PS AUDIO: The difference between the original and the new copy was not subtle

Paul McGowan writes: Over the weekend our kitchen sink backed up.  Of course I tried everything I could think of, from pouring gallons of Drano to buying a pathetic 25 foot snake at Home Depot.  In the end a call to the plumber solved it.  But without that sink life changed immediately.  It reminds me how much we take things for granted.

And one of those things some of us take for granted is our media.  A friend burned a collection of great demo materials for me on a CD.  I use that CD nearly every day without even giving it a second thought.  Then a funny thing happened.  I had reason to burn another couple of copies of this disc, one for another friend and the other for Music Room Two.  I burned both on a Mobile Fidelity gold CD and didn’t think much of it.  Then I grabbed the new copy and made sure it would play properly.  Wow.

The difference between the original and the new copy was not subtle.  So now I have taken the original, which I took for granted for months, and replaced it with the new copy.

Should I do the same for the hundreds of CDs in my collection?  Or should I continue to also take them for granted?

This obsession of mine for perfection drives me up a wall sometimes.  There’s no freaking way I am going to take the time to replace all my media.

Until the sink backs up again, I’ll just continue to take them for granted.