bigshot
Headphoneus Supremus
If your musical tastes are general and are focused on current popular music and greatest hits, there's no need to buy physical media. But if you have broad interests and quite a bit of experience with music, streaming is limiting. I've got over 10,000 CDs, 10,000 LPs, 10,000 78s and almost that many DVDs and blu-rays. My iTunes library has a year and a half's worth of music in it and my media server is almost 100TB. My musical tastes run from classical and opera to jump blues and 50s rock n roll to old time country and bluegrass to 30s jazz and sweet bands to Cuban mambo and Columbian Cumbia to R&B and Soul to big band and modern jazz to tin pan alley and easy listening to novelty records, Hawaiian slack key guitar and freilech/klezmer, etc, etc, etc... and that's just music. My taste in movies is just as diverse. Streaming is fine for a "greatest hits" version of a lot of these genres, but I'm beyond that point now. The stuff I want to hear isn't on streaming, even iTunes and Spotify. That's why I have a library.
71dB, if you have a big HD TV, opera on blu-ray is fantastic. In the DVD era there were great opera discs derived from TV like Great Performances, but blu-ray is a whole new thing. Opera houses around the world are recording their live performances and releasing them. I remember when there were just two video releases of Wagner's Ring, and now there are more than I can keep up with. It's the same with orchestral music, especially if you count DVDs with multichannel sound. In addition to classical and rock (which are both well represented on SACD), there's some great R&B/Soul blu-rays as well as jazz, ethnic music, etc. I really like being able to see the performers, and I often prefer live performances to the album versions. I used to participate in a multichannel recommendation thread in the Music forum, but I haven't been there since my banishment and return as the prodigal son of Head-Fi. I probably should resurrect that thread.
What era of King Crimson do you like? Most people like the old art rock albums, but I really like the Adrian Belew era the best. I got most of the multichannel anniversary discs lately. Excellent mixes. If you like King Crimson, you would probably like the more experimental stuff by Frank Zappa. He crossed that classical line on occasion too.
71dB, if you have a big HD TV, opera on blu-ray is fantastic. In the DVD era there were great opera discs derived from TV like Great Performances, but blu-ray is a whole new thing. Opera houses around the world are recording their live performances and releasing them. I remember when there were just two video releases of Wagner's Ring, and now there are more than I can keep up with. It's the same with orchestral music, especially if you count DVDs with multichannel sound. In addition to classical and rock (which are both well represented on SACD), there's some great R&B/Soul blu-rays as well as jazz, ethnic music, etc. I really like being able to see the performers, and I often prefer live performances to the album versions. I used to participate in a multichannel recommendation thread in the Music forum, but I haven't been there since my banishment and return as the prodigal son of Head-Fi. I probably should resurrect that thread.
What era of King Crimson do you like? Most people like the old art rock albums, but I really like the Adrian Belew era the best. I got most of the multichannel anniversary discs lately. Excellent mixes. If you like King Crimson, you would probably like the more experimental stuff by Frank Zappa. He crossed that classical line on occasion too.
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