Back In the Day

Yes, I was doing it, possibly more than now. I went through cartridges like water. Also, several turntables, less amps, and speakers. A lot of it may have been bad record pressings, and recordings. If it was popular, they stamped records out (truckloads?) when they should have scrapped the dies. Nobody complained, they were making nice profits, and the result was poor. I had some albums that I put a lot of hours on. I used to joke that one of these days I may hold it up the the light, and it will show through.

Then I found a couple of them in the old closeout section of a store years later, and was thrilled. One day I opened them to see how much better they would sound. Big disappointment. They sound like they were played day after day on a cheap jukebox, or were played on a bad changer. I tried them on different tables ( arms,cartridges too) and the same result. I gave them time to break-in, and they never sounded as good as the worn out ones I had. They must have been stamped on super high hour dies.

In about the '90s, I had ended up about at least a half of a dozen of audio friends, even more with the out of town/state ones, finally, more time and money. We bought and swapped a ton of all kinds of audio gear for years. It was a lot easier, with a lot of us involved. Finally settling down some, at least I hope.

Back in the day I learned about the Shibata Stylus in an effort to reduce surface noise on records. I was also upgrading equipment and experimenting with cables.

I think that this phenomenon of churning equipment goes hand-hand with the internet taking off i.e. the public has ready & easy access to a used & new equipment market that it did not have in 1980s. Plus, the number of manuf in each segment (amps, preamps, cables, TTs, etc) has grown many-fold & customers want to try out more/diff gear all the time.....
In the 1980s the methodology to buy equipment was much diff - it was a face-face transaction. Not so now!

Now, you buy from some user name, if you like it you keep it otherwise put it back up for sale....

It was all about "gittin" new music. Every time I went to the record store, I ran into somebody I knew. We were all well acquainted with the owner who gave good recommendations.

After we got into the "high end", the music thing was all over. Although that was a productive phase, I'm glad that I'm through it, and will never go back to it again. "It" meaning "listening to the equipment".

Back then, as some have pointed out already, there were far fewer manufacturers of high end equipment than now... but far more critical a limitation back then --- and the main reason why constant upgrades were rare for audiophiles (even if they had the money to do so) ... was limited access to what was available. Unless you lived in a big city with access to multiple High End shops, you simply had no access to what was available. Now, with the internet and places like audiogon, we have instant access to hundreds of brands of high end equipment. Back then, you would, if you were at all rural, drive a few hundred miles to find a shop, see what they have and choose from that limited array of equipment.

So... when all you had were some few and far between High End shops, you chose from what you had access to... and that was limited. So people did not volunteer to re-enter the hunt-and-find process nearly as often as now --- when one merely has to click a few buttons from home and choose from 25-times as many options and simply wait for the equipment to show up on your door-step.