Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z
ab_ba has some comments about the audiophile record collectors he has been watching lately on youtube:
Sometimes I wonder why people are even into records.
I get it that it’s fun to collect them and compare them and brag about them and have a tangible thing you can hold in your hands and put on your shelves.
But for me, those aspects of vinyl listening are a distraction at best, and unhealthy at worst, and I really try to resist their allure.
If somebody’s not doing it for the sound, it’s a dangerous hobby, since it can waste a lot of time and money. If you ARE doing it for the sound, you have to be an empiricist. You have to wonder. You’ve got to be curious! [ab_ba wrote a very nice piece about the importance of curiosity, which you can read here.]
ab_ba
He added this in another email to us:
Part of me envies the dudes who can just buy what they’re told to buy, and believe they have it as good as it can possibly be. Sometimes I think it must be nice to just be complacent like that. But, I’ll bet they eventually stop listening to their records. It’s not all that rewarding a hobby if you stop at pretty good sound. I can’t see myself ever getting bored of the way my music sounds.
ab_ba
I’m sure I will have plenty more to say on this blog regarding record collecting, but for now I would just point out that audiophiles collect records for lots of reasons, and if they enjoy having a collection of audiophile pressings, and find that they derive satisfaction from owning and discussing them with other similarly-interested individuals, then more power to them. Who am I to tell them what they should be doing with their spare time?
For me, and obviously for ab_ba and other letter writers, Robert Brook among them, the appeal to this aspect of record collecting borders on nonexistent, a subject I have written a fair amount about here on the blog, to wit:
For us here at Better Records, collecting for the sake of collecting has never held much appeal.
We like to play records, not just collect them, and we like to play records with the best sound we can find, using the shootout process we developed over the last two decades. We call those kinds of records Hot Stamper pressings, and finding them, and making them available to other like-minded audiophiles, has been the focus of our work for close to twenty years.
All the collecting we leave to other people who enjoy that sort of thing.
The only kinds of records I like to play are the ones that give me a thrill, the way live music (sometimes) does.
Further Reading