Enough!

[french frank]

Yes darling, I really must purge my shoe collection soon......

[Petrushka]

I got rid of the majority of BBC Music Mag CDs that I knew I'd never listen to and regretfully slung out a mountain of video tapes mostly of Prom concerts and off air recordings a few months back in the hope that it would leave space for more CDs but the available room was soon filled.

I'm something of a completest where certain conductors are concerned, especially Haitink, Abbado, Karajan, Tennstedt and Solti and with special memories of the times I saw/met them I have to have all of their orchestral recordings.

[jayne lee wilson]

Our buying & listening habits choose us, really, don't they?

I bought three complete Nielsen Cycles recently, and not a disc among them..all 24-bit. I used to back them up, but I've become lazy about it, since most webshops now offer lifetime backup, and I only have a coupla-100 hi-res ones anyway...
Or maybe life-experiences made me philosophical about losing it all, starting again...

I do still buy CDs, but somehow the "physical object" thing matters much less - I guess it ties in with - less listening time, giving more attention to fewer recordings, spending weeks on a cycle, a composer, days on a single work or album. 24-bit downloads have returned me to a relish of individual, mainly new releases that is piquantly reminiscent of those few precious early purchases of LP, or the teenage thrill of record-library exploration & discovery....But I only do this because of the intense pleasure I find in listening to them. Worth going to the trouble of the setting-up. And being an audiophile tends to go in the same direction. The slow living, the connoisseur's relish...

So, no problem with bigboxset addiction here. My heart goes out to sufferers, but I get a headache just looking at them! It reminds me of that scene in Hornby's High Fidelity where the intense, nerdy recordshop guy says (tone of great impatience, clutching a towering pile of cassettes), "I've got all these to work through yet...!"

For whatever reason I don't go back much now to The Great Conductors etc. I want to hear today's. And today's music too. Too easily bored perhaps, I'd rather not know what performers are gonna do, especially with any remotely familiar rep...
(And when I did buy such a retro-set recently - Bernstein's gorgeously-presented Sibelius...I didn't have much luck. I'm not going back much, but it certainly is...!)

(**Q:Which words or phrases do you most overuse? A: TOO!)

[pastoralguy]

I'm very lucky in that Mrs. PG allows me to use our spare bedroom to store my CDs. It's been shelved to allow the maximum storage for my cd collection. Before I start mentioning numbers, I should say that since we don't have children (and, being in our 50's, are unlikely to), so I have spent a tremendous amount of time trawling charity shops for second hand discs, many of which have been sold at very low prices.

I have a theory that familys are somewhat non-plussed at what to do with dead relatives CDs collections so they are given to charity shops, some of whom don't know what their value is. As a result, I have amassed quite a valuable collection of CDs that are rare/difficult to find. For example, there's a local Shelter shop who appear to have had a large collection of Pearl discs handed in so, every other week, a new couple appear to be snapped up at a £1 a pop by yours truly. Often, I look them up on Amazon and find that the minimum price is usually a fiver. Edinburgh is a Mecca for charity shops and a couple of hours trawling usually yields something.

[Gordon]

Surely thing about downloads is you can easily dump them or pass them on [copyright rules!] and anyway they take up less "shelf" space [hard drives aren't that expensive these days] and there's no evidence for 'er indoors to see!! I must have a few thousand downloads mostly from MP4 or flac not all of which are cut to CD for the car. I must admit that buying a download doesn't seem like spending the same as a physical disc - and it's quick!! Weird.

Working through the Nielsen's at the present, unfamiliar to me except the first which I've had on an LP for a long time [and CD now] from LSO and Previn. Seems he only did the one. I had the Blomstedt set from EMI given a couple of birthdays ago but never really got into them until the latest jamboree set me off again.

As for shoes Emelda....well one pair is enough surely, you only have 2 feet And those pink wellies go so well with the mink stole too.

[verismissimo]

... well, there have been several forum records for smugness. I'm sure you're in with a chance.

Is this a competition open to all signed-up boarders, vints? Sure I'd do well in it...

[Flosshilde]

18,000!

Is that just your collection of Alpensinfonie recordings?

[teamsaint]

Just in case anybody was interested, and order to join in the general ..er....whats the word....tenor of the thread....

By my reckoning at 100 regular CDs to the yard, which is what mine seem to take up more or less, the number quoted above equates to 180 yards of shelving.

i dont think IKEA have a specific storage solution for this.

[cloughie]

D

Just in case anybody was interested, and order to join in the general ..er....whats the word....tenor of the thread....

By my reckoning at 100 regular CDs to the yard, which is what mine seem to take up more or less, the number quoted above equates to 180 yards of shelving.

i dont think IKEA have a specific storage solution for this.

Yes but that can be contracted by techniques of double boxing and sneaking extras into appropriate boxed sets and creating your own boxed sets using the poundland paper sleeve boxes.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... and creating your own boxed sets using the poundland paper sleeve boxes.

This has been mentioned before but I don't think I saw the answer if one was ever suggested:

Does anyone sell CD-sized blank boxes (preferably of different depths, in order to accommodate varying numbers of discs) that will store paper-sleeved CDs? This would be a great help for me in storing my burnt-to-CD downloads.

[teamsaint]

Oh, and 18 k is a dozen a week since CDs were first launched.
Impressive.

[Daniel]

The idea that my unlistened to cd's were clearly going to outstrip my life wouldn't be a pleasant one for me, and would probably be a kind of pressure in the way that Petruska describes.

But that's really not going to happen here (saving any unexpected early departure ..) as in comparison to some of the Premier League heavyweights here, my collection is somewhere outside the Vauxhall Conference League. But it seems a relatively innocent pleasure and I imagine what matters is being happy in your own manner of doing things.

I must say Caliban's download-only lifestyle quite appeals, perhaps with surprises supplied (plentifully round here) by charity shops. And there are so many non-cd routes available now, Hear and Now, Spotify and youtube provide a cornucopia of pleasures in this house, particularly of new stuff, when cd's are harder to get.

[MickyD]

I find I now get the most collecting pleasure from tracking down long-deleted CDs which were missing from my shelves. The internet makes this so easy. I am now feeling very smug having now gathered all the solo Bach discs that Kenneth Gilbert made for Archiv.

[Dave2002]

I keep being threatened with things like this .... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-Classic.../dp/B000026APH

[cloughie]

I keep being threatened with things like this .... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-Classic.../dp/B000026APH

Threatened?