If you started over what would you do differently?

while in college i didn't have a turntable and therefore no space for a record collection, so i figured i would get more records when i graduated. upon graduation i rushed out to buy a new reel to reel, a thorens TT, and some mid-fi electronics.
but i didn't forsee the disappearance of classical alblums until it was a few years too late, and the huge variety of available music was dwindling quickly. as i began to build a cd collection instead, it became apparant that some of the cd's sounded A LOT better (or one might say alot worse) than others. so i wasted some money upgrading recording quality while regretting that i already knew which vinyl records were considered top grade (these were the "$5 records" when i was in high school), but they were long gone. from wall to wall stacks of them (with no real money to spend) to cut-outs and re-issues to nothing. well, at least we had the opportunity to spend a small fortune on equipment that would make the cd's sound tolerable- lucky us!