Just 3 Albums? Well, in that case length is an issue, so I need at least one double album.
-Zappa: Joe's Garage Acts I, II & III
-The Who: Quadrophenia
-The (always underrated) Kinks: Arthur, or the Rise and Fall of the British Empire
-And I'll smuggle the Stones' Exile On Main Street in my sock
On 2d thought, maybe I'd be better off with Greatest Hits Compilations;
Rolling Stones: Hot Rocks
Kinks: The Kink Kronikles
Nothing could replace Joe's Garage and no one could ever replace Frank Zappa -- Musician, Composer, Free Speech Activist and generally a (occasionally vulgar) voice of reason.
And, of course, I'll cheat again and somehow smuggle all five discs of Frank Sinatra/Tommy Dorsey: The Song is You.
Really, I'm here to learn more about hi-res audio. Once upon a time, there was an upstart computer company that devised a brilliant little machine that allowed you to carry around your entire music library in a unit the size of a deck of cards. It came with brilliantly simple software to help me organize, rate and compile my music. They also sold music in a dismal MP3 format, but there was always an option to rip your own CDs into your library using their lossless codec. And all was well. Then they started grafting applications onto the software-- videos, movies, games, podcasts, books, and the little machine became a phone without buttons and drastically reduced storage for lossless tracks. Now, more than 20 years later, I've lost my carefully-crafted playlists twice in the past year because the software has more bugs than a rainforest. I spend hours on the phone trying to fix the issues, which only get worse. I dread every "update" pushed out to accommodate their latest phone or other device in their "ecosystem". And I am DESPERATE to get out of that ecosystem. I'd like to do it without having to re-rip my entire CD collection and I am intrigued by new Hi-Res audio formats. So I made some purchases -- a Brennan B2 to store my discs in a lossless format and a Fiios M11 to a) replace the aging iPod Classic which remains my main source of musical enjoyment and b) dip my toe in the waters of services like TIDAL to see if there might be something better than CD-Quality in a portable format.
I am old enough to remember the endless hassle of fragile vinyl records, with their static, hiss, pops and other sounds, not to mention using a "Discwasher", which everyone had, but which never really worked, and taping coins to the tone arm of the turntable to avoid skips before spending even more money on a new "diamond" needle. So I'm not going back to all that any more than I am going to buy a car that requires me to crank the battery before it will start. I'm searching for that perfect sound in the smallest possible package.
I'm a big fan of Oppo products, including my little HA-1 DAC which improves the sound coming out of my iPod Classic and, yeah, my buttonless phone as well, because the Classic is incompatible with my car's audio system, so I need Bluetooth, which is a little like chewing aluminum foil when it comes to sound quality. I also love my Oppo UDP-205, which is far more than a 4K BluRay player; it's almost an AVR with both analog and digital inputs, the latter processing sound through professional-quality DACs. I'm slightly less enthusiastic about my real AVR, an Anthem MRX-1120, only because it lacks those analog inputs. But it does a fine job handling just about any music format, it's much smaller than less-accomplished machines, and it is extremely user-friendly when it comes to customizing and redirecting sound. Both the Oppo and the Anthem are very well-built and I don't see myself replacing them for many years. Of course, that's how I felt about my last plasma TV, a 65" Panasonic. But that was before lightning hit my house (exactly five years ago TODAY) and Panny's "customer service" was wretchedly unhelpful. I currently watch an LG 77" OLED -- protected by a beefy Panamax Power Conditioner -- that would be much cheaper now than when I bought it, but I'm the guy that bought a HD-DVD player the first day it was available to the public, a few months before BluRay made it practically obsolete. Even so, the best (and heaviest) TV I've ever owned is still working in my bedroom -- a final-generation 60" Pioneer Kuro plasma.
I believe in owning physical media and making electronic copies rather than skipping the physical and buying fickle clumps of electrons. My speakers are all Bowers & Wilkins and they are all (except the B&W in-ceiling speakers I purchased for Atmos and the B&W speakers in my car) 5-6 years older than my son, a junior in college. When a company makes speaker cones out of Kevlar rather than paper, the speakers are going to last longer.
And that's my story. R.I.P. FZ.
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