[jillesvangurp]

I grew up in the eighties. Tapes, records, cds, etc. I've seen it all. I haven't used a device that can play any of these in over two decades. I have more music at my fingertips in Spotify than I ever had on these. Love it.

I was a teenager in a small provincial town in the Netherlands. It had two record stores. They were small. There was also the library with a small collection of decent cds that you could "borrow" (copy to tape). If it wasn't on the radio or in those stores, or in the library, I had no access to it. That was how I built my music collection. Buying albums properly was expensive. I only had about 10 or so. I had a few dozen tapes. Maybe 60 Albums or so and some mix tapes. That was it. Compared to what I have on Spotify, that's nothing.

There's all this BS. how everything was better on "hifi" equipment of the 1980s. The reality of course was that most poor teenagers did not have access to either decent equipment or decent music. I tracked down most of what I had in physical form on Spotify ages ago. And I even listen to some of it regularly. Sounds great with decent modern headphones. I'm perfectly happy with my Sennheiser bluetooth headphones. It probably sounds infinitely better than what I had back in the day. I alsp have a much wider selection of music. Anything I want really.

And of course I'm now in my fifties and my hearing isn't what it used to be in terms of high frequencies. I'm about average in hearing loss (i.e. not going deaf) but any absurdly priced headphones would probably be wasted on me. That's the irony of aging audiophiles, right when they can afford all the right gear, their hearing starts deteriorating. You can't compensate for that with gold plated plugs or any of the other nonsense people are into. Records and analog amplifiers sound nice mainly because of the sound distortion and compression. This isn't all that hard to emulate with digital processing. The pop music of the nineteen eighties was optimized for the cheap FM radios that most people had. That's why a lot of albums got remastered later. The original sound is not actually all that great on modern equipment.