I use digital exclusively, but I do listen to the entire album unless there is one song that I really dislike. Speaking of things that I dislike, I really dislike remastered albums that have additional tracks, because they break up the order that I have become accustomed to over many years.
Anyone listen to entire albums?
I assume the answer is yes since many of you run vinyl rigs, but just wondering how many around here listen to entire albums at a sitting? In the age of instant gratification and playlists I seem to be, recently, gravitating to listening through entire albums. I don’t have vinyl and only stream or play from a network drive so it’s easy for me to bounce around from song to song, artist to artist. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing but I enjoy hearing a record in it’s entirely the way the artist recorded it. I’ve flirted with the idea of vinyl for the very reason that it seems to be a format that lends itself to listening through an entire album in one sitting. I seem to be less inclined to make that move though now that I’ve been doing the album thing via streaming.
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@roxy54 i could not agree more regarding additional tracks on remastered albums. |
I will second the reissues with added tracks. |
I stream nearly exclusively and nearly always listen to the whole albums. My system is very musical and I am often lured into albums I would not have listened to in earlier iterations of my system when it was analytical sounding. I found, at least for me, “channel surfing” with my system was due to a problem with my system.. too analytical, not a problem with the music or my attention span. |
+1 @bwguy It's about 50-50 for me. Certain albums don't go on a playlist because they need to be listened to as a whole. But having my personal radio station (playlist over 2000 songs) is great when I don't know what I want to hear. Fortunately I have 67 years of favorites. |
Probably 95% of the time I listen to both sides of an album. The other 5% I realize I’m really not in the mood for side 1, much less side 2. I only have 1 “modern” reissue, out of 5,000+ vinyl albums. It’s Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest hits that I bought at Walmart 3 years ago. It’s a poor reissue. Noisy, low recording volume, thin sounding. I found an original, sealed mint copy. Worlds apart in quality!
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@riie That's approximately 1,723,441,876,426,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of records requiring about 3,746,612,774,840,010,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 feet of storage or around 709,585,752,810,608,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles of storage. Cool. |
I haven't listened to an actual album (vinyl) in a really long time but there are lots of releases I listen to start to finish. Maybe 10% of the time I'll listen to a playlist but usually the release is interesting enough to play all the way through. I have noticed that I am listening to playlists more and more but I'm also expanding into different types of music. |
Before the arrival of the CD each LP side was created with it's own dramatic arc, the two sides being separate entities, complete unto themselves (with the possible exception of the dreaded concept album). I thought it would be "cute" if the record companies made CD reissues of LP's so that after the first "side" played the listener would need to again hit "Play" to hear the second side.
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Another aspect of this question; how many albums do you own that you actually like every single track on the album. Or maybe you bought it for one particular track and that turned out to be the only one you liked! Of course, that second aspect is a drawback of the olden days when you had to buy it to try it, unless you had a friend who bought it first and let you borrow it. Streaming does make things so much easier. |
Yes, I almost always listen to entire records during a listening session. I think it goes back to my childhood because that’s how I listened back then. I didn’t have a lot of records so I guess the listening experience developed that way because I didn’t have the selection of albums or 45’s to go from track to track. This rule doesn’t apply when I have other audiophiles over for a listening session. My brain feels comfortable with two sides of an album. Although I have some because of amazing SQ, generally I don’t prefer albums that have been remastered to 45rpm where I have to get up four times to listen to the album, it messes with the flow. My criteria for bringing an album into my discography is very strict. I must like 90% of the music on the album or else I won’t have it in the discography. Unfortunately that has eliminated a lot of great tunes from great artists but it’s also a way to keep my discography limited. Currently my discography is under two hundred albums and there are still records I haven’t listened to in over a year. Streaming probably makes up about 30% of my listening sessions now. |
One reason I went to digital is I can skip around and make a playlist of my choise also digital has advanced so much in the last few years if you cover all bases starting with a good LPS power supply from your router, high quality Ethernet cables and a very Good Ethernet switch ,and possibly filter depending on the brand with good quality power cords , then a good streamer and Dac then you have a digital that is as good and in several ways better , a record can only produce true 12 bit, digital true 20 bit. Bass is for sure one’s lower tighter, S/N ratio , Distortion much quieter, land having natural warmth and realism . Over $10k for sure but the same can be said too for a quality vinyl setup, and I can store everything on a SS drive ,stream millions of songs , make play lists of every type , no cleaning involved . I am half way there .visiting audio clubs I get to hear Audio systems of all types. Beung 65 I just don’t have the patience anymore .I had several thousand 1st pressings and album art . Vinyl is still very good and master recordings sound great,but very limited in availability . to each their own , if you have the patience and $$ then having both is a great solution. |
Vinyl First listener here (90%)…so I often listen to a full album but usually, maybe half the time, only my favourite side. (After having admitting to that…) I recently asked one of the Younger members (mid 30’s) of our local “Vinyl Club” why he liked to hang around us Old Guys (most in our 60’s). His answer was “because you guys listen to the whole side or album, like the material was intended to be heard”. Obviously he was referring to “older” music (Jazz/Rock/Classical) but I found that shocking. He went on to explain/complain that all the age appropriate audio/music friends he had drove him Nuts… changing songs constantly and worse, playing 10 second lines and segments of song Constantly… He also said we had better stereos too… |
I was just laughing to myself about this. Went to change tracks yesterday, forgetting it was an LP. LP’s, usually all the way thru, and I definitely want the original order. I like extra tracks as long as they are added at the end (CD or LP). Recently I have been playing specific/favorite/revealing LP’s to hear the differences of new/re-discovered speaker positioning/toe-in. added a virtual system about positioning/toe-in recently ................................. I realized that forgetting it’s an LP would never happen unless my new to me SACD/CD player didn’t sound so good (Sony xa5400es) I am re-discovering my SACD/CDs, actually buying used CD’s of artists I re-discover or new artists I learn about. (hadn’t bought a CD in many years until recently). CD: I skip tracks I know I don’t like, I play specific tracks for friends, specific tracks to enjoy alone, and specific tracks to hear any difference when evaluating a change. LP’s, if evaluating, I wait for those most revealing tracks. ........... I and my friends always prefer LPs to CD’s and always prefer Reel to Reel to LPs. Never a doubt. The preference of LP’s to CDs has narrowed now. Thinking of Mike Pinder’s recent death, I just bought a sealed LP of one of my all time favorite albums, the Moody Blues, Go Now, their 1st album when they were a piano based blues band, before Justin Hayward’s era.
So, I will be having a CD/LP/Reel to Reel session soon. Turned out: the sealed LP I bought has a sticker "Crazy Eddie, $3.99" on it, what a memory.
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I'm retired, so absolutey. Listening to the entire album, or entire side in case of vinyl is the best way to get the message of the artist on a particular album. At least that applies to all artists worthy of that word. However nowadays many pop artists don't put much thought into their music as it is mostly made at the command of the producers to produce hits. But I don't bother listening to those. |
I’m now 100 percent digital. I stream my ripped/downloaded music from the NAS or from Qobuz. I usually stream entire albums, but it is not feasible to do that with compilation releases that include multiple CD’s. Occasionally I’ll play a favorite song or two for inspiration. I have a few playlists to make it easy to play one off songs that I like. That’s the beauty of streaming. I don’t mind reissues that have new tracks as long as they do not change the order of the original album. Sometimes the reissues sound great and no one is putting a gun to my head to listen to the new tracks.
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If I'm playing vinyl albums, yes, unless I just feel like hearing one side at one time and the other side a little later.. When I put in a CD, I'll generally play the entire thing. When I stream, I would generally do it by playlist and put it on 'shuffle'. Good way of hearing songs I otherwise likely would never have heard again. |
If listening to "entire albums" means both sides 1 and 2 on vinyl or digital media, then I'd have to say that I do, indeed, listen to entire albums most of the time. Sometimes, however, with vinyl, I only listen to one particular side unless there is a or a few tunes on the other that I really like. With CDs I am much more likely to skip tunes that don't particularly thrill me or that I don't particularly care for. With digital streaming I am much more likely to play individual tunes, here & there. Digital media makes it much more convenient to be selective in this respect. Vinyl, of course, requires you to actually get your butt off the couch. The reason I do this goes exactly to the point that rcm1203 makes. I have approximately 500 vinyl albums and around 360 CD discs in my collection. I also have some cassettes (mostly copies of albums I recorded on a high-end machine back in the day) but I don't play those often at all. I gave away my 8-track & reel-to-reel stuff long ago. Of everything in my collection, there are only a couple dozen or so albums that I really, really love in their entirety (i.e. both sides) and maybe another dozen or so that I like well enough to play both sides of sequentially but are not as cherished as my all-time favorites. |
There are a precious few albums that are worth listening to all the way through. One enduring classic for me is The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. I really love concept albums. Contrawise, I hate the "throw in" songs to make the A&R man happy. The Stones wrote Star Star for that exact reason. That song still cracks me up :) |
All my cd were transfered as lossless files... I can put in one shot on many days a sinple artist from which i own 10-30-50 files or more ...All one after the other for few days... I go to another artists after ... i dont like at all listening and touching the trurntable lever when i owned one... I put on my player all an artist albums play "on" and listen... when all has been heard i go on with the next... For sure i have more than 100 Chet Baker albums for example ... I dont listen the 100 at one fell swoop ... It will be too much... But 5-10 albums sure... i hate disturbing music with any pushing button or stop it after 20 minutes of the side A... 😊
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After reading the responses I guess that I am in the minority , listening to over 95% vinyl I pick an album turn it over and play that side because I had listened to the other side that last time I picked that album . This holds true for almost all listening to Rock , Folk or Jazz . I say. almost all because there are some albums that were written as a whole or concept , Pink Floyd DSOM , WYWH or Animals , The Who Tommy or Quadrophenia or The Moody Blues Nights in White Satin to name a few. Classical albums are the only ones that I listen to from beginning to end , after all they were written that way . I don't have any remastered albums with extra songs but I feel the same way about the order of the playlist on the original release verse a Greatest Hits version that just doesn't have the same flow .
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The comments are interesting here. I’m one of those that usually listens to the entire album, one side after the other in a sitting. With digital on my server run by JRiver, I typically pick and choose songs through the app unless I like the whole album. Like others, I’ll load the whole thing and listen to it. With albums I too usually don’t buy it unless I love the album and like most of what’s on it. For instance I love Supertramp’s “Crime..” and “Crisis..” but really only liked about 4 songs off “Breakfast”. So for a long time I haven’t bothered purchasing the album because there’s a couple songs that are so-so and a couple I really can’t stand sitting through. With digital I can just pick what I wanted. |
This is why albums are not so popular anymore. I get bored with my collection and wanna always use roon. Plus with albums spinning around ever so cooly, it’s difficult to skip songs that may suck. But on the flipside listening to all the music on an album allows you to slowly appreciate tunes that may not otherwise excite you right away. Lots of Beatles songs were kinda like this but overtime you begin to really like them. Greatest hits albums from The Beatles are horrifying since I'm used to the sequence from the original albums. I would imagine with Taylor Swift given her extended release lots of people have not listened to most of it because they are focussed on Quickstream stuff from Spotify. I have not listened to any of her new music except Fortnite which is a really cool video. |
I grew up right at the crossover from vinyl to cassette tape so I never really got into vinyl. I have wonderful memories of listening to the radio, particularly at the community swimming pool, all through the seventies. I think that’s what draws me to vinyl even though I’ve never put that into my system. I can remember back in the 80’s listening to a cassette and longing for a way to just hear or buy the one song I really loved. Then mixed tapes became a thing but you still had to buy the entire album not just the song. Streaming has more than scratched that itch and it’s been the way I’ve streamed music for the most part. Being intentional about listening to an album, warts and all, has been a fantastic addition to the way I listen to music. Seems like most of you do something similar wrt listening to albums. Some have the same habits when streaming of bouncing around or skipping the song(s) that is not appealing. Streaming has also opened up so many more genres I would never have indulged in if buying each album was required. I can also build a playlist of every album by a particular artist and listen to each album all the way through, which I am doing right now with a Steely Dan playlist. |
on that "when I grew up right around CDs" angle: when and where I grew up, an album cost 2 weeks' salary. A turntable would cost twice that. Most people had 10 or 15 records total. (One for Christmas and one for a birthday - slowly adding up) We were poor so we didn't have a turntable. When I started working, I could afford to buy a used one. I also bought my friend's record collection about 30 albums (he was super rich - for us). When your monthly paycheck buys you 2 albums, it better be good to listen to every side and song.
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@grislybutter we were not well off when I grew up either. I do remember listening to my parents collection of Billy Joel albums though when I was all of maybe 10. I think they had maybe five or six albums and that was it. That and The Beach Boys Endless Summer. I loved those records. Can’t recall, but I believe I listened to those all the way through at the time. |
@jastralfu As strange as it may sound, I have explored more artists and their work with vinyl than I would have with streaming. I only stop listening to an album if it makes the cat bolt through the closed window. I discover so many "B sides", it's really cool. |
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