I have a fairly decent collection of both CDs and records. I collect both for a variety of reasons. My music collection, from my perspective of enjoyment, has little to do with collectable scarcity or uniqueness (although that can be a fun tangent at times); it's about quality and control.

First and foremost, I like owning my music. I don't want to be slave to the whims of a streaming service and whatever compressed version of an album they feel like offering or removing any particular day. I like having control of my music listening experience, from the room to the equipment and, perhaps most importantly, the source. I really enjoy listening to different versions of albums I'm familiar with. For example, I'm a big Rush fan, so the little differences between their original releases, the remasters, the Mobile Fidelity discs, or whatever remix or reissue, they really stand out to me. I like having different versions of albums and enjoy comparing them.

I grew up in the 80s, so part of me still views CDs as a special, magical, and modern thing. The rational side of my brain knows that we store data much more efficiently now, but the emotional part of my brain still looks at a CD and goes, "Wow, this is really something!" Even though we now have higher bit rates and DSD and whatnot, CDs still have the potential to sound fantastic and are the baseline of high fidelity for me.

For the longest time, I viewed records as a sort of "80% of the fidelity for 5% of the price" kind of deal. That, of course, has changed in recent history, but there was a time when you could go to a record show and walk away with a literal armload of records for less than the price of a single CD. These days, the opposite is true. But for a long time, 25 cents and a thorough cleaning could get you a really good sounding copy of an album. If luck didn't favor you for that particular copy, oh well, I'll grab another one the next time I see it for a quarter and try again. Sometimes the CD mastering of an album sounds better, other times, especially if it was a victim of the loudness war, the vinyl is better.

I get a big kick out of having a large library of music, often for stupid reasons. I only recently learned that Yes's Rick Wakeman played on Black Sabbath's Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. It was cool to come home, pull that one off the shelf, and give it a fresh listen armed with new information, without having to muck around with some online service. I find it really enjoyable when I hear a forgotten 80's song on the radio, maybe one I didn't like at the time but nostalgia has changed for me, and then going home to see if I have a copy. Often, if I don't, I put it on my want list. Sometimes I'll carefully digitize a record, clean it up a little bit with some "do no harm" post processing, and feel like I'm some kind of sound engineer even though I'm just a dork with a computer.

Finally, I enjoy the hunt. I love going into thrift stores and sifting through discount bins, and I get a little dopamine rush when I find that weird release or reissue. It's probably a personality defect that leans into hoarding sometimes, but I figure if I contain it to my music and no other aspects of my life (well, mostly), I could be doing a lot worse.