I can’t help but wonder if when this pandemic started and shelter in place orders went into place if there weren’t quite a few audiophiles who saw an opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, I feel for the people who’ve lost their jobs or and/or, god forbid, their loved ones. As someone who’s spent quite a bit of time over the past few months trolling the used market for equipment, I know there are quite a few folks out there who’ve had to sell off their gear to make up for lost income. And of course, for many more people the situation is far worse.

But for audiophiles like myself who’ve been fortunate enough to avoid a catastrophe and stay relatively whole, the start of this pandemic might have seemed like a golden opportunity to spend more time at home doing the thing we’d just assume do more of anyway. Should I work on that Mailchimp campaign or play my new copy of Kind of Blue? Hmm…

For me as an audiophile, this pandemic has been a mixed bag. With my system set up in the living room and without a lot of opportunities for my wife to spend time outside of the house, I’m not getting much time for the kind of loud level deep dives that I crave. On the other hand, I have had time to tweak my system quite a bit as it doesn’t bother anyone if I’m fiddling with turntable footers and isolation devices (more on this later). And the results of all this tweaking have been, shall we say, ear opening.

Over the years that I’ve been collecting records I’ve very often had the experience of playing a record I haven’t played in a while and finding out that it sounds a lot worse than I remember. Not as often but nonetheless with encouraging frequency, I’ve also had the experience of pulling a record from the dustier section of my collection and discovering that it sounds a lot better than I remembered.

With both such experiences informing my choices of what records to keep and which ones I’d just as soon sell off to further fund this wonderful and ridiculous hobby, I find myself exercising quite a bit of restraint when it comes to selling records that, for the moment, don’t sound good to me. After all, what if a system upgrade later reveals the record in question to be a stone cold winner?

This uncertainty around picking sonic winners and losers has been made worse by the fact that my COVID era listening sessions last only as long as it takes for my wife to go to the grocery store or walk the dog. Fortunately the speaker upgrade I made near the beginning of the pandemic and the tweaks I’ve made more recently have really helped bring the relative virtues and shortcomings of each record to the fore.

Today I went through the bin that I typically reserve for my best sounding and/or most collectible records to see if there were any in there that needed revisiting. I also have a section of my collection I casually reserve for the sonic ?’s. With 2 SOLID HOURS (wife paddleboarding with friends) to play quite a few records and see which of them still impressed me and which ones didn’t, I’ve managed to cull what I would consider a substantial number of records from my collection and solidify the place of several others.

Beyond the thinning of my collection, this collection cull has also helped me better understand why I held on to certain records in the past and why I’m at ease with finding new homes for them now. I’ll be exploring some of my insights in my next post where I’ll discuss some of the mistakes I’ve made and that I think a lot of other analog audiophiles make when evaluating a record for sound.

I also be posting the results from a few shootouts I’ve done of some classic records by Bowie and Caravan that you won’t want to miss! So be sure to check back soon as I’ll be discussing a number of specific titles and pressings that you’ll certainly want to add or remove from your want list.

In the meantime, if you’re thinking of doing your own collection cull and wondering where to start, pull out ALL YOUR HEAVY VINYL and start comparing the sound on those records to what you get streaming the same title on Spotify or Tidal. I expect this will help you better prioritize your record spending budget going forward!

Thanks for reading!