Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

Personally I'm happier supporting artists directly by spend £25 on new digital music each month and streaming it from a local source (or going to gigs!)

amen

I'm not talking about using Tidal and not buying a few hundred quids worth of vinyl a month on top. Tidal is still pretty useful for the hard to find stuff. I think the streaming model could become more expensive once the quality of service has been established, in order to better compensate the artist/label.

That's kind of what Quobuz are doing. They offer a model where you sign up for a year and get big discounts on digital downloads which you keep in your library.

If I bought all the music I wanted to listen to in a month it would cost several hundreds of pounds, not £25?!

Only several hundred?! Only? Or is that just current? Just curious as if was only hundreds to get my music back I'd pay it. I really do need to find a solution. Meh.

How does one bulk buy 90s to current of electronic like trance / techno...

No, I mean, I add about an album a day to my library that back in the day I would’ve purchased. So, that’s like £300 a month if the album costs a tenner. I cannot spend £300 a month on new albums.

Fiat play

So you don't listen to any music that you've already heard?
We only own about 600ish albums, and tend to listen to them regularly.

I may buy 1 CD/LP a month, so yeah, around there.
I listen to the radio (mostly national/university stations), hear from friends and go to gigs to find new music.

Just read your answer to @ChainBreaker - how many albums do you have!?

I have thousands of 12” records and cds. They are with my turntables. Today a lot of what I streamed was tracks I already own. I used to spend about £50 a week on records and don’t want to return to that.

I tend to listen to my itunes library, which is almost 100% burned from cds and lps. Generally people buy less music as they age, but that is kind of moot these days with many younger/modern types not buying any to begin with.
It would be impossible for me to return regularly to music I love if I owned/streamed as much as most on here.

My old iTunes library was at about 6000 tracks, but I haven’t touched that since 2011 when I was 18. I probably have half of those in my Spotify library and an additional 10000ish tracks that are only in my Spotify library.
I wear headphones all day at work. Music discovery is easy.

Music discovery is easy

I know, I purposely limit my options since I'm pretty happy with what I have.

I have hundreds of dance 12" from that period which I'd sell, I used to have them listed on Discogs and I was selling the less valuable ones 25 at a time on the bay. I'm going to be listing them again as I need to make space for the incoming and I've already picked out the dance ones I want to keep.

You can find whole collections for sale but you will end up with a lot of chaff. You also run into the problem that categories are quite broad and you will probably get a lot of music that you're not that into.

I wear headphones all day at work. Music discovery is easy.

Pretty much my thoughts also. I still have a lot of FLAC rips on my PC that I've been meaning to put onto a hard drive and connect through my amp as it'll play straight off that.

Recently moved from apple music back to spotify and slowly building up a library there too. My organisation on spotify is fucking terrible though.

You start going to second hand record shops and talking to the owner

Second hand record shops would love you. Try Pure Records in Brixton. They had a ton of dance vinyl in last time I was there.

Am rather enjoying Tidal. Have quickly been locating lots of music from my past but there are some things I can’t find (Black Dog - Bytes for example).

But a lot of things aren’t in their higher quality Masters encoding.

Had been waiting for the new set up to listen to Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and it’s fucking amazing.

Having got a sofa and cushions into the space has softened the sound. Soon will follow big blackout velvet curtains.

Watching Blue Planet last night was amazing just for the audio alone. Later this week we will install the projector and screen.

Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden - amazing LP as is Laughing Stock

I don't think there's much wrong with the cd quality stuff on Tidal. The mastering of a release would make more difference above CD quality. That's what I'm waiting for, a bit more transparency on the mastering. Although I'm not a fan of MQA there's a solid reason for authenticating a studio master these days.

Listening to Spirit Of Eden for the first time. I'd never moved past The Colour Of Spring.

@freddo - still happy with your Presonus? I desperately need to stop using the Sonos that came with my apartment. They're so shit.

Still undecided between traditional separates and active speakers. I've gone down an absolute rabbit hole on the Audio Science Review forum and YouTube this week and everything I'm reading is that Active Speakers just make more sense for me. But surprisingly not just from a space saving perspective, but from a SQ point of view as well. E.g. lots of people who have LS50s with very expensive amps then hear the LS50 Wireless speakers and are blown away by how good they sound because KEF have engineered the built in dac/amp to pair with the speakers. I've read the word 'engineered' a lot in the last few days....

Sonos are shit until you get them setup right.

Once they are solid, they are great.

What issues are you having?

Or maybe you mean sound quality wise?

Hence the Sonos Connect, running the digital out into external DAC and amp and speakers.

Well, I was talking about SQ, but they do some weird things. I have a 1 and 3 and no other speakers. The 3 is in the same room as my access point, yet it always loses it's connection from Spotify Connect. I can manually open the Sonos app and play music from there without issue but the Spotify app gives me a big fat nope.

I'm also still using the inbuilt speakers on my TV and that's obviously gash. My apartment is tiny, relatively, so I want one pair of speakers to use either side of the television for both TV use and music. I have space for separates in the TV cabinet, but if I can do better with active, then that is absolutely preferable.

This is the post I referred to earlier. It's from a thread called Active vs Passive speakers.

If you speak with people who have owned the passive L50's and heard them with loads of different amps (even super expensive ones) and who then also heard the active LS50W's, the reaction is sometimes 'I never knew they could sound that could'. Even though they are all-in-ones.
I am one of these people. I guess this was a great example (to me) of what can happen when the speaker designer gets to choose the drivers and amps for these drivers and optimise the amplification of the drivers and the DSP crossover etc.
But to fully appreciate what I mean, you need to demo the passive LS50's first. Even with beefy Pass Labs amps or other highly rated amps and really good DAC if you like (just for demo purpose). Then compare with the LS50W's...
Of course I'm not suggesting everyone has been and will be blown away but I was and I do know many others that have.

I've been pretty convinced by active monitors for quite a while. The shorter distance between amp and driver helps the designers. The idea that mixing and matching amps and speakers is the path to Nirvana might just be an audiophile pipe dream, it can cost a fortune too.

Biggest problem with actives is the power cord.

Interesting interesting. I am definitely leaning more and more towards them.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1390044-REG/jbl_305p_mkii_studio.html

Seems a mighty fine deal.

I remain extremely happy with the PreSonus eris 4.5s. I did a lot of research before i bought them and could only find rave reviews, not one negative one. Get them, not least because they have EQ to tune them to your room.

If for any reason you don't buy the PreSonus you could also look at these https://kantoaudio.com/powered-speakers/yu6/