Have Any Of My Chordie Friends Given Up CD's?

purists!!!!! not me...i was so glad when cassettes came out so i could get away from crackles, rumbles, clicks and scratches. of course the tape would then stretch and make the music sound weird. ah, the relief i felt when CD's arrived; clean sound with crystal clarity...ahhhh heaven. i've still got a couple of dozen LP's in the attic gathering dust along with my panasonic turn table. i guess when i die they'll all be thrown in the skip anyway.
downloads? nah, half the fun of buying a record is reading the sleeve notes even if i have to wear two pairs of glasses to read them!

I dont so much buy the CD anymore as I do buy it from amazon or use YOUTUBE to MP3 and then I burn my own CD's for the car.Sometimes I just want the control of it, other times battery is low in phone and FM is all crap or commercials.  If I really like a band, Yes I will buy for the cover and insleve. The last physical CD I bought was Ace Frehley's Anomaly and Godsmacks last disk.

I still have my LP's and still listen to them.  Actually wanting to piece a component system back together.  I love column speakers and 100 watts!

Hmmm... I may be too young, or just was raised too stingy.

Well, as a kid (and even a teen) I played the heck out of those vinyls.  I mean, there were a few records that we had that had skips in certain locations that I was so used to them when I heard the song played in some other way I would get thrown off the beat a little because the skip was missing!  True story.  The Grease Album was one of my favorites to listen to, and sing along with when I was younger (though, don't be fooled, I'll still sing along and dance around the house like a fool to the Grease Album when I stream it though  Pandora).  To this day, I still know where the skips "belong" in some of those songs when I listen to the tracks and smile to myself because of the memory.

Grandma had an 8 track player, and everything she owned was Elvis.  Dad never thought they'd take off so he didn't buy one.  So he told us.  Actually, since Grandma got a Microwave at least 6 years before we did, I have a feeling we just didn't have the extra money for a few of these things... so I never actually manned an 8 track on my own and wasn't allowed to touch Grandma's musical players (oh no!  The children will put scratches in, or break it!  Here kids, have cookies instead!  Your mother doesn't give you chips?  Eat junk food!  Don't touch the "stereo"). 

So, other than a few records that my parents bought for us kids (Disco Mickey!  Gah, I can't believe my husband never heard "Macho Duck" until I forced him to last week), I didn't own any of that on my own.  My first was a very small boom box (welcome the 80's!) with a dual cassette so I could record everything off the radio and then record it onto another cassette!    I owned a few cassettes, but not a ton.  Why?  Dad bought me the ability to record my own songs, no reason to spend frivolous money on per-recorded ones!  Plus I had that awesome cassette my boyfriend made, and the one my best friend made for me...

I got a CD player as I became an adult, and joined one of those clubs where you're supposed to buy so many CD's each month to keep a great discount.  That was me forcing myself to OWN music that was per-recorded.  Then I stopped, because I saw what a scam it was.  At the time, I also stopped buying albums and realized that most of what I wanted to listen to was on the radio already being played 60 million times over... plus... the internet was here.  All those CD's?  Um... I think most are in the basement collecting dust.  I ripped the ones I wanted to my computer years ago and always keep them backed up on hard drives so they are available.  A few are in my car, though mostly my car is filled with "Kids Bop" CDs.  BUT... at the end of the day, everything I really want to listen to gets put on my iPhone and my iPhone simply gets plugged into the USB port in my car if I want to listen to specific music there (and again, there's a lot of songs on my iPod that belong to "the kids" not me anyway - I should download Disco Mickey or Grease... of course, they are already well aware of both and the little one and I were even singing "Cool Rider" from Grease 2 through the drug store last week).

I don't even have a CD player other than in the car (though the computer can play CDs, as can the Xbox).  I have some songs from Chordie members that have been ripped to my hard drive, the original CD's are ... somewhere, I think in a drawer.

So, yeah - I have probably bought more singles to download than I've ever bought of any other musical media.  Well.... I do probably own more printed music than anything else though.  I have several folders of choral compilations, a few books filled with Italian Arias, and my giant folder of printed chord/song sheets.

Getting back to Bill's original question..... the audio quality of a digital recording on something like CD is far superior to anything that could be pressed into a chunk of warm vinyl (not that these old ears could effectively "hear" the difference).  The jackets, artwork and feel of a vinyl record has a nostalgic effect that a plastic case and tiny disk can never replace.  That said, I am also of the group who has long abandoned LPs as a viable format, along with the "dead" Laser Disc (about the same size as an LP but read via laser), Beta-Max Video Cassettes, and "dial" Telephones..... and would be difficult to "retro-convert".    There is so much music out there (some is quite good), and for the most part if you can remember the title, you can find it on the web (for those who's memory is up to it), there is little incentive to "own" anything but the right of downloading to your "Library" that which you feel worthy.

Support the Artists, buy the Music, and attend as many Concerts as your Wallet will Allow..... the Memories are "Priceless".

My PC has a set of half-decent speakers hooked up to it, in order to stream YouTube, etc.

But I'm still locked into CDs in some ways, due to the other listening equipment I have. My car is a 2006 VW Jetta (which I love!) and it hasn't got an MP3 jack anywhere ... just a CD player. My home stereo system is an old Revox tuner / power amp combo, along with a 5-disk changer. It works fine, so I keep using it. Once I get with the 21st century with my car and stereo, I'll probably go MP3s / streaming all the way.