CD the new Vinyl

Had an interesting experience this week. I inherited a collection of SACD's and so have been auditioning an Esoteric CD/SACD player. To get a good sense of it compared to my Naim CDX2 I took out my phono stage and had both digital sources set up. I had a freinds kid over (14yrs old) who loves vinyl, the beatles and hopes to put together a system some day. Well, he wanted to hear the new machine so he came over and was a little disappointed that there was no vinyl to listen to. Well, we sat down and listened to the Beatles, Leondard Cohen, The Groundhogs, Led Zeppelin, Dave Brubeck, Milt Jackson, etc. Was an all day listen. I even did some chores around the house and he just listened and listened. To both the Naim and the Esoteric. He liked them both but here is the shocker. Near the end of the day he says, "hey, this is cool, it's just like listening to a record". What he was doing was listening to a whole LP that was crafted as a piece of work by the artist as opposed to a bunch of individual downloads. So now he want's a CD player "cause it's like a record without the record". So, this is easier to assemble. The take home message, when he had a chance to experience the full landscape of an artists message in a full album he really enjoyed it and realized what he was missing. Yes, he still wants a "record player" but wants to add a CD player as well and just doesn't see the need to "down load" as much.

We humans are something else.