Help for an Old School Audiophile


I'm 56 and I've been in this hobby since the early 80's and have a modest system and have amassed a collection of about 1500 LPs, 500 cds, and 400 cassettes.  Between two different older hard drive tower cases I have probably about 10,000+ songs on iTunes and I keep those tower cases around thinking one day I'd like to put those songs on a cloud - although I totally don't know what that entails.  I have the free Pandora on my iPhone and still regularly listen to FM radio and have an aversion to paying for satellite radio when there are good stations in the Philadelphia market that I listen to.

Last week, I went into a local hifi shop and listened to a bookshelf pair of powered Dynaudio speakers that you could hook a laptop up to but also had RCA outputs to hook up a phono preamp to and the salesman was playing music thru his phone.  He had Tidal and also mentioned other names that I forgot the name of.  When I saw what he could do thru his phone, it kind of made me feel a little foolish for having all of these albums, tapes, and cds.

I don't watch a lot of tv these days except for sports and I'm amazed at how my 24 year old daughter can watch all this stuff with Netflix and by streaming stuff and I'm still paying lots more each month for cable.

I'm not gonna go out and change it all tomorrow or the next day but I guess my questions are this:

1.  What's the best way to get educated about all of the different options that I have?
2.  With regard to all the music on iTunes that I have, is it better and more cost effective to put that music on a cloud or should I just subscribe to Spotify, Tidal or some other music format and just throw out the old tower cases?
3.  Can I assume that most people who have music servers are using that for music in lieu of actual music collections?  Or do most people have both?  
4.  If I were going to one day purge my collections but still wanted access to all the music I have now, what would be a good - modest - step by step game plan?  
5.  Is it better to get a USB turntable or analog to digital converter and start converting my LPs to computer files or is that a waste of time?

The actual collections and all the gear can take up a little room, but they are cool to look at too.... on the other hand, having the extra space and being a minimalist has it's own merits.  I'll never own a kindle either :)

BTW:  (My current system consists of:  Tandberg 3012 int amp, Thorens TD125 mk II turntable, Kyocera D-811 cassette deck, Harman Kardon TD302 cassette deck, Creek CAS3140 tuner, Oppo DV970 cd/dvd player, Fostex B-100 BH speakers, custom 45 SET tube int amp)

Thank you in advance for all of your kind comments and suggestions, 
Lou


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Showing 2 responses by parsons

Lou...there is some very good advice here, and this can be somewhat overwhelming even for those of us very committed to these solutions.  Many of us have tried many of these solutions, so the good news is there is lots of good advice available.

Some other feedback from you that could help narrow down some of these recommendations...

Is budget a consideration, and if so, what is your max to get you to a good solution?

Do you consider yourself kind of tech savvy or would you prefer more of a set and forget solution?

Do you have the time and patience to burn all your important source material to digital, or would you pay a service to do it, or would you just skip that and have your analog and digital (CD) sources still available when you wanted them?

How important is ultimate sound quality vs. convenient musical listening?

Do you like random music presentment like Pandora or FM radio, or do you prefer to either select and listen to the album straight through, or select individual tracks for a "mix"?

From those answers you will be able to get more specific solutions that might best meet your desired outcome and point you to some deeper investigation.
BTW, if you have a computer that you can hook up to your integrated amps via RCA (through a headphone out jack for starters), or via USB to an external DAC for better sound, I agree with shadorne that a demo of Roon and Tidal together is a great first step for you.  You can hang your iTunes hard drive off of the computer and then get a glimpse into what would be a great digital front-end solution for you, then upgrade the bits behind it later if you like it.  Really, just some computer speakers to your computer will allow you to play with the Roon software, see what music Tidal gives you, and get of a feel for the whole thing without much effort or commitment.  Any of us here would help you set it up, but it's not hard on your own.  I bet in less than an hour you could be playing around with it and get a real taste for it with little to no financial commitment (at least during the trial period!).

I mistakenly fought against using Roon for the first year or so in lieu of an Aurender unit (which was awesome in it's own right), but now that I have the current Roon configured with Tidal and their online Radio options, I wouldn't go back.

That's how I'd recommend getting started and you can figure out how it might fit into your listening goals.