On a forum I frequent, a question came up wondering why there are people who do not aspire to find and appreciate the best sound quality possible.  The answer is probably obvious on the surface – it’s just not something that interests them.  Like some people don’t have a care for paintings or photographs, or interior design, or anything else a person could be passionate about.

But on another level, on my level, what about people who do like music, but don’t like crappy sounding audio systems?  There’s a few sub-questions in there, like: Why don’t you have the best-sounding stereo possible?  Why don’t you own the highest-rated-in-terms-of-sound-quality CD for each of the albums you own? Why aren’t you into vinyl?  Why aren’t you also up in arms about people settling for MP3 and earbuds or playing music through their phone’s speaker?

Because I used to own a dedicated stereo system and because I plan to own one in the coming future, I felt that I needed to consider this question.  There is a certain “floor” of quality I insist on, but as far as a “ceiling”, I can’t be sure.

Regarding playback systems, I am not compelled to buy $3k speakers or $6k amplifiers to get the sound quality I require.  At the same time, I can’t really tolerate a $100 sound system either.  I swap out the stereo in each car I get, always to an improvement.  Despite having sound systems at the house, none of them are really satisfying.  My home theater system is a booming, bass beast – not good for music.  I have a couple small speaker docks that are ok for background music, but not for listening.  My best sound system is my computer running through my Event studio monitors.  Next year, I’ll get my listening system for the living room.

When I do buy my stereo, I’ll be buying what my budget allows from a quality brand.  For a true audiophile, this wouldn’t be satisfactory.  Consumer brands have lots of quality problems, and they would be able to identify what they are.  I wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t be able to tell by listening either.  After all, I don’t have any opportunity to compare systems, since I don’t have any friends (with stereo systems). Neither do I have the money to swap out components to try and make small to moderate improvements that I may not even notice.  So, what I have is what I hear and what I will enjoy.

As far as listening goes, I’m not sure I have the ear to be an audiophile.  I can identify obviously bad sound (like my theater system), but after a certain point, I can’t identify differences.  I can say that I don’t like it, but I wouldn’t be able to explain why.  More discerning people could say it was because of compression or eq or “presence” and some of the best could say it was because of speaker placement or wiring or the amp’s power supply.  I can’t do that.

The last piece of the loaded question is why not take the time to evaluate different masterings of albums to have the “best”?  My current stance is to own a version as close to the original as possible.  Before, I didn’t really have a position.  I’d just buy whatever was available.  I’ve decided that the original mix/mastering is the authority.  That’s what people liked.  A remaster is not a re-release.  It’s not like an album from 1986 is going to re-enter the charts because it was remastered.  All remastering is for existing fans.  It’s like version upgrades of software.

In my random browsing about CD collecting and storing, I came across a website for “CD collectors”.  Some people were posting pictures of their collections and some would post pictures of their finds at stores.  It was kind of cute, and I mean that in a patronizing way.

Post titles like “Started 2 weeks ago, full collection so far” and “After 6 months, this is my collection”.  And then there’s a picture of a dozen CDs, or maybe two dozen.  And when I think about my 800+ collection, I snicker a little inside.  And when I see that the CDs are mostly new releases, I snicker a little more.

And boy, isn’t that pompous of me?  It is, I admit it, and I accept that.  I mean, I could make a post saying, “After 30 years – my collection” and there would be people snickering at me.  “30 years and only 800?  I bought that much in the last 2 years!  My collection of 3,000 laughs at you.”

Despite the holier-than-thou ranking and hierarchy of collectors in which I probably place in the 70th percentile (The curve is exponential.  Once you break a certain level, you are in rare company), at the same time, I am encouraged.  These are people just discovering the joy of collecting physical media.  Judging by their selections, they are young, which means there is still life in physical media.  It’s not dead.

There is another reason for encouragement as well.  I’m not going to pretend that piracy doesn’t exist, whether software or music or video.  I can admit that I used to be a pirate.  In the old, old days, we used to have dual cassette decks that would copy tapes.  There’s really no legitimate need for a dual-deck unit otherwise.  So, I had plenty of copied tapes.  Why?  Because I was young and poor.  I also had lots of pirated software.  Why?  Exact same reason.  I couldn’t afford $500 for Photoshop.  As I grew older and started making money in my career, I didn’t need to resort to piracy anymore.  I didn’t need to “settle” for a copy.  I could get an original.  And I started valuing having that original in my collection.

If these budding collectors are anything like I was back then, that means they are beginning to advance in their life, making a living wage, where they can afford the luxury of not stealing.  That means the world is getting better.  Also, they take pride in their collection.  Consider the pride between showing someone 200 gigs of downloaded albums (which may elicit some praise from some people) vs. showing someone a collection of 100 CDs.  “They’re all real.  They’re permanent.” 

You can copy off that 200GB of music to your friend and not feel a ounce of pain.  But, giving up a CD from your collection, you’re actually losing something.  It’s the same psychological trick pundits use when they encourage you to live a cash lifestyle.  By handing over physical cash when you buy things, you feel a loss, more so than when you just swipe a credit card.

So even as these beginners are showing off their tiny collections, it’s still something to encourage and cheer on.  They have many years ahead of them and decades and decades of music to discover and collect.

Lately, I’ve been looking and dreaming about getting a true stereo audio system like what I used to have.  A bit of research showed me that dedicated stereo systems aren’t dead, they’re just brands I am unfamiliar with.  So, I’ve been spending lots of time reading and thinking and drooling over the idea of having a listening space.

And my CD purchases keep going.  Completing my collection of the MCA Master Series wasn’t the end of my music collecting.  Even though I’m not into modern music, there still remains a wealth of older music available for me to purchase.  There are benefits to this.  First, the music is cheap, because it’s old and used.  Second, there is a chance of getting a collectable for cheap.  A collectable CD?  Worth more than a drink coaster?  You’d be surprised.  Especially in the era of music I purchase, there are a couple specific things to be on the watch for in order to get a CD that has collector value. 

The thing to know is that when CDs first came out, in the mid-1980’s, the primary goal was to get as many titles available for sale as possible.  In order to do that, record companies made glass masters of CDs straight from the master tapes used to create records of that time.  Later on, when there was more available time, the record companies would remaster those original master tapes.  The remastering process would include different EQ and effects, sometimes an improvement, sometimes not, but always different than the original.

Knowing that, when I say that there is an audience that insists on having the pure, original sound (defined as being the LP version), and that CDs that contain that sound are limited to early, early pressings, you can easily see the scarcity-to-value premise.  Yes, the original pressings of CDs are more prized by audiophiles.  That’s not to say they are always superior.  As engineers’ mastering and remastering skills became better, CDs got better sounding, with better stereo separation and more dynamic range, but the “purity” of the original sound is still prized.

There’s a couple of simple clues to finding a first-run CD, and naturally, there’s a ton of subtleties that I can’t get into.  But, if you want to get one of these CDs, you need to be looking for an album recorded pre-1990, and manufactured in either Japan or West Germany.  One sure clue that you are getting a first-run CD is that the case spine is frosted smooth, instead of ribbed.  Another sign, and one that raises the CD’s collectability, is if the CD is printed with a “target” design.  Search for Target CD if you want to know more about these.

Yesterday, The GF and I made an impromptu stop at a local CD store.  I was hoping to pick up an Ultradisc or two (Ultradiscs are gold-plattered CDs with highly-reputed remastering and are very desirable).  Not finding any, I bought a couple of CDs by The Cars.  $3 and $5 – not bad at all.

We stopped at Sonic and I took a closer look at my purchases.  One CD I was immediately disappointed in myself with.  It wasn’t a retail CD; it was a CD Club pressing.  These are easily identified and I should have passed on it.  Slightly depressed, I opened up the other CD and was shocked to see a target CD inside.  I quickly closed the case and checked the case edge.  It was frosted.  I just got a target CD for $5, which would be sold by a knowledgeable seller for $15-$20.  Mood immediately elevated.

I had discounted the thought of ever getting any rare CDs from my local CD shops, because I assumed these guys knew what they were selling.  They should have identified that disc just as I had and sold it on the Internet for 3x what they sold it to me.  But, since I had recently bought an Ultradisc for $22 (valued online at $45-$50) and now finding a target CD for $5, this gives me hope for finding other collector’s items.

As I’ve previously noted, I have finished the acquisition phase of my CD collection.  I have also completed the scanning of the cover art.  The results of this have been added to Flickr and also as a series of pages for other’s benefit.  To increase the benefits, I decided to contribute to a music metadata website.

I think I’d been through this before, and I had a big internal debate as to whether to use MusicBrainz or Discogs.  Initially, I chose Musicbrainz, but something didn’t sit well with me during that experience and I gave it up pretty quickly.  Recently, I submitted some missing information to Discogs and it went a lot smoother.  So I think I’ve found my home, there.  History shows I’ve said that before and ended up disappointed.  We’ll see.

Discogs seems to be more of what I want anyway, because they focus on collectors, which is more and more how I view myself and my CDs.  So, not only do you simply submit information, you also consume that information by tracking which CDs you own.  I started doing that sporadically.  I’m about half-way through with over 300 of my 600+ albums logged.

The problem is, when you are logging a collectable, you have to be very specific as to which collectible you have.  In the case of albums, each album can be released under different labels in different countries under different catalog numbers.  So as I was logging my collection on the website, I was pretty much choosing the most likely candidate from the multiple choices.

To be the most accurate (and there is a benefit to being accurate), I would have to have the CD in front of me to make sure I was choosing the right one, with the right label and catalog number.  Instead of doing that, I decided I should record the Label, Barcode, and Catalog Number in the files’ metadata, so I can refer to them as needed.  So, for a little while each day, I sit in font of my CD rack with my laptop and record that data into the files.

I had previously used Windows Media Player’s metadata feature to try and add all missing info using their metadata services.  As I was going through and adding the actual info from my CDs, I discovered how inaccurate the results really were.  How could an application determine what label the CD was on, when all it has is a ripped audio file?  For every album I had to change from Sony to Columbia or anything else, I got really irritated.  Not so much that it was wrong, because I understand how it could be wrong, but more because I could have been put in a position of giving bad information.  I insist on being as truthful and accurate as possible.

One of the benefits of being accurate is that Discogs can value your collection based on prior sales of the same item.  Of course, if you have a common or a rare release of an album, that can make a big difference in its value, so accuracy is important.  Being about half-way through my collection, and with moderate accuracy, my collection has a median value of $1500.  I have some CDs worth $60 and some worth $.75.

Today, I purchased the remaining CDs to complete my collection of the entire MCA Master Series catalog: 44 CDs released between 1986 and 1990, including one album with vocals and a rare special issue compilation included with BMW vehicles from that era. 

I thought I was done at 42 CDs. I knew about the country/vocal album put out at the very end of the MCA Master Series label’s life and I wanted to purposely disregard it because it has no interest to me.  I never had any hope of finding the BMW CD, since it was made so long ago in probably an incredibly small quantity and who would keep something like a promo CD with a new car?  However, as fate would have it, the completion of my collection came in a fortunate wave.  The two expensive holdouts became available for less than I’d seen before, a search for the rare BMW CD returned a hit, and the vocals album was available for a penny.  In a flurry of purchases, I was done, and done more than I even expected.  That is the completion of Phase 1 of my music plan. 

The status of Phase 2 – the scanning of all CD covers – is pretty sad.  I have a LOT of CDs and little free time and even less time where I am motivated to work on them, especially when a batch of scans came out poorly and I have to rescan them.  So I think I will reprioritize the scanning to focus on only the MCA Master Series covers so I can move on to Phase 3.

Phase 3 is the printing and framing of the CD artwork.  I don’t exactly have a plan for this just yet.  More on this to come…