WHEN I STARTED seriously collecting classical music right after college, ...

What amazes me is how well these old 33s hold up. Research into early music has gone deeper, and today's best outfits have become more professional, nuanced and true to the original musical practices, but the beauty and even eerie individuality of those 1950-60s records are as alive today as ever.

An early favorite was a collection of motets and other works by Guillaume de Machaut, produced by the Collegium Musicum of the University of Illinois. Machaut was a 14th-century bridge between early French polyphony and later madrigals. I'd never heard anything quite like it, and it enthralled me. Now I find the production beautiful but a little abrupt; yet I think it must be close to what you would have heard when it was composed.

On the other end of the sound scale was my Sunday wake-up call, The Art of the Baroque Trumpet, on Nonesuch, a pastiche of raucous blaring by several French groups. You'd be hard put to find any record, anywhere to match it for sheer oomph, the perfect "it's time to clean the apartment" music.

Musique de Joye , 17th-century French wedding-festival music, came out on Vox, the cover looking very French but the playing by a slightly wacky American group, the Telemann Society Orchestra, that developed their own theory of how to play Baroque music. I loved their sometimes off-kilter work, on their own label and others. In this case, the music is gorgeous and delightful, the most festive sounds imaginable.

I was working in a college bookstore when Dover Books decided to put out a line of records. I wish they still did. Two 13th-century masses-one from England, one from Spain-featuring the Ambrosian Singers superbly document the transition from chant to polyphony. Nothing in later Western music has matched that purity of melody edging into harmony.

The Singers come off equally well in a Dover release of Guillaume Dufay, as does the Stuttgart Choral Society in my personal favorite piece by Heinrich Schutz, his "St. Matthew Passion." The Dover output was small but nearly flawless.

When I said "eerie," I was thinking of my strangest early-music record, Music of the Gothic Period and the Early Renaissance, Volume One, on Allegro Records. I've never seen a "volume two." The players are identified as The Vielle Trio, which, shall we say, seems an unlikely moniker. Every single piece sounds like a funeral dirge played under water. The tempo is tortoise-slow and the tenor, DuBose Robertson, has just watched his dog get run over by a beer wagon. There are few albums I love better than this one, and even fewer where I have more difficulty saying why. I'd run back into a burning building to save it.

As usual, I've saved the best for last (if you've survived this far, you deserve it): Court and Ceremonial Music of the 16th Century on Nonesuch, featuring the Roger Blanchard Ensemble and the Poulteau Consort. This is, hands down, the most beautiful early-music record I've ever heard. Every piece flows like a stream, and the singers have pure, clear, delicious voices. Several works by Josquin des Prez and several more by Anon. are excellent, but the chief delight is Antoine de Longueval's "Passion selon Saint-Mathieu." I've never run across anything else by this man, but lord, is it magnificent.

This is only a sampling, of course. Some day I need to devote a column to Vox boxes, the poor man's classical-music salvation.

What's Out There: Probably, none of these. Try eBay, or buy alternate versions. It's all gorgeous music.