Interesting to read all your different stories and angles, thanks for sharing! Still haven’t disclosed my own habits completely, so here I go. I used to mock digitalised libraries and cherished my cd’s. However, after the second Roon trial, I was convinced and it just got better since. Roon is great!
By now, I have almost digitalised all my cd’s and I haven’t played a single physical disc since. I store everything on local HDD’s and backups. So I’ve made the switch from physical music to digital music. Roon just offers so much more convenience than my cd-player.
That said, I’m still not ready for the next step: streaming. I use Spotify (I know, mp3!) to discover new music, although this too is replaced more and more by Roon (more specific, this great forum with my favorite thread: “What are you listening to now”. So I still miss out on MQA and infinite addition of albums to my library (through Tidal), due to budget limitations. On the other hand, I’m always in control, not some nasty Neil Young suddenly withdrawing his catalogue from streaming services, for example.
But then… I was shocked to read the thread about a lightning strike, destroying a complete music collection. And I wondered: what would I do if that happened to me? It cost me almost my whole life, and an awful lot of money, time, effort, love and care to build my collection. I remember vividly, crossing the entire country (and other countries) as a student, collecting music. I can never invest the same amount of time and money again. So if (let’s hope not…) this would happen to me, I think I would also switch to a Tidal account (or whatever streaming service is leading in hi-res by then), and purchase unavailable albums separately.