Music spending

Music is unnecessary if your computer has a sine wave generator, it is good enough for evaluating the gear. I do have one of the Stereophile test CD's just in case though.

 

In all seriousness my cd collection is rather large as I started collecting in high school and got a bunch of HUGE generous donations, like whole symphony cycles and whole piano collections and entire opera cycles, from a friends father who had too many recordings of the same piece.

But what I did to stretch the budget was buy a lot of VoxBox classics (this was in the 90s when CDs actually retailed for 12-30/disc) which was avg of $5/disc, nowadays the record companies are reissuing a recording artist's entire catalog for an average of 2-4/disc which is a great bargain for old timers like me. Look for conductor catalogs on Amazon now and the pricing is great and often times the associated artwork and notes are welcome bonuses.

The second "secret" I used was Berkshire Record Outlet and they are still very big. Most CDs were $1-5/disc.

 

I had an extensive CD collection (costing many time more than I've spent on gear) stolen from me in my late 20s. Tidal has been a godsend, allowing me to listen to 80% of what I had in that collection, lossless, plus helping me discover lots more.

 

I don't count exactly how much I have spent on CD, but it easily went past 2000€ over the last 5 years. Sometimes I think that if I didn't buy that much CDs, I would have had the Yggdrasil

 

My current record purchasing plan:

 

I spend more depending on how much time I have to listen. An album will at least get one good listen so the more time I have the more music I buy.

Nowadays I work a lot so I only buy something I will listen to, even if it requires a fresh coffee after a 10 hour shift.

 

The problem I have with vinyl is it's getting more and more popular and yet at the same time access to pure analog or otherwise great recordings is diminishing. At some point I'll have enough? Or more importantly, at some point I'll stop buying faster than I can listen.

 

I've already significantly slowed down on my vinyl purchases.

 

More likley you'll turn to Discogs or other used marketplaces for orginal or second pressings, that is if you're hunting older stuff

Discogs is a rabbit hole in itself. Once I find something I like, I go to the sellers other items and start browsing trying to combine shipping. Usually it's $5 for the 1-5 records or something similar. The last purchase I made a few days ago was for around 20 LP's at $105 and $13 shipping.

 

I've been buying a ton of music internationally through discogs as it seems like they are the ones with the pristine copies. I should travel Europe just for the record stores.