The Whole Shebang

I started getting bit by the record-collecting bug when I was in what we used to call Junior High school, nowadays Middle School. I had an RCA Victor record player with detached speakers covered by bright red cloth. Even by the standards of the day it wasn't much of a record player, but it was mine.

But I had two major limitations for acquiring sufficient recordings to enjoy my player. The first was funds: I had an allowance and by the time I was about 15 I was bagging groceries in a nearby store. But it didn't bring in much. The second was access. Western Denver was spread way out, I only started being able to drive when I was 16, and there just weren't many record stores around.

The Columbia Record Club was something of a godsend for me. Every month I could buy some stuff. I remained limited, but still. It was via the Columbia Record Club that I started acquiring all of those Stravinsky recordings with him conducting. They were pretty new then. I started getting to know the big American orchestras -- Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, Boston. Eventually I even got a whiff of the major Europeans such as the Philharmonia under Klemperer and of course the lordly Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan.

But still, it was always a bit of a struggle to scrape together enough to buy records. So I was always hungry, as it were. That hunger stayed with me into adult life. When I lived in Baltimore I made some forays up to Record Finder, that amazing record store that stored everything by label and catalog number and, by God, they had it all. Then came San Francisco and Tower Records, not to mention Odyssey Records -- easier to get to since they were right downtown, whereas Tower required a cross-town slough on the Stockton bus.

But that's all changed. Nowadays the advent of the big streaming services has completely changed our relationship to commercial audio recordings. For my 11.99 per month I've got a Tidal subscription; I also have a Qobuz subscription. There's a lot of overlap between the two, but still what I have now is really just about everything. No buying, no waiting.

And it's in the same quality audio as a CD at the very least, sometimes in higher-def. (Whether or not I can hear that difference is another point, but at least it's there.)

A massive collector such as myself, with a personal recordings collection that, ripped to FLAC and Apple Lossless formats, takes up 7 terabytes of disc space, can now multiply that collection's size by something approaching infinity. If it was recorded, I can probably get it. I might need to buy some restored audio from those find folks at Pristine Audio or Marston, but that's just because I have this thing for older recordings as well as newer ones.

But essentially I now select from all of it, as I wish, and from right here at home. The magic of the Internet and streaming audio has to be the single biggest change in audio history, bigger than the move from acoustic to electronic recording, from 78 RPM to hi-fi and 33.3 RPM vinyl, bigger than analog becoming digital. It doesn't change stereo equipment or media. It changes something bigger -- which is how we get it in the first place.