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What Are You Listening To?


khaos

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6 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

. When I do doom it up though it's usually some kind death/doom like this past year's Worm album, or early Paradise Lost which never falls too far out of rotation, or maybe some sludge/doom with harsh vocals like Dopethrone which is a favorite of mine.

That's a classic one although I've always preferred Come My Fanatics.

Interesting to see you say that "those of us old enough to live through that time ended up buying the many of the same albums we had on vinyl in CD form in the 90's." I can tell you that I certainly didn't do this.....

Yeah, I was never a big music collector before the digital era but I remember starting to buy some CD's around 1990 because I remember buying Zeppelin's box set and transitioning from vinyl to CD when I graduated college in 90. It was just easier.

I went through several of those mass produced boom box mini stereo things that had a CDP and cassette tape player. Shit, I didn't even have an actual stereo system until I was in my 40's.

But from those original CD purchases...let's see, I still have old discs of Season in the Abyss, Slave to the Grind and Persistence of Time which I'm pretty sure all came out in 90. Anything after that was CD but wasn't that much. Prolly under 50 in all along with some jazz.  I've never bothered with vinyl after CD's came out. 

Then, when I went digital, at one point I went out put together an essential library of classic rock, alternative, punk  and classic metal. I bought a bunch of Maiden, Priest, etc. And all the way up to the present, I've slowly picked up discs of albums I missed from the day-stuff like The Cult, Accept....every once in a while, I'll get an itch-oh yeah, grabbed some old Twisted Sister, some Sabbath...just filling in holes here and there. 

Headphones were the reason you originally stopped by at Metal-Fi I believe. What are you using these days? b

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Well right now I'm rather enjoying my Massdrop Hifiman Edition XX planars. They were originally priced at $600 new, I got them used in mint condition last year on Ebay for $410 and I'm quite happy with them. 

But no, the reason I came to Metal-Fi had nothing to do with headphones or Head-Fi (that was you) or audio fidelity or not even AMG. I just happened to do a random Google search one day "Best metal albums of 2016 so far" to see if I was missing anything good and somehow I ended up on a M-Fi thread where some people were discussing that topic and I signed up to join in. And the rest as they say, was history.

For the record I was referring to the awesome Quebecois sludge/doom band Dopethrone in my post above, not the classic 2000 EW album from which they took their name. I like a little EW as well every now and then, but my favorite of theirs is Witchcult Today by a country mile. Tbqh I think their Dopethrone album is a tad overrated. Some of those songs stretch out a bit too long for their own good. I know they were stoned out of their gourds and all but you'd think there might have been one straight person in the studio to say "Hey guys, do you think we could try to cut this down to 6 or 7 minutes?" Because as the listener if I really want to hear the same riff for 11 minutes I'll play the fucking song twice.

Unlike you, I was already building a sizable vinyl album collection in the 70's and 80's (well it seemed sizable to me at the time, but I'm sure it was well under 1,000 albums) and I had them on display in a large magazine rack that I had picked up from a stationery/video store that was going out of business. So I really took it as a very personal slap in the face when the record industry said "Sorry assholes, no more vinyl records, you can either get your shit on cassettes or these new fangled CD things from now on." I was dead set against CD's simply because I didn't want to have half of my shit on one format and the other half of my shit on another format, and then some tapes thrown in as well, thought that'd be a big stupid mess. I didn't want to have to buy a new playback device and also I was thinking what would be stopping them from turning around in 2000 or 2010 and foisting yet another 'new and improved' format on the unsuspecting consumers?

So in 1992 I swore that I would never succumb to their corporate marketing bullshit and buy their stupid little compact discs. I was prepared to go to the mat and stick with my 12" vinyl with the large format artwork come hell or high water. Needless to say I had a rough time in the early 90's when some records I really wanted came out and vinyl was not even an option. I remember having to buy some stuff like Alice in Chains Dirt and Soundgarden's Superunknown on cassette tapes because the scumbags were not releasing vinyl versions at that time.

Of course years later we now know that vinyl has had a massive comeback in popularity that no one could have forseen back in 1992. But now that I've long since converted to all digital I will never buy another album on vinyl as long as I live. Being the generally scattered and unorganized person that I am, keeping track of my albums, putting them all back in their rightful sleeves and keeping them clean and static-free sans skips is just waaaay too much trouble for me. I love being able to scroll through all my stuff sorted by artist or genre or year and just click to listen. The very idea of going back to the days of having to get my ass up out of my chair and physically look for an album and use a mechanical device to play it and then have to get up again to flip it over seem ridiculously and laboriously archaic to me now. I have absolutely no idea how this process of collecting and playing physical media could possibly have caught on the way it has when digital is so much better.

Still, I'm not gonna go try to replace everything I had on vinyl from the 70's and 80's digitally now because it's been too long and I just don't care about most of that crap anymore. If I do ever feel the need to hear something from 40 years ago I can always dial it up online, listen once and get it out of my system. Some of that stuff you mentioned like Twisted Sister or Slave to the Grind or Persistence of Time were albums I didn't even have back when they came out and I'm 100% sure I will never feel the need to listen to them.

NP: Dopethrone - Dark Foil

 

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