As I write this post, my stereo system is playing a CD of The Longest Johns’ album Between Wind and Water. They’re my favorite a capella group, and I bought their entire catalog earlier this year. Of course, as soon as I got this CD in, I ripped it with abcde(1), re-encoded it to Ogg Vorbis, and slurped it up onto a ZFS volume served by copyparty and Jellyfin. There are about half a dozen ways I could listen to Robbie, Dave, Andy, and Johnathan sing “Wellerman” or “Santiana” without budging from this laptop, but I’m listening to the CD.

It would be easy to pretend that it’s just because it sounds better on my two big speakers, but that’s not it. It’s not like I have an audiophile-grade system, anyway, whatever that means; my speakers are nice, but they also came out of an alley and look like it, and the receiver/amplifier powering them was $5.99 at Goodwill. No, that’s not it.

The fact it, I like having to get up, fumble with the console door that we didn’t hang properly, find the CD I want in the rack - no easy feat when half of them have little cardboard sleeves in place of jewel cases - turn the CD player on, select the CD player on the receiver, wait for the CD tray to open (it takes like ten seconds after starting up to even think about accepting a disc), and inevitably get blasted by the much-too-high volume one of my housemates set on the receiver rather than changing the volume of whatever media they were streaming on the TV.

I like that my listening experience is bounded by the position of the speakers (and how loud I’m willing to get). I like that skipping a track takes some effort - not much, but some - and that, when the CD ends, there’s no autoplay of some algorithmically selected album, nor is it trivial to just throw something else on. If I want to keep listening to music, I have to get up and do it all again.

I like thinking about the process of listening to music, rather than it being an ambient, all-encompassing part of my day. It’s nice.