Been there. Done that too. I was “that guy” who bought a laser disc player and within a year something new called the “DVD” came out. Laser discs were horrible: $40-50 each; deluxe editions $100 each. They would show flaws in the picture if they got even a tiny scratch. I’d swear they probably would warp like LP records. I only had about five movies. Anybody want to buy a lightly used laserdisc player?
It’s funny, but when I got a DVD player as soon as they came out, I’d search stores that hadn’t even decided to carry them yet. One guy at a rental place told me, “Well, we probably won’t carry them until we know the format is going to succeed.” A year later they had gotten rid of literally every VHS tape in the place.
It’s bad enough that I had to basically dispose of a voluminous VHS collection. Thankfully many of them are now pretty rare and I was able to sell them on Amazon for a decent price rather than just toss them.
I lucked out in the sense that I only had about ten tapes I “owned” and the rest were rented as needed.
EDITED TO ADD: I take that back. I had all of the original Star Trek episodes on VHS, plus the movies. Luckily I sold them to a Star Trek nut for pretty close to what I paid for them.
A buddy of mine still–and I mean still–has more VHS tapes than DVD’s. He constantly struggles to repair or replace his equipment. VHS machines are becoming the Eight-tracks of the modern era.
I’ve also got a couple thousand LPs and 12" singles from my DJ days and more cassette tapes than I care to think about. One day I will need to covert those cassette tapes to digital format so I can unload them as well.
When in college I was the first person I knew in this town to own a DVD player. No remote control IIRC. It was about $400 in 1983 to basically just play discs. You couldn’t even program the songs you wanted to play in any order: they had to be programmed to play in the order they appeared on the disc.
About three years later I got one that would just about cook breakfast for you and only paid about a third the price.
LP’s were like VHS tapes to me: I never had that many and it was no great loss to switch to CD’s. I’ve got a lot of rare CD’s now: out of print stuff, rare pressings, collectors’ editions. When you know you’ve got one of 5,000 of a CD pressed on a French label designed to introduce an obscure band to the public, you know you’ve got something irreplaceable.
Now I live in fear that CD’s are becoming eight-track tapes and I won’t even be able to buy a replacement CD player in ten years. But they said that about LP’s too.
Thing is: I think LP’s really do sound better than most CD’s. Maybe it’s just the hearing damage “coloring” the sound or something. I also think mono sounds better than stereo.
If I can ever get around to converting all my CD’s to a single storage medium or something I’ll probably call it a day as far as collecting new music.
dont have to tivo and skip commercials anymore