It's a sound theory...
Everyone1 needs a hobby; something to stave off the boredom.
Remember audio? Here's where I own up (during my ongoing quest for [a] listening unsullied by snap, crackle and pop and [b] ever better signal-to-noise ratios) to recording my four Curved Air vinyl LPs...
- on to non-Dolby, mono cassette tapes (1971: a Sony mono radio recorder, <50dB)
- on to non-Dolby, stereo cassette tapes (1973: a Sony stereo2 ditto, <50dB)
- on to Dolby B, stereo tapes (initially [1975] Hitachi deck plus separate Videosonic Dolby B box, <57dB, latterly [1978] Tandberg's tasty TCD330 3-head deck, <60dB)
- on to Dolby C, stereo, tapes (1981: Pioneer CT4, <65dB)
- and on to bias-optimised Dolby C HXPro metal tapes (1983 to 1987: no less than three of the superb Aiwa ADF770, dual capstan, 3-head decks, about 70dB)
... before finally giving away the tapes in 2000 (the vinyl went West a decade earlier) having long since re-bought all four damned LPs on CD by then. (This is surely what's meant by "paying your dues to the audio industry".)
A message to people who email asking for copies
I receive occasional requests for copies of various items. My position is very simple: I do not distribute copyright material.
I shall skip lightly over the brief bout of insanity that was my attempt to build and get working the Wireless World opto-resistor based audio dynamic range compander in 1975 or thereabouts...
One of numerous iterations in Old Windsor
... not to mention my equally brief flirtation with a dbx box (a claimed 90dB) while I was for a while a hifi reviewer for the Haymarket Press by moonlight, while freelance assembler programming ICL 1500 Series minicomputers3 in the evenings, after my day job in the ICL Education and Training HQ in Beaumont, Old Windsor, but before the arrival of my son in March 1980...
Sonja Kristina's divine warbling / Darryl Way's violin?
The CDs are now safely up in the loft, with their companded resampled ATRAC3 DSP Type-S bits strewn across one unfeasibly tiny LP4 (Sony) minidisc (>90dB, never even heard of wow and flutter, number r119 in my collection), thanks for asking! Mind you, I burned out three minidisc recorders during the long (real-time) months of this process. Funny how they expire about a fortnight after the one-year warranty, don't you think?
Ripping my CDs was even more boring, but my 20GB Creative MP3 Player did nicely for a couple of years on long trips. (Of course, now that I've lost my wonderful chauffeuse and had to become my own driver, that particular in-car entertainment option is closed off. But then, Creative have discontinued making the rechargeable batteries the player needs, so the option would have closed in any case.)
Re-ripping progress
Re-ripping4 all the CDs (this time using variable bit rate and highest quality level) has been an odyssey of discovery, too. Not least the discovery that some of the CDs failed to make their way through the original (128Kbps) ripping process or, in some cases, even into the database. So the use of the word "all" above is (technically) inappropriate. The somewhat larger MP3 files are now safely housed on a variety of hard drives, including my Buffalo NAS from which they can be served, via my Western Digital 'Live TV HD' media player to the downstairs main audio system. But (of course!) they won't now all fit onto the natty little 160GB iPod Classic I acquired at the end of 2007, so I gave that to Junior in 2011.