I stopped buying CDs ~15 years ago, then moved to a different continent, leaving my CDs behind. I just had a hard drive of MP3s. I joined Spotify around 2010 or so and that became my sole source of music. Over time I started to notice how my listening habits and my relationship with music changed when I listened on Spotify. On the one hand, very few albums stuck with me. Instead I would always be on the lookout for something new and I would just straight-up forget about the releases I was listening to in the previous months. On the other hand, I felt that the software interface itself didn't let me have the feeling of curating my own collection of music (especially once they started going hard into AI-based recommendations). Through all of this, music was increasingly just something that would go in the background.
I got fed up with all of that last year, so I started buying music again. It has been a mix of downloads and CDs. Initially the idea was just to do downloads but sometimes the CD was basically the same price. Once I started ripping CDs, I started looking out for good finds at charity shops. Suddenly I have a decent start to a CD collection again. Still, though, the main way of listening was via FLAC either streamed from an RPi to a SoTM-sMS200 NEO SE streamer (main system) or played directly from a computer (office). For the past few months I have been looking into buying a CD player to put those stacks of CDs to good use, but I figured if I'd do so I might as well make it a bit different from streaming through a modern DAC. So, I just bought a vintage Denon CD player with dual multi-bit DACs (Burr-Brown PCM-64P). Obviously too early to say anything about it but I'm looking forward to that more tangible experience of perusing and listening to CDs instead of scrolling and searching on a screen.
