Actually Steve, when I started buying Lucinda's albums (1988, the s/t album on Rough Trade. I had been introduced to her at Club Lingerie a year or two earlier, when her then-husband's band The Long Ryders performed. She was very shy.), I did buy them on LP (the s/t album wasn't even available on CD), and didn't buy my first CD until the albums I wanted were being released in that format only. When most record labels stopped making LP's, releasing albums on CD only, that's what I bought. I was happy for her when she broke through with the Car Wheels album, but didn't much like it's follow up or the one after that (though I now have changed my opinion of them ;-).
I lost interest in Lucinda, and moved on to newer favorites like Iris Dement, Buddy Miller and his wife Julie, John Hiatt, Rodney Crowell, Jim Lauderdale (he was in Lucinda's band on the Car Wheels tour, playing acoustic rhythm guitar and singing harmony), etc. It wasn't until I started reading you and others speaking of Lucinda's more recent albums that I again gave her a listen, and damn---she's better than ever!! A lot of her newer albums are on LP, and some of the originally-only-CD albums are now too. I gotten some of them, gotta get the rest. I have some of her albums on both CD and LP, some on LP only, some on CD only.
I'm not one who can't stand CD's, and have quite a few of them (somewhere around 3500, same number of LP's). Just like LP's, some sound better than others. I trained myself to not pick music to listen to with sound quality as the first criteria. I went down that path when I discovered the high end in '73, and it led to a shallow musical life ;-) . It's nice when it's there, but the music comes first, by far.
