Many years ago, I told you stories of me digitizing my records - with a view to saying good-bye to them at some point. Also, I ripped my entire CD collection to .mp3 at some point (still in Aachen, IIRC). With storage becoming ever cheaper and more plentiful, I took to ripping any new CD I got my hands on to .mp3 AND to .WAV and then sort them differently: Strictly by composer and genre for the .mp3s versus keeping the .wav files in one folder as sort of a pseudo-CDs (you know I am a classics buff).
But I never went to a fully computer-based system, although my entire CD, record, and cassette collection, ripped in two different formats with higher resolution than needed, fits on something smaller than a fingernail these days. Yes, I chucked my old compact cassettes, and the cassette deck. Yes, I chucked my minidiscs and sold off the (rather nice) Walkman-type player I had bought around the turn of the millennium. But when the next chance to make a cut rolled around with moving into the newly-built house, I still didn't throw my records away. Nor my CD's. Instead, I let the LPs sit on the mantelpiece, and the CDs got two massive shelves all of their own, together with the - get that! - the DVDs.
And when I was in my two months lull after demission as a Fat Cat, I made a decision: I poured part of my severance pay into a posh new network player - but one with an excellent CD drive-, into a posh amplifier - but one that was praised for its excellent, warm-sounding phono pre-amp, and into a pair of smaller speakers with excellent reviews - passive speakers. I gave my rather beat-up, 30 yo Technics turntable to a repair shop, and it returned with a perspex lid you could actual use, a very low wow-and flutter, and a spanking new needle and cartridge. When I got a new desktop and Son I got the old one for his birthday, he also received the active speakers I had bought with it - while I dragged up the Missus' 25yo Onkyo receiver, still working and looking perfect, from the back of a dark drawer somewhere, stacked it under my printer, connected the CD line-in to the desktop's line-out, fitted it with two glorious (but cheap at age 30) small Canton speakers off eBay, and voila, I now have two old-fashioned stereo systems. Complete with AM an FM radio, as long as those are still broadcast in 'Schland.
The Technics turntable is the only piece surviving from my first stereo kit bought with my nursing student job money in 1990. It consisted of a midi-sized Philips all plastic CD player, an Onkyo receiver much like the one the Missus brought into our marriage, a fitting Onkyo tape deck, a pair of Elac speakers (about 20" high), and the turntable. Oh how I loved that gear! The CD player finally gave out in '17, as did the receiver ( I am sure it could have been saved), and I had mercilessly and stupidly thrown the fully functioning cassette deck into the junk in '12, when all the tapes had been digitized. Likewise the speakers, when they didn't fit our shelf anymore. The turntable got whacked by something heavy after we first moved to Potsdam, and the repair shop was unable to fix the hole. I just taped it over from both sides to prevent the dust from getting in too easily. But it survived. Seems like the missus will have to bear with my small record collection for some more time.
My interest awoke with watching a couple of YouTube channels where people (read: Middle-aged well-off white guys) demonstrate old gear they pluck off eBay, Japanese auction sites or, plainly, a junkyard. It's lovely to see how they love their stuff and get it working again, and while I'll never restore, let alone use, an old Macintosh IIe, a 1999 ThinkPad, a Nakamichi Dragon or even another minidisk player, I now have my well-maintained little corner of "vintage gear". Or maybe just good gear. See photos below. If anyone’s interested, here are the channels:
Techmoan - I love that channel. Just watch the credits section of his more recent videos, and you know you've met someone who loves and knows his stuff. He is so quintessentially, so plucked-off-the-cliché book English (he's even from Liverpool and says things like "flippin' 'eck"), our Scottish members will probably get all pimply watching him.
This Does Not Compute - Heavier on vintage computing than consumer electronics, by a nerdy engineer from St. Louis
VWestlife - by someone who actually seems to own a repair shop. Shows more daring and more in-depth repairs than the other two, because he is a pro.
Context menus will guide you to an unending chain of link-hopping opportunities (beware of Vinyl fundie channels), but I really like watching those three best.
Here's Teh Gear in Teh Arnebhouse: