With my Martini and Music, I'd like an Olive

[Occhidiangela]

Before you embark on this mission, have you considered whether it is worth it?

We have a similar collection of LP's. :blush: We still have a turntable connected, so that we may hear them, should we choose. (Please do not ask how, or what manner of equipment supports this. It is not my toy. :rolleyes:)

Most of them are unworthy of copying. (Perhaps the ones collected towards the end may be. Quite a lot of them were played once on the turntable, to copy them to cassette tape, and then put aside.) But virtually all of the others have suffered some vicissitude or another.

I know it seems like a conspiracy to keep you purchasing your favourite music over and over again. But if you really do want to hear some of those older pieces in their full glory, it is worth just purchasing it.

There may well be some LP's in your collection that are yet unavailable in CD format. For that number, is this new machine worth the expenditure? Or is it part of the process for you, and hence worth it, no matter what? ;)

My old audiophile habits are rather hard to break. I'd rather have a piece of gear I get to play with than have to piecemeal my old records, and most importantly, to make my digital mix tapes/CD's to my liking, in other than MP3 format, which I find less than satisfactory on my Klipsch speakers.

The end game is all of the albums, and a bunch of stuff my dad has on LP, gets converted to CD format. I tend to use high end turntables (B & O, though I have an eye on a Denon now that the B & O is deemed unrepairable by the local electronics shop: no parts.) The artificially brightened mid range of most CD's is one of the downsides of CD era music.

So, some of this is a labor of love, and is well beyond a sterile "cost benefit" analysis. My Deutsche Gramaphone LP's are some of the better performances done of certian pieces, to include the Mozart Four Horn concertos, and I'd rather "roll my own" than spend a great deal more than $ 900 to replace my entire collection. I have replaced about 20% of my LPs with CD's in the Rock n Roll category, but there are lots of albums I have, Mott the Hoople and Guadacanal Diary "Walking in the Shadow of the BIg Man" that never made it to CD.

More than you wanted to know, but the old audiophile in me is not happy with some of the options. This appears to meet my needs. Stereophile gave the Symphony a solid review. All the Musica has is a bigger hard drive, and the Opus, at about $3000 is exactly what I want but well outside of the budget.

Occhi