I saw my first CD store in Salt Lake City in 1984 or 1985. The sales girl was wearing a broken CD as jewlry, and it was obvious tom me that it was a status symbol – I’ve had CDs so long that I have a broken one I can wear as jewelry. But it was still a rarity, and I still bought vinyl. I continued to buy and play vinyl for years afterwards, even though it was becoming hard to get vinyl records after 1991 or so. I didn’t have a CD player, though, because I didn’t see the need, and they were expensive. I didn’t get any CDs until Pepper Mill moved in, bringing her player.
I had my first record in 1982 with Men at Work’s “Business As Usual”. Then my collection consisted grew to British pop and new wave (New Order, Depeche Mode, Wham!, etc.). I was 10 years old that time.
In 1985, our family got a new tape deck so my first cassette was The Cure’s “Standing on a Beach - Singles Collection.” I kept buying cassettes until…
I went to college in 1990, parents bought me a boom box with CD player. First CD was Erasure’s “Wild!” At the same time, I started working at a record shop. My CD collection grew to about 1000 CD’s by the time I graduated in 1994.
I collected ALW, and Europe pressed LPS a lot longer than America did.
My first CD was Aspects of Love.
1986, had my parents buy me a stereo system for Christmas. First CD I remember buying was Sinead O’Connor’s The Lion and the Cobra.
Do you listen to any current music (does it play 33 rpms as well)?
I was born in 1959. The last year I remember buying any vinyl LP was 1984. That was also the year I stopped owning a record player. (Broke and I decided not to repair or replace it.)
After that I somehow subsisted musically on cassette tapes alone for over 12 years. During those years when I found an LP I wanted to listen to, usually something from the public library, I took it to the stereo in my parents’ house and put it on cassette. Like Phase42, I got my first computer in 1996, and I think I got my first music CDs in 1997. Now I avoid cassettes entirely… they’ve practically stopped making car stereos with cassette players, unless you special order one from Crutchfield, which we did once but I don’t want to keep doing. Now I’m planning to start converting old cassettes to digital.
There was some overlap, but I switched to CDs for good sometime my freshman year of college – so late '88 or early '89. I think the Traveling Wilbury’s first album was the last vinyl record I bought.
Hmmmm. I think '87 or '88. I was in high school then. I do remember that the first CD I bought was Hot Rocks '64-'71 by the Rolling Stones.
Sometime in the mid 90’s when I finally bought a CD player. Before then I usually listened to cassette tapes.
I got a CD player from my brother in 1990-91 for Christmas (he had my name that year out of the drawing). It was a 5 disk changer, but not the kind available today. It was like a lat revolver cylander the spun CDs like shells. After getting it, my wife suggested we join BMG to get CDs at a discount. We were with them for about 2 years, until we owned everything we liked in their entire collection. We even had to get a 5-foot high CD rack for our living room to fit all of them. They gave us the worst time about quitting them, but they finally took “F-U” for an answer.
1984 or 1985. My first two CDs were two samplers of classical music published by Telarc.
There was (actually still is) a used record shop on Carmine St. in the West Village called House of Oldies that used to have an article taped to the cash register that read (paraphrasing): Don’t buy CDs - WhateverTheirNameIs Technologies has invented a turntable that reads analog signals from vinyl records and converts them into crystal clear, digital audio.
I decided to wait. It wasn’t until Deep Forest’s debut was released on CD only that I gradually made the shift. Had Ryko released the Zappa catalog prior to 1994, I would’ve switched then.
What’s funny is, I just saw a teenager buying T Rex’s Electric Warrior on Vinyl last week at Tower. He got back a few loose coins as change from his $20.
I don’t know if it’s relevant, but I’m a sub-30 year old who made the switch from CD to LP a few months ago. I realized that CDs are disposable as I listen to all music on my computer and burn everything to disk. I can’t even remember a time when I put on a CD save for that initial burn! And now with downloading (legal and, um, otherwise) I need never even buy the CD for that initial burn. I buy LPs from bands I want to support and whose CDs aren’t available at the library for burning. Also, they are usually cheaper than CDs when you buy them through the record label itself. (And most of what I listen to is released on both.) Also, colored vinyl! And while I am not much of an audiophile, I do think vinyl has a richer sound, even on my crappy speakers.
So it goes cassettes-CD-LP for me. Full circle!
::takes position atop SMDB bell tower with loaded sniper rifle::
The first person who starts singing “The Circle of Life” dies horribly.
The VERY FIRST.
To go back to prehistory, I started with reel-to-reel tape. I brought a reel-to-reel deck from Sony with an amp and speakers built in to college in late 1969, and started recording everyone’s records. (It didn’t start with Napster.) I got a whole stereo in the summer of 1970. I moved to cassette around 1978. I think we got our first CD player in 1989 or 1990 (461 Ocean Blvd by Clapton for no good reason) but I didn’t really start converting until I got a car with a CD player in 1992. I mostly get CDs from used record stores - first Princeton Record Exchange and now Rasputins.
It was 1989. I went to a friend’s house in Toronto, and heard Beatles outtakes in pristine stereo from a bootleg CD. That was enough to convert me. I had about two dozen of them before I even had a CD player.
I have thousands of records, and for awhile there, I told myself that I wasn’t going to replace my collection yet again in another format. Well, I started hearing recordings with no scratches, and I was seeing reissues with bonus tracks, and box sets, and it wore me down. Now I have over 4000 CDs. But I am NOT buying it all again in the next format.