Buying Music

So I was thinking about the number of times and variety of formats that I have paid for a particular album. No surprise one of the many is Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Originally I bought it on vinyl, then bought it on cassette and finally on CD and I have to say that each media averaged $12, so essentially I’ve paid $36 for the same album three times.

This is absolutely ridiculous and I’m not doing it anymore. Of course, I’ve decided this after buying two CDs I owned only on vinyl. So I was talking to Power Ranger, our audiophile at work, about my decision and his viewpoint is this is precisely why I should buy all of my music online. I pay for it once, burn it to CD and since it’s digital, I am free to do whatever I want with it!

Now for being the audiophile he claims to be, he totally shocked me because I firmly believe that any compression is never good. Whether I'm burning a CD from AAC, WMV, MP3, etc. there is still compression resulting in degradation of the original source. Any opinions?