That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

Chapter 19: Ten Tips for Building and Enjoying a Jazz Collection
Cassettes are delicate. Sound quality fades with too much heat and sun, and
tapes get tangled or broken. But cassettes are dirt cheap at garage sales, and
you can get a lot of music for your dollar. If you want to add a lot more music
to your collection quickly, cassettes are a good way to do it, but they really
aren’t collectible like vinyl or good-sounding like CDs.
Clean vinyl albums on a decent stereo sound really good. Many purists
believe that pristine vinyl on a decent turntable amplified by old-school
vacuum tubes gives a more real representation of music than CDs or downloaded
songs. CDs contain music in digital form, whereas records have a natural
range of sound. I think good vinyl sounds better than CDs.
The key to getting good sound from a record is having a clean record, a reasonably
good sound system, and a fresh cartridge in your turntable. Some used
turntables are collector’s items and expensive, but there are affordable new
and used units; most new sound systems have a place to plug in a turntable.
The cartridge I bought recently (from an online store that specializes in cartridges)
cost less than $50. See the next section for details on assembling a
good sound system, including turntables.
Rare vinyl is expensive, but great bargains can be found through garage sales,
radio stations, and relatives. A radio station recently sold several boxes of
vinyl to a collector for $100 (I wish I’d been there first), and I inherited a
quirky (though not jazz) collection from my grandparents (think Burl Ives
and Lawrence Welk) when they moved to a smaller home.
Here are more reasons to build a portion of your music collection with vinyl
recordings:
� Cost: Vinyl is cheap. Sometimes you only pay $2 or $3 for a vintage jazz
album.
� Looks: Vinyl looks great! Many albums are worth buying just for the
cover art. In fact, I display my old albums with their black and white
photos and cool type styles all over my house. I don’t believe that music
collections should be hidden away. Visitors to your home should be able
to examine your collection.
� Mood: Records hold less music than CDs, and the music is divided into
two sides of the album. Often, the two sides have different moods, or the
music has been put in a certain order to create a mood or tell a story. If
you want a truly authentic experience of music originally released on
vinyl, then you should hear it on vinyl.
You also can buy inexpensive hardware that lets you upload vinyl music to
your computer, although the process is time-consuming. From there you can
download it to your digital player. Some musicians simultaneously release
new music as vinyl, CDs, and online digital downloads.
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