How do you like to listen to your music? All things hi fi and format.

  • Carrying on from from a couple of comments made in the thread about SACD I thought there should be a thread on the way we like to listen to our music and the formats we get them on etc.


    You just can't beat vinyl. Never have done. I have a collection of vinyl and CD. CD is best for general playing and finding songs easily. I may pick certain albums on CD or vinyl sometimes on price or how I think I may listen to it. Nothing beats though my B&W P7 headphones ,sitting back and immersing in a favourite record. ( Which should be black). For many years stuff was unavailable on LP or very limited I have a lot of CDs from that time along with lot of second hand records . I have an i pod for portability with most of my CDs on it plus a few other bits and pieces. We also have an Alexa which is ok as long as you can remember what you want to hear and don't want info on any tracks .Mrs Farmer loves it.


    I have newish speakers Q acoustics Concept 20s I went from floorstanders to something small. I love them . I have my 30 year old Linn Axis deck. Not quite the LP12 but I love it . It's been with me longer than than the current Mrs Farmer and both my children. An old Arcam alpha 7 CD player and a newish Marantz amp . Still can't make my mind my mind up about the Amp. When I do change anything on the system ( very rare) there is always something else to hear .

  • At the moment, I listen to music almost exclusively over iPod. I use either earphones or a Bose amplifier. That is not particularly the best of all solutions, but I have reached a point, where I stopped buying music in physical formats but only mp3-files. As soon as my budget will allow, I will get me a proper sound system, that I can connect to the TV and that will allow me to play music from my devices via bluetooth.

    First we learned to walk on water.

    Then we tried something harder.

    - Red Seven -

  • Yes, as I said over on the other thread, CD is my most used choice. Have a NAD C521BEE CD player, which cost me nothing as it was faulty, I fixed it with a part for £9, effectively the whole CD motor and laser assembly, it's a Sony part. I also have an old Sony CD player as a spare, and my original, mid-80's Philips CD104, still working perfectly, after replacing parts of the CD loading drawer and servo board with parts off ebay. It's a great player, and will read discs many other machines won't touch.


    Amp is a 10 year old Cambridge Audio azur 340A, and a pair of Cambridge S30 speakers, plus a pair of 30 year old Wharfedale Diamond's in the conservatory wired to the same amp.


    For portable music, I used 4 Sony NWA1200's, each loaded with different stuff for different reasons, holiday, car, etc. But, sadly, they use an OLED display which is now dying on 3 of them, so they will have to go. A shame, as they use Atrac, not MP3, and so sound better, and allow gapless playback, so Behind the Lines and Duchess don't have a moments silence between them, like MP3 do. As both our cars now have USB port's, the cheap option is MP3 coding on 32m/b memory sticks.


    Surround is a Denon AVRX-250BT and a set of JBL 5.1 speakers, which cost a total of about £280, so a budget system, cheaper than my hi-fi, and, like the Farmer said elsewhere, it's not as high end as the stereo, but good enough to get the effect. An LG Blu-ray player feeds it with surround stuff from the likes of Tim Bowness, the Moody Blues, BJH and XTC.


    Still got my old Dual CS505 turntable, but, to me, vinyl doesn't sound as good as CD, all things being equal (in terms of mastering quality, etc.) Still got my Dual C814 cassette deck too.

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!

  • With apologies to the audiophiles out there (and on here)... You may want to avert your gaze.


    Google play music subscription and Jabra elite earbuds streaming from my phone.


    I have a turntable and many records, I love listening to them when I have the chance but with three kids under ten the chance is a rare thing.

  • I never seem to enough time to listen to as much as I would like . Grown up children. seem to take up more time than Un grown ups especially as I'm a grandasd with elderly parents.!!!!

  • I should add - since I forgot earlier - the turntable is a cheap enough audio Technica one (at-lp60 bt) and I have an Elac B6 pair of bookshelf speakers and an Onkyo receiver, the 686 one. I'm very happy with it except I never get to use it really, and have plans to expand the speaker to the full set and probably get a better turntable. When these plans will come to fruition is anyone's guess!


    I also used to have an awesome pair of Sennheiser Bluetooth over ear headphones but some scumbag stole them from me when I left them at work years ago.

  • Yes, as I said over on the other thread, CD is my most used choice. Have a NAD C521BEE CD player,


    Still got my old Dual CS505 turntable, but, to me, vinyl doesn't sound as good as CD, all things being equal (in terms of mastering quality, etc.) Still got my Dual C814 cassette deck too.

    Sounds great excuse the pun . Glad you still have the turntable, I was worried that I couldn't speak to you anymore.!

  • I have nearly audiophile speakers my brother made for me, I listen mostly to CDs and cassettes (no joke). I have a couple vinyls but no record player. I also have this bluetooth thingie to listen to streamed music from my smartphone but I hardly ever use it. When I listen to music from the internet I use headphones.


    About physical formats etc., there was a time I used to download lots of music from rapidshare and megaupload and all these sites but I completely went back to buying CDs. I usually get them at the CD store or I order second hand CDs online.

  • I should add - since I forgot earlier - the turntable is a cheap enough audio Technica one (at-lp60 bt) and I have an Elac B6 pair of bookshelf speakers and an Onkyo receiver, the 686 one. I'm very happy with it except I never get to use it really, and have plans to expand the speaker to the full set and probably get a better turntable. When these plans will come to fruition is anyone's guess!


    I also used to have an awesome pair of Sennheiser Bluetooth over ear headphones but some scumbag stole them from me when I left them at work years ago.

    Just looked up the turntable: Good news, it has a magnetic cartridge! Many modern turntables, the mp3 ripper type in particular, have a ceramic one, whose high tracking weight and low quality chew up your records. Another advantage of CD, doesn't matter how cheap the player is, it doesn't wear your discs out. :)

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!

  • Yes I wondered this . Most people are downloading or streaming . I just can't my head around not owning my music in physical form.

    Just to point out, I cannot buy my music here in Canada. Most of my music used to come from UK or America.Costing lots to ship including sometimes custom charges. Costing more then the CD.. There are a few outlets out there, where you can buy music and download them. Bandcamp or the artists themselves. I have so many CD's, it clutters the the place. I now download my music because it's instant. :)

  • Just to point out, I cannot buy my music here in Canada. Most of my music used to come from UK or America.Costing lots to ship including sometimes custom charges. Costing more then the CD.. There are a few outlets out there, where you can buy music and download them. Bandcamp or the artists themselves. I have so many CD's, it clutters the the place. I now download my music because it's instant. :)

    That's interesting about the difficulty you have in buying music. I'm not surprised at your clutter judging from regular posts in the "what are you listening to" thread. I have around 700 records and about 450 CDs at a guess and I'm running out of space . I insist to Mrs Farmer (and others) that it is only quite a small collection compared to many. I like them all together in the living room where I can see them and get to them . Don't really buy much these days. I never seem to have the time to play as much as I would like with what I have, leave alone trying to fit in a load of new stuff. We have an Alexa and I have streamed a few bits through that ,plugged into the hi fi. I'm going to have get into the modern age.

  • Mainly CDs and MDs, mainly on a stereo type thing, with speakers and stuff. Made by some company or other.


    I remain dedicated to MDs. I've got loads of them, with albums, compilations and radio shows on. I have a MD walkman, indeed several such walkmen, and a set of little speakers off of ebay.


    I also put albums and compilations in mp3 form onto a usb stick doodah to use in the car.


    Oh and the stereo has a radio, we have 2 digital radios, the car radio and a beautiful old transistor radio, and I use all these various radios for listening to radio stations, mainly BBC 6Music, Radio 3, Classic FM, RnaGael and Moray Firth Radio, using my ears.

    Abandon all reason

  • MD = minidisk? I had one of those too and a bunch of MDs. When they launched I think the MP3 players maxed out at 2gb or so and I remember thinking a removable medium is always gonna win out here. I went on a very long trip (more than a year) and took a bunch with me. All of suede's first five albums fit on one disk except for one song I had to cut - The Chemistry Between Us. I came back after the trip and listened to that song; it was great! Like discovering a new song from one of my favorite bands.


    Anyway I didn't persevere with the format but I enjoyed it very much for a couple of years.

  • Mini Disc used the Sony Atrac format of coding I mentioned earlier. Sony made many hard disc drive walkmans in the 2000's, including the NWA1200 I have 4 of, with an 8Gb drive, which would hold about 120 CD's at 128bps, and sounded better than MP3 twice that bitrate, and the NWA3000 with a 20Gb drive, which would hold over twice that.


    Great machine, but as I said, the screens are now dying on them, so I'm going to have to abandon them. Atrac is still used in Japan, but not available elsewhere.


    The machines can be used as memory sticks, so at least they are still some use.

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!

  • Mostly CDs for general listening for me. However, I had all of these DVD-Audio discs and SACDs that had surround versions collected over the years (e.g., the Genesis boxsets) that I decided that I wanted a proper system that would play them.


    I did hesitate at the time - vinyl was making a comeback at the same time when I was making my choice. So, I did consider getting back into vinyl. However, several things made the choice easy for me to go the new millennium route:


    1) the cost of new vinyl is utterly ridiculous

    2) SACDs and BluRay Audio discs have true lossless sound (DVD-Audio can be too, if it is done right)

    3) ripping CD audio for use on portable players is dead easy; yes, you can do this for vinyl too, but it's a pain in the ass in comparison


    There are other reasons, but those are the highlights.


    I get why people like vinyl - hell, I grew up with it too. If you heard albums that way first, hearing them on vinyl is the only way they are going to sound "right". Having the artwork in a larger format is a real plus too (I don't know how the downloading/streaming folk so easily do without it). However, there are some objective facts about vinyl that aficionados seem to ignore: CDs have a wider dynamic range than vinyl, you can't play vinyl in your car or on a walk (unless you master Audacity or equivalent), vinyl is much bulkier if you have a large collection (it sure makes moving house more "fun"), etc. People seem to like vinyl for aesthetic reasons as much as the sound (rituals of talking the record out of the sleeve and putting it on the turntable, the slight crackle of the needle on vinyl, flipping from one side to the other, holding the cover while listening, etc.). I was happy to grow up with vinyl, but I've always preferred CD once it became the dominant format. Yes, when CDs were brand new and the record companies didn't remaster them properly for the new format, their sound back in the 80s left a lot to be desired (e.g., the first CD version of W&W was dreadful - however, nothing will beat the awfulness of the original CD version of King Crimson's debut album - the source tape noise literally drowned out much of the music), The record companies also made a mistake with CDs early in the new millennium by making them too loud (the notorious "loudness war" - this bad mixing/mastering also infected some early DVD-Audio discs too). However, during the 90s and for the last 15 years, CDs generally sound wonderful!


    But this is unfair - I should pick on the mp3 lovers too! ^^ Yes, I get the convenience - that's easy to see. However, WAV files and even lossless files are every bit as portable as mp3 files. Even more, most portable players today (i.e., one's smartphone) play WAV files every bit as easily as mp3s...and the WAV files sound better! What's more, if your phone is from 2016 or later, it can most probably play lossless files too (e.g., beginning with the iPhone 7, Apple finally made their products able to play FLAC files (the most commonly used/found lossless format) - before then, they only played Apple Lossless which virtually nothing was available in; the Android equivalents I think also can play FLAC files). OK - I hear you say, "What about the storage space?" Well, if your storage space is limited, you probably do want to steer clear of the lossless files. However, WAV files are a nice, tidy size. You can get a whole lot of songs/albums on your device...and they sound better! :thumbup:


    My goodness, how I have digressed. ^^


    Back more on topic, I usually listen to (in order of preference) :


    1) SACDs

    2) BluRay Audio discs

    3) DVD-Audio discs

    4) CDs

    5) mp3s (if I can only get a particular song/album that way)


    The first three are my preference when I'm at home - I do also listen to CDs at home too. When I am in my car, CDs. When I am walking/traveling without driving, ripped WAV files from my CDs (and mp3s if they aren't avoidable).


    My audio system:


    An OPPO BDP-103D BluRay disc player (this plays virtually anything encoded on a disc, including SACDs)


    Yamaha RX-V383 amplifier/receiver


    Sony 5.1 speaker system (the 2 large floor-standing speakers have the model number of SS-CS3 - the rest of the speaker system is from the same "family", as it were)


    The system is a good system. Yes, there are better ones if you are willing to part with literally thousands of dollars/pounds/euros. However, if one shops carefully, one can get a very good deal. The Sony surround speakers on their own are $1500 full price; however, in the States, there is a chain called Best Buy which has an annual sale called Audiofest every March. I bought during this sale - thus, I got the speakers and the amplifier/receiver for about $750. Very doable. :thumbup:


    My ears have been very happy ever since...

    Stepping out the back way, hoping nobody sees...

  • All the points 1 -3 are true , but point 4 which you glaringly omitted or forgot is of course that vinyl is simply better because it is. ^^


    You are also so completely wrong about playing a record in your car.

  • Yes, re portability of record players, my first audio item that wasn't a radio was a Bush Discassette, which played 7 inch records vertically, and cassettes, even whle being carried. It also chewed up 6 C cell batteries in 10 hours, and chewed your records up too, with it's spring loaded tracking arm, and ceramic cartridge.


    https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/bush_discassette_dc70.html

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!

  • Seriously I do love my vinyl. I never got rid of my records. I don't like crackle but rarely really get it enough to bother me. I like the sound . The biggest let down for me is that they are too much of a pain to bother ripping but I have enough CDs to make a good portable collection on my ipod.. Steve Hackett usually provides a CD or download code with his new records . Also yes they are very expensive but I only get a few now and again , I still get CDs partly due to price. Records are usually for Birthdays and xmas. Also like to browse the second hand shops .

  • Yes, re portability of record players, my first audio item that wasn't a radio was a Bush Discassette, which played 7 inch records vertically, and cassettes, even whle being carried. It also chewed up 6 C cell batteries in 10 hours, and chewed your records up too, with it's spring loaded tracking arm, and ceramic cartridge.


    https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/bush_discassette_dc70.html

    So now I'm going be looking at that radio museum. Thanks. I love all the old hi fi stuff. If had the money and space I would certainly be a collector of old hi fi especially record players. I still have an old box record player , the one with speaker at the front ,two dials , on/off volume and bass treble. 4:speeds and spindle and arm to play multiple singles. I still have the old 60s singles I was given by my sister that I played on it when I was child , including some Beatles stuff. Great stuff.


    This sort of thing . Mine is blue.