What constitutes a large record collection?

No right thinking person considers downloads or any music held on 'gigabites' as a collection surely.You own nothing!

 

Oh yes!!!!

 

I have over 11K CDs in my collection...but the part that I find daunting is trying to listen to the 4.5K that I haven't been able to listen to yet...so it really isn't doing me much good to have so many when I can't enjoy almost half of it...I find myself being much more particular about the new ones I add fearing I won't be able to listen to them anyway...at 54 years of age I hope I live long enough to say that I was able to listen to everything...I have about 200 box sets that haven't been listened to either...

 

You live the life of a king my friend.

 

Go big or go home

No seriously it's relative. I think 7500 LPs is a lot more than 7500 CDs for some reason. And I'm a CD guy. I have more than 10k digital discs - actually at this point I think it might be a lot more. And obviously my wife, my friends, and people I've never met on the internet think I'm bat**** insane.

I've still got a couple thousand "vinyls" but when I meet a guy with a well curated 7500 LP collection, in my mind that's a pretty darn serious collection...

So all due respect OP, good thread.

 

I'd rather have 300 pristine (M-) LPs than 1500 not pristine.

But that's just me.

 

For god's sake don't put that into my head!

 

Back in the 80's, I thought it was ten cassettes.

 

Back in the 80's, I thought it was 300 cassettes!

Still kept 60 of the best in a wooden cassette rack. Haven't played them in 2 decades.

 

I have always considered 1K a "large" collection. It's a nice round number and it's 10X 100 records! I mean come ON!

Now that I have surpassed that number it still seems about right. Obtainable for the average person but still requires some dedication. Just my $.02

 

I started buying records in a big way when I was 16. Boxing Day sales at Sam the Record Man ( RIP) . I distinctly recall my dad looking me in the eye saying if all your summer job cash goes to that I hope you will still be into this 10 years from now. That was 1979. I did not sell off during the dark painful purge years when digital forces took over the empire. ( I bought those too ).
I'm at about 900 lps and about half that on cd and MP3.

 

I'm sure many of us here are willing to help you of your dire predicament!

 

Since "large" is a relatively vague term, let's use the individual owner as the gauge:
IF you have lost the ability to honestly recall whether a certain release/pressing in a given media (CD/LP) is in your collection, then is IS TOO LARGE.
(I may have almost reached that tipping point..Almost.)

 

I think a "large" collection is anything over 1000. I have somewhere between 300-500 LP's and many more CD's and other digital disks of various format. Personally I want to maintain a small to medium LP collection of good copies of things I really want to listen to. I'm not interested in having a huge collection.

 

Actually, living on a second floor apartment, I've occasionally wondered if my LP/CD collection was potential grounds for haphazardly endangering the tenant's lives that lived on the first floor below...

 

Until last Friday, I'd a thought my ~2,000 collection of LPs was "large". However, I met a guy to sell him some jazz records, he said he had ~20,000 I've reclassified mine as "respectable" sized.

 

More than three.

 

I feel guilty, I think I'm nearing the 300 mark which seems large in our storage limited house.

 

Well, my Musicbee tells me I have 3238 separate "albums", a good number of which are multi-disc or box sets, so I would wager that's well over 5000. I also have about 80 classical "mega" box sets (at least 25 CDs, most closer to 50 or more), so that is roughly 4000 more. Add in single classical CDs which I have not ripped, and I'm probably over 10K CDs. I have less than 100 LPs (that's the next project).

I consider mine to be a large collection, but a small library.

 

There are interesting comments here regarding a related question, which is "What is too large of a collection?"

That also has a subjective answer, but here's my opinion: There's too much wonderful music in this world to ever say "That's it, I will never discover another new album for the rest of my life." And even if you feel like you already own all that interests you, there's always tons of new music being created. And even if you only get into 1% of what is newly released, that's still a helluva lot of new albums to buy.

So I'd say my collection will never be too large simply because music is too amazing to ever be done buying and discovering it.

FWIW: My vinyl collection stand at 1269 LPs, 100 45s, and about 60 CDs.

 

I'd say 2,000 and over. (They hàve to be in B+ and over condition or they don't count)

 

Were the racks the old Napa Valley ones? I had two of the 100 ct. ones and two plastic recycle bins full of vinyl (plus about 50 CDs), and I had the most music out of all my friends. When I see some of those old photos of myself in front of my "large" collection in '91, it seems so odd.

 

OK, I did some measuring and counting and estimating. The ongoing purge has now got rid of 5 whole feet of LPs that were either in poor condition, poor recordings, or music I really never wanted to hear again. We are down to about 2300 from a peak of about 3000 LPs. It's not as many as I thought, my mental estimate of about 5K was way off. I was never in the big league, but it seems I'm not even in the medium league. A small-time collector. I'll pipe down - and tell the wife it's NOT a large record collection by any means.

 

I think it's large - but PERHAPS she will believe you

 

On a serious note a building would really have to have existing severe structural issues to not be able to support a lot of records evenly distributed along walls with wall fixings for example, having said that I have seen cases where too may records have been stored upstairs and the floor has started to bulge alarmingly so it does happen, but at least your neighbours will likely have a warning rather than a sudden critical failure perhaps best to check your insurance policy anyway. The best upstairs space I ever saw was a 1970s built commercial unit that appeared to have reinforced concrete floors, records stacked floor to ceiling and right across the space rather than just along the walls, plus it was fireproof as a bonus, I really envied that space.