If my house was on fire I'd save my external hard drive containing my iTunes library on the basis that I can carry it and I couldn't carry either cds or Vinyl!

I find it easier to browse a quickly when I'm looking for something to play ( I like being able to see all of them at once - not possible with MP3 ), my laptop isn't plugged in to the stereo and I like to look at and read the sleeves. It's neither a sound nor a cool issue

Everything is on an external hard drive - that's what I'd pick up first. Secondly, the box of DVD-Rs that the HD is backed up to.

Then I'd go back and get the wife.

No chance of me getting the vinyl or CDs out without a forklift.

Also, if I'm honest, I play my vinyl because I've not got round to digitising some of it yet.

Used to own a decent turntable,loved the sound of vinyl(when it was a good pressing at least),and have never heard CD quite match vinyl at it's best.Eventually though got fed up trying to align cartridges perfectly(don't think I ever got one spot on),trying to keep records dust free,and frankly some piss poor quality vinyl with faults easily visible on the playing surface.Still miss it though.

...is mainly composed of albums and singles that I don't own on CD. Putting on a record isn't an expression of preference for one format over another.

In a fire I would attempt to rescue my CD collection because most of my music library is stored on Compact Disc; also CDs are more likely to survive being hurled from my bedroom window.

There's stuff on vinyl that either hasn't been replaced by CD, or is not available in any other form (I chose "it sounds better" because thats the closest answer)

If your house was on fire. Which sound carriers would you save first?:
I would attempt to save the lot (vinyl, CD & computer), and am therefore unable to choose between the two options.

As noted above playing vinyl isn't really anything to do with being cool or the sound (although the thought of playing vinyl because I thougt it was cool is pointless, because who would be impressed?). The main reason is because I want to play something I don't have on CD.

Does Fraser have a bad code?

However, I don't play my vinyl because it's better sounding (though it often is), nor do I play it because it's cool to do so. I play things on vinyl because I don't have them on CD. And vice versa.

I'd save the CDs first if I could, simply because there are more of them, and they are easier to throw in a bag when the rafters are smouldering.

I've never owned a turntable... I got my first CD player for my 12th birthday, and promptly went out and bought Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Brothers in Arms. Make of that what you will.

PS nice chicken

Sunday papers, coffee, a roaring fire in winter (not-PC but t's been a bit cold of late) and a selection of vinyl, largely HJH, although Boz Scaggs and Robert Palmer have recently found favour. Sounds great, and yes, even though there is no one to observe, of course it's cooler!

It's all about the weird and wonderful things you can pick up on vinyl for 20p in charity shops. People reading from the book of Daniel in the Bible to flute music, or Russian orthodox chanting, or nursery rhymes, or a version of Sheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov that I rediscovered by accident after the one I grew up with died from water exposure, or other random childrens stories or a biography of Beethoven, or Miles Davis or Bjork remix 12". It's all about the randomness on vinyl.

Agree with Hannah. The chicken is good.

seems rather quaint to me now, and I've never for a moment missed my old vinyl albums, though I do miss the huge square-foot canvas the sleeves provided, resulting in some magnificent cover art to which the tiny CD booklets can't really do justice. The very sight of a turntable makes me giggle now, they look like contraptions from Heath Robinson cartoons. The first time a friend played me a couple of discs on his newfangled CD player, way back in the mid-80s, I was sold. The complete absence of pops, crackles and hisses just seemed to let the music mainline straight into my brain. One thumbs-down to vinyl from this corner, I'm afraid.

I always kept my original vinyl despite re-buying many titles in CDs. I am now in the process of selling off my CDs (around 2,000) and I buy new titles in vinyl wherever possible.

Better packaging, better sound and it just looks good, either in the sleeve or rotating on the turntable. CDs just seem so disposable, crappy cases, crappy artwork and I can burn another one any time I want.

I will keep a reasonable number of CDs, mainly special editions and box sets, but vinyl is the future for me. It will outlive the CD format.

...were just posturing snobs until I was walked through the world of the needledrop at the end of last year.

I'd bought vinyl until I was about twenty, but, like many, I was incapable of understanding the benefits of the medium when that medium was all there was. Come 1986, however, the lure of the shiny new digiworld distracted me (and pretty much everyone else) once I'd seen Judith Hann spreading jam on the back of The Power Station album.

When I discovered the world of the vinyl rip, however (this is starting to sound like a "World In Action" documentary on heroin addiction), I was quickly hooked.

The first thing I heard were the original Ardent pressings of the first two Big Star LPs, and I was absolutely captivated. How was it that these two tinny albums had suddenly acquired thumping new rhythm sections without me noticing? Next came the first UK pressing of "Exile On Main Street" (on which you could hear the wobble of the air between Charlie Watts' ankles), and after that it was "Rolling Stones No. 2", "Songs For Beginners" by Graham Nash, "Burgers" by Hot Tuna, "If I Could Only..." by David Crosby, "Rainbow Rising", "Power Age" by AC/DC, "Tusk" by Fleetwood Mac and the first five Black Sabbath albums.

The beauty of vinyl is that it is such a CINCH to listen to; it is like having your ears goosed by soft, unmigrained dewy zephyr air. The quiet bits are churchily quiet, the loud bits are almost pervily loud, and both come with a woozy cotton wool penumbra that you can never quite...

Recession permitting, I aim to buy as good a turntable as I can afford this year, and I want to build a vinyl collection the size of my dining room. I can use my CDs to give me Clockwork Orange-style living room walls, and if there's a fire, f**k it; I'll burn while "Surrealistic Pillow" and "Van Halen I" play me out.

Gave all my vinyl to my son to 'look after' when I left New Zealand ten years ago. He was two years old then, so he's just getting around to being proper inquisitve and selective about music now. Trouble is the young fella is more into Che Fu than my Mahavishnu.

I decided to get my old Rotel deck fired up, hook it up and go through 3 0r 4 damp, tired boxes of vinyl picking out random er 'LPs'.
I put on 'Black and Blue' which is a) one of the Stones worst and b) Im not a big fan anyway...
It 'sounded' fantastic - the, ahem, GROOVE and warmth of the old tight but loose playing, the sheer sonic 'oomph' of it stuck me to the sofa.
Then..'Bim Sherman and U Black', 'Rust never Sleeps', 'Rubycon', 'Best dressed Chicken in Town', 'Velvet Underground live 1969' (which sounds like shit in any format but is the best live album ever released) 'Pauline Murray and the invisible girls' (!) and a Don Letts compilation, Christ, it was...epiphanic.

I could now attempt a Jon Savage/Ian Penman/Morley style post - structuralist, Textural/Textual meditation on the phenomenology of sound but Ive got to change my little boys arse and take him to 'Stay and Play'.

I can point at that blokes book 'Perfecting Sound Forever' (featured in the word podcast last year) and say that the science of it is all there though...

... the picture of the chicken

I would not save CDs or Vinyl (of which I only have a select few LPs and nothing to play them on). Like many people I would grab my iPod or Mac, that's where the music I care about is. Even so, in some respects I would relish the opportunity to start again from scratch.

... to have appreciated vinyl, as by the time I was buying records it was already on its way out, and CDs were starting to dominate. Despite there being quite a bit of it around the house when I was growing up, I've never had any nostalgia for vinyl, because both our player and the one in my grandparents' house were fairly unreliable, and as a result, virtually everything that got played on them ended up jumping or getting stuck sooner or later.

CD is better 'coz it's easier to spell than vynil

Attempting to salvage thousands of CDs OR vinyl records in a fire? Not happening, and that's what digital media storage is for. But I do have a tiny box of singles I'd grab if time permitted, simply because there really is no replacing them (stuff recorded by mates and mates-of-mates in the 1980s, in ridiculously small pressings, or seriously rare debuts by bands I love). It's the equivalent of a treasured photo album, I guess.

I listen to vinyl mostly for tracks I don't have any other way. The ongoing project is to get it all ripped (and neatly edited, which is the time-consuming part) and then I can think about selling some of it.

Late for school as usual when it comes to this sort of thing but what is a 'needledrop'?

My first brush was pop music was as a little boy loafing around in my older sister's bedroom reading her Jackie magazines and listening to her records. Like most teenagers in those days her record collection consisted of about a dozen singles, recent chart stuff. Beatles. Edison Lighthouse. Love Affair. My favourite which I played over and again was Hallelujah Baby by The Dells (which was actually the b side, but if you've not got many records you play the b sides too). I've never been able to get this song on CD so you can image my delight when I recently 'came across' and 'acquired' an mp3 of it. I can stick it on CD compilations, stick it on an i-pod. And even better, it's ripped from vinyl so has the hissing and scratching in all the right places. And it's still as thrilling as it was in 1969.

So 'needledrops' it is for me. So is the idea that mp3s ripped from vinyl sound better then mp3s ripped from CDs, i.e. keep the 'dynamic range' despite being digitised?

If my vinyl and CD's WERE destroyed in a fire, but I managed to salvage the hard drive I have it (virtually all) stored on digitally, would the insurance company refuse to pay out ?

If they DID pay out, it's hard to image going and buying it all again when I have it anyway, so presumably the cash would then be available to buy loads of new music.

By the way, and a measure of how paranoid I am about it all, I actually made a 2nd hard disk copy (i.e. I have a back up on an external HDD AND another back up) that I keep round my mother-in-law's house and update every month or so. Can anyone beat that for covering all the bases ?

What if my house and my MIL's house were both the victims of spontaneous combustion on the same day. You just can't win.

..if vinyl "sounds better" than CD..it certainly sounds better than mp3, I just know that I prefer it. CD always seems too soft or too loud, vinyl is always just right. You can listen to vinyl for hours on end, whereas CD can cause aural exhaustion.
British pressings from the 60s and 70s are astoundingly good, and that's all I buy.
You haven't really heard Free's second LP until you've heard it on vinyl.

I find I have vinyl 'sessions' (usually lasting days once I get going!). Often it's when someone comes round and starts ferreting through the collection and it gets me going again - I get reminded of just how wonderful LPs are. Then there are all the memories of when I bought them and sat and listened for hours on end until they became part of my DNA. Face it, a lot of this IS just nostalgia!! As to whether they sound better really does depend on the mastering and what you are listening to them on - some LPs sound great, but then I have some CDs that knock the original vinyl into a cocked hat; you just can't generalise. But.....I do have a damn good CD player! One thing I DO miss is the labels and the sleeves....do you even know what label artists are on now? Each label had it's own personality - the pink Island label was always a 'guarantee' - the EMI covers were always so well designed (and Pye were crap!) - Decca were laminated with Clarifoil - Stiff were so funny - Marble Arch re-issues were great value but had 2 tracks knocked off the original (why??) - EMITEX - inner sleeves with 'other recordings you may enjoy'...oh dear, I feel a session coming on....!!

vinyl over cd or mp3 any day. When I play music at home it's usually on vinyl as it sounds better on the system I have (not expensive by any means!). I also take more care of the vinyl, and like the idea of having a bit of a break between sides one and two!

as I hope you will, see if you can get Michael Bywater to expand on his brilliant writing on LPs in his book "Lost Worlds: What have we lost and where did it go", (search inside at amazon.co.uk for "LP"-pages 166-7 and also "Texture"-pages 235-236).

Also liked the line in a recent podcast about vinyl being essentially French, as I once actually had a Gallic hi-fi mag which waxed lyrical about how CDs were OK for "l'usage quotidien" but how one needed vinyl for one's country house with the fine cigars and the cognac, or words to that effect ...

Bit of a vinyl agnostic myself - had some lovely turntables in my time, but in truth most of my listening is on Apple lossless (on nice headphones or into a good hi-fi), or Freeview radio (again into hi-fi), or internet radio into a Squeezebox. The rest is CD, which the FPO strongly prefers to lossless ..., captured iPlayer on MP3, etc etc.

I have no particular affiliation with vinyl although, that is the media I grew up with having bought my first 3 albums in about 1970. When I started work in 1973 I made a point of buying at least 1 a week and eventually changed over to CDs and now have joined the hard drive/iPod revolution (who says us 50+ year olds are past it?).
There seems to be a common denominator between all of us that fondly remember vinyl. Is it the actual vinyl we crave, or the large gatefold covers. The artwork of Roger Dean. The space log in 'In Search of Space' by Hawkwind. It was always a real event, getting the album home and looking through the cover whilst listening to the album for the first time (hoping there would be no major scratches or worse still, jumps).
So note to record company execs, issue CDs in full size LP covers, that way, we would still have that splendid looking row of shelves, and they could carry on (re)selling the music. Send my commission cheque to..............

My parents didn't have a turntable when I first started buying music and by the time they got one I had left for college where the portability of the cassette (which could be played on walkman on interminable bus journeys to and from college) meant that I own very few LPs.

I was a late adopter of CD and stuck with the cassette for a long time as I found you could buy 3 cassettes for the price of 2 CDs.

The only downside to this was that I had a huge collection that had to be reassembled when I moved to iPod. (mostly done now)

But the cassette is under rated in the format nostalgia wars and despite its flaws (and yes there were many....) it filled a definite need very well.

I have to be negative, I wouldn't save any in a fire. Just run for my life with the wife and kids. I have a fair few LP's and CD's which I enjoy equally. The Lp experience differs with the 20 minute or so break. It gives you a chance to think and perhaps go on to some thing else. I wonder if the differing sound some people hear is more to do with the change in production equipment. The change from massive multitrack desks to PC technology was well underway during the change to CD. It obviously effected the sound.

It's the music that matters not how you access it.Whilst wanting to hear the music reproduced as accurately as possible,It's all to easy to become so concerned with the method that one ends up listening to the kit and not the music.

.. because there's a huge gulf between "Yes, and it gets a regular bashing" and "Yes, but it's in the attic somewhere".

My turntable is still wired up and has only a small amount of clutter on its lid, but I hardly ever play my 500-odd vinyl albums. And the only CDs I play regularly at home are the surround-sound ones.

That's because I spend around 10 hours a week driving, and I listen to all newly acquired music in the car, either on CD or iPod. At home, I usually just choose a playlist and put iTunes on shuffle.