Poll: When CDs first emerged, did you replace/duplicate your records with CDs?

Some, yeah. But its not like I trashed my record collection, but I did pretty much abandon the format. When I moved from NY to California I left the lps behind.

But I will say the first thing I did was buy all the Genesis CDs I could find as they were made available in the mid to late eighties. I'm glad I did. No regrets.

 

Didn't read all of this, but I replaced my entire cassette collection with CDs. I missed the LP's heyday.

 

I didn't "replace" anything, 'cause I never stopped playing my LPs. But I did duplicate some things.

 

I spent the first half of the 1980s, replacing my domestic LPs with British and European imports, the second half of the 1980s replacing my imported vinyl with CDs, and the first half of the 1990s replacing my CDs with new and improved remastered CDs. If only the internet and this site existed in 1986, I would have known that for the four hundred dollars I paid for my first CD player, I could have bought a turntable that would have blown away any of the CD players that existed at that time and saved myself a fortune in CDs and remasters.

 

I replaced the vast majority of my collection, and also added a lot of titles I'd been to dumb or poor to buy before.

 

I'm just about there.

 

I still have every record I ever bought. In the 80's I moved from Texas to NYC and left my records in a closet. I had only a cd player, a receiver, and some head phones.

 

I eventually "replaced" most of the over 300 LPs I owned when I bought my first CD player in 1985. There are a few that I don't care to replace, and maybe a dozen or two that I will still buy on CD when the price is right or they become available. I've actually kept all the LPs, so "duplicated" is probably a better word to use that "replaced". I did a quick count - of the first 50 or so CDs I got, about half were duplicates and half were new titles. The first 10 CDs I bought were duplicates of my favorites that were available. The first new title I bought on CD was the 1812 Overture on Telarc, followed by Wish You Were Here and Scarecrow.

 

It was an exciting time! I bought oldies that I had never owned at that point. Most of what I found in mid-1985 was from either Motown or Atlantic/Stax. A year or two later, it was cheapo rip-off labels that released 60s/early 70s oldies. It wasn't until 1988 that I discovered Rhino, and Steve Hoffman's work on various MCA , DCC, and Sandstone labels. Dennis Drake was also putting out stellar-sounding work on the Polygram labels. New stuff was by Sting, and I particularly loved the Steely Dan "Decade" CD.

Many of those late 80s Atlantic CD comps contain mastering that sounds better than anything put out since, IMO.

No way would I ever dump the vinyl before I got the CD!

The early 90s was heaven for me. That's when especially MCA, including their newly acquired Motown, started releasing all kinds of R&B CDs. Next it was CBS (Columbia, Epic). I bought all that along with all the new product. I had started to buy tons and tons of compilation CDs of all types, and boxed sets. The first boxed set I bought was Rod Stewart's "Storyteller". Then It was the Bee Gees box. Then Motown. Then Stax. Marvin Gaye. The collection just kept growing. I had long given up on vinyl, but was still making cassette dubs. I gave that up when I bought a DAT.

I was pissed when I got those early Earth, Wind & Fire CDs. Columbia botched half of them. Missing interludes, bad sound, glitches. That's why i'm glad they remastered them. I wrote elsewhere that the remasters pretty much sonically match my original vinyl, so I am very happy with them. No, I don't like the MoFi CD of "That's The Way Of the World". It's too bright. I was so happy to find the Atlantic Chic CDs, but, I had to hunt for them, as I discovered them as they started going out of print. And I was still buying up tons of Rhino comps!

The best time for that was about ten+ years ago, before the big record stores like Tower went out of business.

 

And now replacing CD's with LP's.

 

Where did you live that you only saw Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen on CD??????

 

I didn't get into CDs immediately.

It was out-of-print jazz records that were expanded, like Coltrane's Live In Japan, that led me to get a 2-CD set.

For a while I had the CD but nothing to play it on! By the mid-90s I grew to embrace the convenience and availability of CD reissues, mostly.

 

I was very young at the time, but I'll talk on behalf of my Dad. He replaced almost all of the albums he had on vinyl with the CD versions instead. All his vinyl LPs were sold to a second-hand record store which we had in our town back in the 1980s, and up until around five years ago.

He's never regretted it and maintains that CDs sound better than vinyl.

At the time our Hi-Fi didn't have a CD player included, so he bought a separate CD player to hook up to the Hi-Fi. The CD player was very expensive at the time.

 

As the question is asked--when CDs first emerged--my answer was "No, only a few." For me, "first emerged" meant 1986 when I got my first CD player. Since I didn't have one in that car, I still made cassette tapes of the albums and CDs, and saw no need to replace the vinyl records in the first few years. Main exception was the Beatles CD catalog in 1987. I didn't have the UK issues, and not even all the US albums on vinyl.

JcS

 

Not really. I mostly bought stuff I could not get on cassette, like this one.

 

i WANTED to replace all my records to cds but couldn't, not for audiophile reasons but economical one.
even after i got my first cd player (87'), i still bought LPs mostly (until it was gone~) simply because it was cheaper.
it was choice between buying 2 LPs or 1 CD and i took the former almost everytime (4 or 5 LPs if it was used).

btw, i'm one of those that still REFUSED to go back to vinyl now that's in again...again, not due to audiophile reason but because of what i went through in the 80's.

 

I have a friend who worked at Arista when CDs were coming out, and I heard some early promo stuff, before CDs were even in stores.
He told me, "this is it, they're replacing lps". Mostly that's been true. That probably partially influence me to do the transition to CD, but in the end the CD portability, convenience, durability, sound, and size was what motivated the switch.

Plus, they look great on my wall. 8 closely aligned shelves with CDs on them looks like an abstract painting, with the horizontal lines of the shelves and CD row melding nicely with the vertical lines made up of the different colors and designs of each CD spine. So it's like a piece of art. Or maybe I'm just high.

 

Slowly but surely all the albums. But sadly, the bulk of my record collection is 12 inch mixes and a dozen shoeboxes of 45's that I don't hold much hope for ever being released properly on CD.

 

I was only ten and already very much in love with vinyl, so no.
The first CD I did buy was in 1993, halfway through college, and then only because that album wasn't available on any other format (World of Monsters by the Drovers).

 

There were some of my vinyl records that were in marginal condition for one reason or another. Some of those I replaced with CD's. However, I had no system of doing it. It was on a case by case basis.

 

CDs took off at just the right time for me. Just as I graduated from cassette boom box to a nicer turntable, and didn't have many titles on either, CDs came out. Then I began building a collection of both CDs and LPs, and while there is some overlap, there are a good number of albums that I have exclusively on one format or the other.

 

The fogiest for sure...LOL!

Ed

 

I thought the last option "Not applicable - I did not have a record collection when CDs were released." would cover individuals like yourself. Apologies if I didn't make this option clearer.

 

Another contributing factor was that the quality of those early "cheap (ahem $200) CD players" is that despite their limitations, they produced a much better sound quality that the very cheap record players that many individuals had at the time. The CDs were not being compared to good quality turntables.

 

When CD's first emerged I did nothing. Couldn't afford a player, so no dice for me. Eventually toward the end of the 90's I did replace some of them, but have lived to regret it for the most part. My best sounding CD's are stuff I never had on LP.