My Music Format Odyssey

Like many of you, I have at one time or another embraced just about every music format made.  I’m an avid music lover and it has and continues to be an extremely important part of my life. Just about every experience and memory I have has a song or soundtrack associated with it. I started buying vinyl as a kid. The first album I ever bought was “Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing the Beatles” because my mother wouldn’t let me buy a regular Beatles album after John Lennon’s misinterpreted comment about the band being bigger than God.  (I thought my workaround was pretty clever!) I built up a decent vinyl collection over the years using any spare money I had. As time went on I was intrigued by the convenience of 8 Tracks but they sounded like crap and were unreliable. Cassettes allowed the making of mix tapes which provided greater dominion over how I listened to music. Then along came the CD and I thought there was nothing better. They were convenient, initially sounded great and I even bought a CD recorder that allowed me to recreate the mixtape experience on disc although it was a painstaking process.  The CD era began when I was out of college and working with the disposable income to amass a very large collection (around 6,000 at the peak). When ITunes came along I enjoyed the ultimate ability to make mix CD’s from my existing collection as well as purchased digital files. I was not an early adopter of streaming but eventually embraced that format as well the purchase of high resolution files. Like many, I assumed vinyl was dead and digital was the future but I never got rid of my vinyl collection. Of course, over the years as I embraced all of these formats I also purchased better and better equipment for playback.  I also became more and more aware of sound quality and realized how much crap was out there and how much compression ruined music.   All of this had led me to build, tear down and rebuild my primary system to a point where I can now just sit back and appreciate good music. After seriously upgrading my analogue capabilities earlier this year I now much prefer vinyl with CD’s and streaming tied at a fairly distant second.  I have a dedicated listening room and specially made cabinets to store vinyl and CD’s. Recently I had my entire CD collection (pared down to about 4,500) ripped onto a hard drive so I can play anything from an IPad while also still owning and playing the physical CD’s if I choose.  (I should probably just give away all of the CD’s but that is another project for another time.)
All of this has come at some cost as I have made some foolish purchases along the way but I’m happy where I am now. I don’t know what the next big thing is and I really don’t care because I assume my ability to hear clearly is going to diminish before I have time to embrace new formats. I apologize for the long message but as I re-filed the CD collection after it returned from the ripping process I began feeling nostalgic about the musical odyssey I have been on for the last 55+ years (I am 62 now). I have revisited music I haven’t heard in years, wondered why in the hell I purchased some of the music I did and have experienced that sublime feeling of listening to vinyl again that is well recorded and played on really good equipment.  In spite of everything going on in the world we live in a time where music and playback systems of high quality have never been so available and affordable with a mind boggling variety of styles and genres.  If you are willing to work at it and do some digging you can experience music in a way that humans have never experienced it before. I feel very blessed by that. 
Thanks for indulging me.