When I was a young boy in the 70s, I grabbed my grandma's old turntable to listen to Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure, Stranded and These Foolish Things. Beethoven had to have a break in the meantime .

Forty years have passed since then. Today I listen to the music of our hero on my Marantz and Yamaha Hi Fi Sets (with 2 Roxy SACD records), but sometimes even on iTunes - my archive for very bad cases (water, fire and other elementary dangers ).

My question to you, my fellow V!RM.com members: How do you listen to the masterpieces of Bryan, Andy, Phil, Paul etc.? Do you have a big room with speakers as big as monuments or do you enjoy the RM/BF back catalogue wherever there's an occasion to do so - even if it's not what you call high fidelity?

I'd be glad to read some reactions.

Yours sincerely, -pianoman-

I'm afraid, I'll have to disappoint you. I have a very good media-player, the Cowon C2, and that's what I'm using most of the times. Since I live in a small apartment (or is it flat?) in the city and the walls are so thin you can hear the flies cough in your neighbour's apartment I don't even have a stereo at the moment.

When I was young I used to listen to my vinyls on my stereo so loud the neighbours were complaining all the time. Once, I think I was listening to "If There Is Something", the neighbour from the fifth floor came down to complain - I lived on the ground floor

Now I prefer to listen over the headphones and I also acquired a bit of discipline concerning the volume, after all I don't want to end up hearing impaired.

P.S.
As to the sound quality, I prefer the FLAC format to mp3. When it comes to classical music I copy most of my CDs uncompressed to my Cowon. It has a microSD slot and can read cards up to 32 GB, so storage space is not an issue. But it was funny to see how reluctant I was when my first 32GB card was full and I had to decide to split my music up on two cards. Heck, when I was young we had to flip sides or change the lp after 20+ minutes, not to mention the maxi singles and singles - and now I'm reluctant to swap an SD card when I want to change from modern to classical music...

Hello Lonely Dreamer,

with such a high tech media player and such high definition sounds you'll never be lonely at all .

I see you're totally en vogue because I read a lot about these new devices (Cowon, Calyx, Astell + Kern etc.). Years ago I bought myself an iPod with a 160 GB capacity. That should be enough for the time being ...

But as an old school (sa)cd guy i prefer listening to my cd player - not too loud, of course .

I wish you loads of fun with your super media player - whatever finds its way into your ears .

Say hello to lovely Hamburg!

- p -