a Sonos feeding the big-rig via various jitter-busting boxes (which looked pretty silly) and then with various Squeezeboxes, Transporters etc. as streaming technology evolved. The evolution of my digital system culminated in me stepping back into dCS ownership with the purchase of a dCS Bartók, which I later upgraded to a Vivaldi short stack (if you haven’t followed the story it wasn’t until after that that I started working here).
I gave up ripping the CDs when their availability on streaming services overtook the snail-like pace of my ripping project (probably around 2010?) and put them all into storage where they sit to this day. I keep them as a “back up” in case the streaming services radically change their pricing models or the repertoire becomes as fragmented as the video streaming services have. I have no plans to get rid of them as most of them are pretty much worthless anyway.
In parallel with all of this I had fallen down the vinyl rabbit hole. I had graduated to an esoteric high-end turntable that looked like a (strangely beautiful) oil rig and started buying audiophile pressings of all sorts of discs (very often ones I already owned at least one edition of on CD and which were also available to stream in hi resolution). I had record cleaning machines and flattening machines and de-statifying machines, you name it.
But my digital sound quality had been steadily increasing and when I upgraded to the Vivaldi my digital was at least on a par with my vinyl with none of that medium’s disadvantages and all the advantages of fingertip convenience, a complete absence of sanitary rituals and almost unlimited repertoire. That made me realize that the only vinyl I had any real emotional attachment to was my “original” collection, pretty much acquired by the time I was 25. All the aforementioned genres, all original pressings and most of the contemporary ones bought upon their original release. I wasn’t even playing most of the “audiophile” stuff for my own enjoyment, only a small handful of discs when my audiophile friends came round. So a few years ago I made the momentous decision to sell all of that later stuff (some of which had become quite sought after and increased in value which was nice) and trade in my oil rig for a Technics 1200G.
When my father passed last year I even surprised myself and took the decision not to inherit his enormous vinyl collection (which I would never have had the space to house anyway), something I had been subconsciously anticipating most of my life. I realized that although there was much music that I loved and had grown up with, it was almost all (at least that which is important to me) available via streaming services and those physical LPs, in their sleeves, the physical manifestation of that music, just didn’t mean to me what it had meant to him. I was lucky enough to be able to sell the entire collection as one lot to a friend of his who will treasure it and has the space to house it and the time to categorize, file and enjoy it. I kept one disc, the very first one he ever bought, as a physical manifestation of the love of music and hifi that I inherited from him.
So now I am clear:
- Streaming is my number 1 source and the system is optimized around it, in other words that’s where I have focussed the budget. A corollary of that in my case is that I have no preamp, and the Vivaldi drives my power amp directly.
- I keep my records and play them occasionally when I am feeling nostalgic. Mostly when I’m alone or with old friends from that period of my life. Friends who lived them with me. Sound quality is not the overarching priority there, many of them have been played to death anyway. But every crease or stain on the sleeves holds a memory. That pokey little flat where I lived, that party, that girlfriend, that break-up… They really form the sound-track of the first third of my life.
- The Technics is currently connected via a phono ADC to the Vivaldi, although I will probably move it to a second system, maybe at our summer cottage, along with those records which are taking up too much space in my listening, ahem, living-room. That will sit in a small system with a nice integrated phono amp, some high quality bookshelf speakers and my Bartók or similar streamer/DAC.
It took a lot of soul-searching and a lot of reversing out of cul-de-sacs for me to get to this point. I hope it gives you some food for thought.