A place to highlight you favorite physical media. Items that are good, interesting, or possibly both.
This would mean things that you actually own, like: books, tapes of various formats, DVDs, vinyl, shellac, etc.
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As I mentioned in the “Victory! I’m a Rockstar!” thread, I got my Onkyo fixed, and I am getting re-acquainted with my CD collection. Both player and CDs have been in storage longer than I care to think.
Today I decided to honor the late Lalo Schifrin by playing this CD. It is a collaboration of Schifrin with Dizzy Gillespie. It is a combination of two LPs, “Gillespiana” and “Carnegie Hall Concert.”
I liked it better now than I did 20 years ago. I used to think it was too much. Now I think it’s just enough. I have grown into it.
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My DS9 Boxset…
I also like that I still have CDs I got in 90s… Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos, the first Portishead album, the Nick Drake Box set, all of Skinny Puppy, Cure, and DM albums… the Cocteau Twins singles box set…
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I have a random assortment of physical media that mean a lot to me. I have a pair of plastic drawers that i shove a bunch of stuff into that i have not organized 
i seriously need to go through it, there’s a handful of autographed things in there. If i sort it i’ll take the time to take pictures and share stories about them.
But in there i have a CD from Rasputina’s Radical Recital signed by all of the band members that performed it live at the time.
It took some years to get everyone’s signatures. The hardest one was Melora weirdly enough, the first time i tried she was feeling awful after having driven to a Colorado concert in a busted van and going straight into their concert. Managed to get her signature years later in Austin 
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I was at the local thrift shop the other day (same spot as the “NERFS NOT TERFS” sign) and there were several boxes of DVDs out. Someone had clearly divested themselves of their entire, quite impressive and Criterion-heavy, DVD collection. I had to restrain myself. I ended up getting:
- I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
- 47 Ronin (Mizoguchi) (Korean market)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- The Court Jester
- Battleship Potemkin (a nice 2-disc Kino release)
- Last Year at Marienbad (Criterion)
There were so, so many things I passed up, but I didn’t want to spend too much money or bring too much crap home from the junk store. We do have a long-term plan to start re-establishing our physical media collection to prepare for the inevitable Streamingpocalypse but for the moment I wanted to keep it focused.
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That’s a wonderful CD - I have a deficit of Dizzy disc’s (maybe 4 albums out of such a large & important discography), but that’s one that I do have.
I still prefer CDs over both vinyl records & downloads/streaming. I always feel like I’m going to foul up the former (whether thru clumsiness, or a bad stylus, etc.). But I’m superstitious that I should at least have a physical copy, so I tend to not do downloads unless the CD is just that expensive.
I put my CDs in vinyl gatefold sleeves (wherein the disc goes in a Tyvek sleeve) as they take up much less room on the shelf. So if a new CD’s jewel case arrives cracked, I don’t care because I’m swapping it out anyway. But rather than sending the jewel case into the landfill, & with no known way to recycle them*, they end up in tall stacks in the basement. Boxed sets have their own shelves and stay as-is.
The gatefold sleeves also exist for DVDs but I don’t have as many of those (but enough where I want to save the shelf space).
*Local libraries no longer have physical CDs, so they wouldn’t need 'em
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That’s a solid week of viewing lined-up.
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Maybe longer if one were to watch regularly and then again with commentary 
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I agree.
The CD is, in my opinion, the most practical audio storage format. Really it’s perfect.
Although in some ways I prefer LPs because on their “hands-on” quality. A record player is like a musical instrument.
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I know that my 70+ years old neighbor has been purging her DVDs this year. She had something close to 50K. I know she had every Academy award winner, plus a bunch more that she never watched. She was giving them away, but we really don’t have room for any more DVDs.
She said that she collected most of them from the “on sale” bins at places where the sold DVDs, so she seldom paid full price for them.
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My dad has been doing this with music CD’s. He has a pretty big collection and now that he’s retired he’s slowly going through all of them and listening to them. Leading up to his recent retirement he spent like a year categorizing all of what he had. He might have a spreadsheet too.
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I only play mp3s nowadays. But I’ve still got three types of physical media, LPs, cassette tapes, and CDs, all sitting on shelves. I’ve got over a hundred LPs sitting on a shelf, not played for decades. I did buy a record player to digitize them, but only did a few. Turned out my tastes have changed, and most of the ones I wanted to still play were available on CDs. So I ripped the ones I still wanted to listen to onto my computer.
Part 1.
My first LP from the late 1960s was The In Sound From Way Out
by Jean-Jacques Perrey. I got the CD when it came out. The music is made of various sounds recorded on tape, then carefully cut and spliced together – so it was made from physical media. The first piece on the album, “Unidentified Flying Object” is still one of my favorite pieces you could label as electronic.
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Part 2
I never bought any cassettes - I taped music I had on LP or CD so I could play them on the tape player in my car (a 1973 Chrysler Newport AKA the QE III). I still have some tapes that I should toss because I no longer have a player. I did get a cassette tape player for my 2007 computer, so I could rip some tapes of older relatives talking about their lives. I sent the mp3 files to younger family members. I didn’t use it for much else, except for ripping some tapes of music I didn’t have on LP or CD. I don’t play any of them anymore.
Speaking of tape, I did have an old second or third hand reel-to-reel tape recorder at one point. I took a couple of electronic music classes in 1976. One of them was a lab course where we had to do a music project using the synths they had. Everything was recorded on 1/2" tape, which we could then copy it to 1/4" tape. I then used my reel-to-reel recorder to convert it to cassette. About 30 years, later I digitized the cassette via the cassette recorder on the PC. It’s now up on Youtube, if you’re at all interested.
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Part 3
My first CD was Up From The Dark, by Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin (not the Eurythmics Dave Stewart). This was back in the mid 1980’s, when I didn’t have a CD player. My dad did, so he copied it to cassette for me. Of course, eventually I got a CD player. The CD includes a hit the duo had in the UK, a cover of the Leslie Gore song, “It’s My Party.” Here’s a different example from the CD (that I prefer):
The above cover is from the Japanese CD; I bought the original version, which I prefer:
Dave Stewart is a keyboard player who was in a lot of progressive rock bands (subgenre: Canterbury) in the 1970s, such as Hatfield and the North, and National Health. I love their songs, and still listen to them – in mp3 form.
Nowadays I’m mostly into electro swing, most of which I buy from Bandcamp and download in mp3 form. I only listen to digital tunes nowadays; I know there are advantages to physical media, but I prefer mp3s. They weight less.
So that’s my progression from LPs to digital. I missed 78’s, 45’s, and digital tape. And I don’t plan to get a brain implant from Elon Musk.
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Wahey, an electro swing fan! I feel like i’m maybe somewhat basic when i say that my main love in that genre is Caravan Palace but i really do love them. I also had the pleasure of seeing them live and they are incredible.
I’m also a fan of electro tango. I don’t have a particular band i can recommend, my Pandora station plays a good mix of stuff that i greatly enjoy.
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Whoa, Caravan Palace live! Lucky you. I actually put some of their songs on CDs so I can play them in my car.
One of my favorite electro swing artists is Dimaa, who is no longer making music alas.
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Excellent, thanks for the rec. Also in the land of music, you never know. Maybe some years down the line they’ll come back around and make new music.
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Magazines surely count. I never buy magazines, but years ago I was at a bookstore and saw this magazine. I’m a big Daft Punk fan so I bought it on an impulse. Later going through it I realize that the issue is actually a David Bowie issue and Daft Punk was the cover with a smaller feature. This was around the time Bowie was still alive.
Not necessarily the most favorite book/print media I own, but it’s such a beautifully put together issue.
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Absolutely.
This is the place for creative works that exist in the real world, and that you didn’t create yourself.
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On the subject or reacquainting myself with my CDs, I did not remember having two sets of Stokowski’s Phase 4 Stereo recordings. In my memory I had conflated these into one.
One is an amazing triple gate-fold jewel case, complete with foam inserts so nothing rattles around. The other folds into a small box. 11 CDs in total.
Stereo recording in the 1950s generally tried to capture the sensation of room ambiance. Decca’s Phase 4 Stereo technique was intended to eliminate all of that. These were recordings to show-off your stereo system to your friends. That has benefits and drawbacks.
On one hand, the recordings are flawlessly clean with an amazingly large signal-to-noise ratio. On the other hand, they are mixed in such a way that half of the orchestra appears to be on the left side of your room, and the other half of the orchestra is on the right. But Stokowski was always interested in new technology, especially new technology that got people interested in old music.
I had created MP3 versions of some of these tracks for my iPod back around 2010, but I didn’t listen to them much. These don’t work well in headphones. They sound better bouncing around a room.
Highlights include:
- Beethoven: Symphonies 5, 7 & 9. This is a great version of the 9th. Although the singers were “close-miked,” so it sounds like they are in the room with you, which is a bit jarring.
- Stokowski’s Bach organ transcriptions. Stokowski started out as an organist, so he always conducted like he was playing an organ. His most well-know transcription is of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a version of which appeared in Fantasia.
- Brahms’ Symphony No. 1. Another great performance.
- Franck’s Symphony in D Minor
- Symphony Fantastique
- L’Ooiseau au de Feu
- Prelude a L’Apres Midi d’un Faune
- Werious stuff by Vagner
- The 1812 Overture, of course
- Scheherazade
- Enigma Variations
- Many More!
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