As a side note, I don't get why whould record make someone listen to the whole album, especially when you have to turn it half way through and why would someone stop a CD where an album can play all the way through with no stopping? Furthermore, why would this be an advantage? There are most certainly more albums with few really dumb songs and some really good ones then there are albums that are 100% a good listen.
I don't buy CD versions of records I own. I used to do that when I was much younger and wanted all those progrock albums as well as Mike Oldfield - where I thought superb sound is important. For me - and I know I'll get stretched all over these forums for that - I don't see why would I bother with Hendrix? His playing and his recordings are so muddled up, smudged and unarticulated, CD simply doesn't help. I have a lot of his music on records and some sought after live sessions. Records are as pure and as clean, black as coal, not a single scratch and perhaps played a dozen of times. I never saw any advantage of owning Hendrix on CD. Even that Experience-album sounds dreadfull.
I don't expect anything from records anymore. I have a few hundred of them. I'm very satisfied with how my deck works and at my home it's; if you want to listen to those certain albums you use TT because I don't have them in another format (and don't intend on getting them). So certain albums have their own reproduction machine.
But these days I have to admit
@gene said one thing good a long time ago about records. I simply didn't know my gf had it in her and I couldn't foresee it; she said TT is romantic for her. (!! go figure) I remember Gene's wife saying something along those lines. Then I said; and this record doesn't even pop&crackle... And she said; even if it did, that's part of the romance.
Listening to one side of an LP was pretty good, for that time- they only had single-play recordings or, if they really had a big budget, an open reel tape machine. Or, the radio. 78 RPM records were rarely more than one song, so being able to hear (I don't think everyone was actually 'listening' in the way that word's meaning would become) more than a couple of songs was better. The reason CDs were able to store 75 minutes of music is because Akio Morita, the head of Sony, wanted to be able to listen to a Beethoven symphony uninterrupted (IIRC, it was Beethoven's 5th). Since Sony was one of the companies that developed the CD, he got what he wanted.
If you think Hendrix sounds bad on the vinyl and CDs in your collection, check out some of the remastered versions- they sound far different from the original LPs. WRT his live recordings, remember, those were recorded between '66 and the middle of 1970- the facilities for live recordings wasn't always great and he didn't care as much about tuning his guitar as he did about the music. I have a Request music server and one thing struck me about the Hendrix CDs that I ripped to it- they sound far better than I would have expected- frequency response, dynamics, stereo separation and mix are all better than the LPs but another part of LPs for some people- they grew up with the music they listen to and THAT may be where the experience approaches romance for some, for others it may have sentimental value because of the events surrounding those times in their lives. For someone who was at Woodstock, the Monterrey Music Festival or some other show, the sound quality may be far down the list of things they care about- when music makes someone shiver, it's not about the sound, it's about feeling something special.
I don't want to sound all Care Bear, but music can be a visceral experience. Recordings that take someone from their musical Stone Age to what became their musical future is definitely going to remain at the top of someone's list. The beginning of many genres of music did that, whether it was Dixieland, early Jazz, Blues, Swing, Bebop, cool jazz, early R&B, Rockabilly, early Rock & Roll, etc- it's a demarcation point. It's a musical awakening, if you want to use another word. Think about the first time you heard something that excited you- does it still do that, or did you move on from it?
Sound quality isn't musical substance- it's great, but great music stands on its own.
About the dumb songs- they needed filler and if they could ration the good ones, they could put out two albums, rather than one. It's all about the money.
