Audiophobia.

My first experience of recorded music came out of a piece of furniture similar to this:

A Radiogram (photo courtesy of Audio Gold)

Out of this wooden edifice, after it had 'warmed up', came  such delights as "Apache' by the Shadows & 'Telstar' by the Tornados (Joe Meek) both of which would still feature in my Top Ten All-Time Favourite Noises That Last About 3 Minutes.

My family owned some records.

Mostly E.P.s, belonging to my mother, by artists such as Miki and Griff or Nina and Fredrick.

My older half-sister had some Beatles singles.

I also remember watching  'I Only Want To Be With You', sung by Dusty Springfield, and a record called 'Messing About On The River', sung by Josh McCrae, that I think belonged to my father, spinning round and round on the turntable.

Life continued, most of the music I heard continued to be squeezed through the aggressive compressors of the BBC then further squeezed out of speakers no larger than 6" in diameter, (usually oval shaped).

In the mid-seventies, in a mid-life crisis, father (mother was dead by then) bought a National Panasonic Stereo Music Centre:

(N.B. No cassette deck!)

This huge leap forward in sound reproduction came with a free copy of The Beatles 'Abbey Road', (which remains my favourite Beatles L.P.) though all I wanted to listen to were my T. Rex singles which, according to the step-mother I seem to have acquired by that time, was 'puff's music for puffs and would no doubt turn me into a puff.'

I'd just like to say at this point, FUCK YOU BITCH!  

Dig it 20th Century Boy

The next great leap forward came in the shape of a "Rigonda Party-Time Stereo" all the way from somewhere in the C.C.C.P. 

I am unable to find a picture of this shite magnificent entertainment centre, but did find a picture of the free disc that came with it:

Which enabled me to set the machine up for crystal clear stereo enjoyment.

(Yeah, right.)

This is all well and good.
Nobody in the small village I come from had anything different or, in most cases, better than these fine examples of 1970's crap-end technology.
Then my social circle started to include nice middle-class people and I was introduced to another world of audio reproduction.
I remember being sat in a suburban bungalow bedroom experiencing some Jimi Hendrix guitar twanging coming from a set of Wharfedale speakers, the size of wardrobes, at ear-drum busting volume and realising I may have been missing something.

1976, and things changed.
Having being forcibly ejected from my childhood home by the wicked stepmother, it was sometime before stability reasserted itself on my life to the point I could consider getting some kind of record player.
Fortunately my then girlfriend had a Ferguson Mono Record Player that was just perfect for listening to the music of that period.

Time worn on, various stereo set-ups came and went.
I'm sat at my computer, I have my recording monitors pointing directly at my ears.
Most of  the music I listen to is in mp3 format, but I usually just listen to spoken word audio nowadays.

The thing is this, I've had a couple of conversations recently, and read many articles on-line or in magazines, about how mp3 files, and digitally produced music in general, just doesn't sound right, doesn't have the 'warmth' or 'depth' of vinyl which may be true but, given the equipment I've had to listen to music on, how would I know?

To be fair, music for me is a 'doing' word, singing a song, playing an instrument, not the passive consumption of a product, and the equipment to reproduce it on.

I think that may have been a 'rant'.