Starting Over
Re-building a record collection from scratch
Some time during 2020, Ruth and I decided to get rid of our record collection. That’s right. The whole kit and kaboodle. The shelving unit we had dedicated to housing the roughly 500 albums was simply not up to the task of holding them any longer. The shelves bowed and groaned under the weight of them, exposing the edge laminate covering the cheap particle board core underneath.
The old record player hadn’t worked in a number of years and we had no place to set it up properly anyways. I suppose we could have fixed it, but why bother. Our TV occupied the entire top shelf of the custom built entertainment cabinet. The whole collection had been gathering dust for some years, unloved except to occasionally pull an album off the shelves to look at the cover art or reference liner notes. With the rise of streaming services, it seemed there was little point in holding onto the collection. But having done the deed, an uneasy feeling grew within me and with Ruth’s sudden passing in the fall of 2024, that aching feeling began to grow into an itch to correct what I had come to regard as a terrible mistake.
The Turntable
So this past Christmas, after consulting many reviews on YouTube, I bought a new Fluence RT-85 belt drive turntable with a Ortofon 2M Blue elliptical cartridge and some solid Kallax shelving from Ikea. I mounted the flat screen TV on the wall and placed the turntable, my receiver and a few other new gadgets on the primary real estate atop the stylish pine cabinet. I had exactly zero records to start with when I finally had the new system set up and running.
But knowing my plans, my girlfriend Carol, who had been encouraging me to move forward with the project, bought me my first album, Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, an old favourite and a title I had indicated was high on my want list of replacements a few weeks earlier when we had been visiting a vintage shop near Peterborough and spotted a used copy. The one she bought me is a brand new copy, an auspicious beginning to the new collection.
Record Number One
Suddenly, music had come back into my life in a way it had not for years and I began to collect not only records, but CDs as well. Seems these little plastic discs are much maligned these days and are being shifted through thrift stores and vintage shops in large numbers for pocket change, making picking up multiple titles like grabbing low lying fruit from my musical past. Thrift stores sell them for as low as $1 a piece prices as high as $3 is not uncommon. Unless they have been heartily abused, these used discs play exactly like new ones.
The CD Player
To play these and get the most out of them, I did some further research on YouTube and found new portable CD players being produced that seemed to suggest that far from over, CD’s were having a resurgence of major proportions. With title prices being so low on the used market, and people rushing to dump their old collections, is it any wonder the format is so popular especially amongst people looking for an alternative to streaming services. I bought a FiiO DM13 portable CD player that is small enough I can carry it with me in the car to give my fancy new car audio system with old fashioned CD capabilities through the magic of bluetooth, while still being able to act as a very competent stereo component when hooked up to my home stereo.
I never got rid of my 80 or so CDs, so I was in better shape than with the LPs starting over. I dragged the box of CDs out of an upstairs closet and registered them all online in yet another modern convenience of the current trend for collecting physical media. Discogs.com is an easy to use online database designed to catalogue, buy and sell physical media of all sorts. Registration and use is free and the advantages of having every album, CD, tape or 8 track registered and accessible on one’s phone using the site is simply too valuable to not take advantage of it.
Why Bother?
Which leads to the question at the heart of all of this activity. Why? Why bother, with all this when most everything you might want to listen to is available to stream from Spotify, Apple or Amazon Music? YouTube also has a huge archive of recordings to choose from.
For me, the answer is I just like owning the music I listen to when I can. While streaming platforms are great for researching new and old music alike and building playlists, there are many tracks and entire records that are not available on these platforms and in some cases, have been deliberately withheld by artists protesting the ridiculously low compensation rates these platforms offer. Spend any time on these platforms however and you will spot titles greyed out for whatever reason. Here today, gone tomorrow. As listeners, we have no control over the media we listen to.
Of course, no one is getting rich on streaming platforms other than the platforms themselves. Labels may get a decent cut, but the artists themselves are clearly being ripped off. Using streaming platforms makes one feel complicit in this crime against creatives and so buying CDs and records directly from your favourite artists is one way to support them. And knowing that a corporation cannot disconnect you from your collection gives one the sense that owning physical media is quite different from renting access to it.
Albums have themselves, made quite a remarkable comeback in recent years to the point where new albums are now outselling outselling new CDs. That’s pretty remarkable considering CDs were supposed to have a clear technical edge over albums.
CDs are more durable, more portable, longer, take up less storage space and arguably have better sound quality depending on how they were recorded compared to album versions that start with analog masters. But while convenience like that found in streaming, has been touted as a major advantage of CDs, a more subtle human characteristic comes into play here.
But Aren’t Records a Pain in the Ass?
It seems records are indeed a pain in the ass to play and remarkably, that makes them better. The attention they require just to listen to them requires a level of commitment not present in streaming media or even CDs. They must be correctly and alphabetically stored, pulled from their multipart storage case, and finally brushed to remove dust and static electricity. The player must be level and properly adjusted. And half through, one must get up and flip the record over to play the second half. Everything about this suggests CDs should be the hands down winner comparing the formats, but it turns out all those obstacles make listening to records special. Very special. Active listening isn’t an option when playing vinyl records. It is a prerequisite.
Like printed photographs compared to scrolling Instagrm, vinyl records demand attention and if the digital age has taught us anything, our attention is of much more valuable than we ever considered before.
John’s Jukebox 2.0
So with this post, I intend to take a bit of a left turn with John’s Jukebox. My friend Jan thought it might be useful to chronical how I build my collection from nothing. What is it like to be a vinyl collector these days after years of ignoring physical media? Where can you get records and CDs these days? What am I collecting?
Stay tuned. If you have questions or comments, please leave them below.
What an exciting project, John, rebuilding your collection. I remember when I first started buying records in the mid-1970s and what a thrill it was to discover new-to-me music and pore over the album art and liner notes. I imagine it’s much the same for you, plus the joy of finding old favourites.
It’s cool to be here in the audience to watch as you chronicle the project though a new direction on your blog. I keep vacillating about buying a new system. I decided after a few years of not using the pre-amped turntable that complemented our old and quite decent mini system that its railway spike-like stylus was probably no good for my beloved vinyl. I guess I need to get out to a few shops and see what is out there in terms of hardware. I’m anticipating sticker shock.
Have fun!
I love this post - very well written, as always! What a start to a great project. You and I have been on similar quest with some differences. For me, I am starting over but not from scratch. My youngest son was the spark - he is into hip hop and wanted to buy albums to play on my "record player".
I still have my >45 year old Technics SL - D2 and gave it a tune up. I may have mentioned that I recovered much of my vinyl collection, hundreds of items, and logged it in Discogs, but I lost hundreds more, too. I have moved a dozen times since leaving Toronto for the US in 1986. I've lived in ten states, though, ironically, I haven't moved since coming to California in 2001 making this the longest I've ever lived in any one place. So the loss was incurred in those first 15 years. The box of CDs I just found in the past week will be the next to log into Discogs. Then, it will be time to digitize vinyl and burn all those CDs to store them in the cloud with the rest of my digital-native collection. Then, I will likely upgrade the hardware from 5.1 to a Dolby Atmos system so I can benefit from what Steven Wilson and others have been doing to our old favorites. "The Music Never Stopped"