"Sonic Man" wrote in message

Say you are a typical recorded sound consumer, and over the last who
knows how many years you accumulated
- hundreds vinyl LPs, some vinyl singles, and maybe even some old 78s
- hundreds cassette tapes, prerecorded and your own recordings
- hundreds CDs, prerecorded and your own recordings
with pop, jazz, classical music and spoken word.

Now you decide to invest the effort to put it all in one medium, so
you can throw away the turntable and the cassette deck. What will you
do?
Convert the vinyl and tapes to .wav files and put them all on CDs that
you can play in CD players and on your computer?

I see this as a first good step, and a good form of backup and archiving.

Convert everything into MP3 files, back them up on DVDs, and download
them into your iPod or home system as needed?

I see this as a second step, more attractive to you if you have a portable
player that is more convenient to use with MP3s.

Regarding the MP3 option, if you tried such project, have you run into
any problems? Are you happy with the sound quality?

I've been known to use MP3s under duress. They aren't that bad in many
cases, but the gold standard is 16/44 wav files which I use wherever
possible.

My preferred listening format is 16/44 .wav files, and this includes my hard
drive based portable player. I have a car player, two flash-based players,
and a portable CD player that play MP3 files and have limited storage space
in some sense. I use MP3 CDs and MP3 files stored on flash memory in those
cases.