Quote:
Originally Posted by OccultHawk
Well...... I don’t see it that way because I can’t bring a stereo and a hard copy of my music everywhere I go. Work, the beach, out in the woods... even at home I don’t like fumbling with my music collection. I’d love to take a vacation at your place and spend about three weeks letting you spin records for me but after that I still prefer my iPhone and Spotify. I don’t really care about the temporary nature of today’s technology because it’s still way cheaper than the brutal financial damage buying records and CDs cost me. And also, life itself is temporary. I’ve had the phone I’m on now over 5 years. That’s a nice little chunk of my life. I’m good with it. Not that you should change. Please don’t.
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I understand and appreciate your perspective. The convenience factor is undeniably a powerful argument in favor of portable audio. And there are ways to get better sound from a phone if one is serious about the task - one can opt to stream lossless FLAC from their server instead of settling for garbage bitrate DRM-protected streaming services with paltry selections and abysmal organizational structures, and bypass the phone's internal DAC with an external portable headphone amp and portable DAC paired with a quality pair of semi-open professional cans. But for most people's needs, a cell phone does the job just fine.
I just take a firm position given my penchant for open source and responsible consumption to abstain from supporting corporations that engineer their devices to become bricks every 2 years or who lock down content from the end users' control.
Don't get me wrong - 90% of my listening is not my vinyl library but lossless content from my server, and I am over the moon about the incredible convenience of instantaneous access to hundreds of thousands of recordings at archival quality free of charge.
Every year or so I give Spotify a try but it has consistently failed to meet any of my needs. You can't browse by catalog number, there's no discography search parameters, you can't select between different masters of a recording, and their classical search is miserable. When I survey an artist or a label I prefer to listen to their complete catalog chronologically so I can observe the evolution of their sound, and I prefer an organized folder-based browsing structure of albums, EPs, singles, side projects, collaborations, live official and unofficial recordings, mix sessions, demos, etc. Spotify doesn't seem to offer any of that.
But I suppose that I am not most listeners.