I own a few hundred CDs, a few dozen DVDs and am just starting to buy Blu-rays.
They are all sitting on various shelves, not to show them off (
) but so they are easy to get to.
I actually owned more dvds until about three years ago when I realized, well with the help of some other people on an A/V forum
, that too many times I had been buying dvds of movies I barely liked....but pretty much never watched after buying them & then watching them one time. So I sat down one day and mercilessly went through them & kept only the shows I
truly enjoyed enough to watch multiple times and now my shelves only contain material I highyl value.
Despite it not being "cool" anymore
I will always keep my most valued movies and music in physical form because:
1) hard drives can crash unpredictably. Viruses can screw up music and video files.
2) related to the above: I will not pay or deal with the hassle of "cloud storage" when I can have my own storage system right in my own home.
3) as a movie and music snob
I want to hear and see those forms of art as best as possible.
a. while I use my MP3 player a lot in the car because having (nearly) my entire music collection at my fingertips is a worthy trade off for lessened sound quality, even using a 320kbps bit rate I know the music is missing something because the MP3, AAC, ogg vorbis and other file compression formats literally delete parts of the music that - according to scienctific research - the "average" person cannot hear anyway. I'll admit it does take careful listening via a decent home system to hear the difference between those formats and the unadulterated .wav files on the CD, but even just knowing something is missing bothers me (and yes, I know about the placebo effect in the field of audio).
b. movies in Blu-ray form, if they have been transferred properly from the original film or digital master, can look so stunning and so realistic even on a basic-brand HDTV, 42" or larger. I think even well-transferred dvds can look surprisingly good on the same TV. But movies via the typical cable or sat system? To my eyes, phew. To get all those other channels crammed into their limited-space broadcast signal or copper wire transmission system, those companies usually must compress all those signals to a certain extent to make them all fit, which in turn deletes parts of the original sources' visual information just like the audio formats mentioned previously (these are informally called "lossy compression" formats, because pieces of the original source is tossed away). This is why on certain shows and channels, many times you can see very visible pixels and outright chunks of ugly blocking, along with gray-ish blacks and weak color. But with most Blu-ray discs, unless the studio was really sloppy, you
won't see those things and will instead see jet-black blacks i.e. great contrast levels, proper color reproduction and smooth seamless images. And almost all Blu-rays contain an uncompressed .wav audio track, and many that use high-resolution .wavs using the 96kHz/24bit format, improving sound quality IMO over the lossy Dolby Digital format used with most cable/sat systems, but this is only apparent when a decent audio system is utilized, in my experience something around (minimum) $300 for stereo and $700 for surround.
Lastly, for albums I really like, I buy the CD.* For songs I just kind of like, I'll buy the digital version from Amazon or directly from the label.
* or high resolution version if possible which means the dvd-audio or sacd format, though both formats have been hit hard by the MP3 "revolution" and releases have slowed to a trickle, but fortunately the number of
surround albums is increasing surprisingly. My last multichannel music purchase was a King Crimson dvd-audio,
In the Court of the Crimson King.
Btw for whatever reason, among others quite a few GM and Acuras since @2004 come with dvd-audio surround systems - look for the "DVD-AUDIO" logo somewhere on the faceplate.
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