Comment by microtonal
1 month ago
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
1 month ago
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
I am the youngster in this case and I am going to tell you something but we really need to move off of spotify.
I never really got onto spotify. I was always the youtube kind of guy, although I recently started listening to youtube music when I realized that my youtube feed was being impacted and youtube music's a better way to listen I guess
We really need to get to pen-drives first before CD as well I guess. Like downloading songs from youtube to run them in pen-drive or just listen to locally would show us youngsters something
I have been recently thinking of downloading all of my songs and uploading it to some vps so that I can listen to from anywhere. I feel like steps like these with media ownership would gradually help rediscovery of CD perhaps as well as we people would really love supporting the artists then as well and buying their CD might be the way if we end up downloading their musics.
Pen-drives are ubiquotus as well so perhaps we might need the pen-drive era in between
Also computers are absolutely removing the CD port. Even my desktop doesn't have it. I think it has the slot but I had my PC built in the store so they didnt really add it but literally no devices have CD except perhaps our car but I think even some new Cars might not have any CD's
If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction and I would argue that Vinyl is much more so for the aesthetics itself as well which I feel like CD's aren't really that much for.
So my point is, People aren't really using Vinyl for quality, they are using it for aesthetics. If CD's have a chance, they really need to get more on the ease of starting and pen-drives can help start the local-music movement.
A couple of decades ago most people I knew were spending considerable time thinking about the best folder structure to use to manage large collections of MP3s (and then making them available on Limewire). Then you'd move over selections to your or someone else's MP3 player.
One great product of this among my friends was the MP3 mix tape swap parties. You'd select a bunch of your favourite songs and put them on a thumb drive, then go hang out at a friend's house. All the MP3s would be put together, virus checked and then copied to everyone's thumb drives. It was a great way of discovering new music.
> If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction
I recently had a relative complain that they have to find and buy a CD player to listen to their music when they aren't in the car. I pointed out that they already have several in their home. Multiple game consoles and their bluray player supported playing CDs. The loss of CD drives in computers is unfortunate, but the format is still supported in a lot of devices that take disks.
I was bummed to find out the PS5 cannot play CDs. Ended up buying an Onkyo CD player that I like and it wasn't very expensive, but it would be nice to not have another black rectangle in my living room.
2nd hand CD players are abundant and cheap. New CD players are also rather abundant and cheap (and also have burning capability + DVD read/write) and are available e.g. on Amazon - some are USB, some are standalone units (like we all bought in the 90s). There are tons of options, and as the article says, plenty of people are still buying CDs.
Otherwise I totally agree about aesthetics of vinyl. I have a rather large collection and still buy from time to time, but usually only 2nd hand. I threw away all my CDs because they stopped working after 20-30 years from being stored improperly, being scratched from being played too often, and overall I just prefer the convenience of MP3s.
Internet radio is also lovely (outside of Spotify of course), check out https://directory.shoutcast.com/ which works great with WinAmp (even the old versions from the 90s still run fine in Windows 11). There are of course other smartphone apps that use other directories, but Shoutcast was/is the first and still my favorite place to discover new music.
Come and join the resurgent Minidisc movement!
I'll have to pivot to DAT revival for max hipster cred.
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Sounds cool, what's a good player?
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MD will always be the coolest format
No we don't.
We should stop fantasizing about CDs and Vinyl and shit and just enjoying listen to music.
And if we think we need tokens in the real world, make them yourself or buy that one vinyl.
My daughter (16) and her friends are. She's asked for specific CDs as presents, and is now the guardian of my brother and mine CD stashes dragged out of the wardrobes and attics.
She'll trawl thrift shops for CDs too.
New CDs in shops now are much much cheaper than they used to be as well.
Giving up Spotify isn't on the cards yet though. I'll teach her how to rip songs next I reckon.
If it is to happen, CDs and CD packaging would need a rebranding. Part of vinyl popularity is the large sleeve surface that provides a large canvas for a piece of art. Another part is that you get a physically large analogue object that, while previously would be cumbersome, has become interesting in a heavily digital age.
Afaict this has already happened. Vinyl is about the big art, CDs are all about the pack ins. You get small books, pictures, stickers all packed into a cardboard box the size of a novel. Not jewel cases.
At least for the K-pop artists my daughter listens to.
That is quite uncommon outside of the K-pop space - I buy a pretty large volume of new release CDs and don’t own a single one in the K-pop form factor
In my experience your average indie CD these days comes in a cardboard sleeve or a digipak, which are slim and more resilient than jewel cases (which love to crack) but idk how to store them neatly, since the sizes vary in at least two dimensions. And they tend not to come with anything outside the disk, you're lucky if you get a booklet.
My daughter is in to K-Pop and they do an excellent job on CD packaging. It's sometimes a very high quality photo book.
But sadly often horrible mastering.
That’s not the mediums fault. I’m sure during the 70s and 80s there were equally horrible vinyl masterings.
I have a record collection and a cd collection. It was not the same. So many CDs of older music sound bad on CD. Recordings made during the CD era sound fine though, but I'm not an audiophile. Maybe the "loudness wars" are a complaint for some.
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It is partly the medium's fault. A lot of the sins of CD/digital mastering wont fly on vinyl because there's physical constraints around what you can literally press into the record groove.
The mastering problems the early CDs suffered from was the move to analog to digital.
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All vinyl mastering is comparably horrible. Everything gets high-passed to hell because sub bass makes the needle jump.
There's also a noise floor that limits your dynamics.
Introspect my favorite music media was cassette tape. I found them more robust and repairable then CDs.
Huh? IME cassette tapes often begin to stretch after fewer than a hundred plays, which permanently ruins them.
I still have a working copy of AC/DC's Back in Black from 1996. I have older tapes that work fine too, but not sure how much they've been played since they're mostly from thrift stores.
Never noticed that. My experience was that CDs were far from indestructible.
Never. Now we have tiny music (digital), and big music (LPs), so no need for medium music (CDs).
I bought my kids all the songs on Tonie. Now I am buying them all the same songs on Yoto. I can't wait to just start burning CDs again.
It's about owning the physical object like a concert ticket stub only way more accessible. They already have the music on their phone they don't need to listen to it on a record
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
I think they are. There was an article in the newspaper in the last month or so saying that CD sales are on the rise, and mainstream pop stars are releasing their music on CDs again.
As noted in another comment, I see CDs in music (and other) stores more and more where I live.
> Much less prone to degradation to vinyl
huh... and I thought the vinyl craze happened because it's more durable out of ye old formats
CDs are well known to oxydize in the span of decades of storage
Pressed cds last well in general. Burned cds have a lot of issues. vinyl also wears out from using it, while cds are listen as much as you want with no issuse.
I have ripped all my cds to flac on my NAS and put them on usb in whatever format as needed.
You need to take care of them though. Scratched CDs don’t play good.
Vinyl was infamous for degrading during use to the point where you could identify whether an album had been played more than a dozen times by the reduction in sound quality.
this is perhaps a language barrier, but I'd call "measurement of getting worse during use" *durability*, while degradation is exactly about not-in-use deterioration...
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CDs can oxidize in the span of decades. I've got hundreds of burned CDs that are from 2003 that are fine (even if they have changed color) because i store them in a climate controlled environment.
A vinyl record degrades every time you play it in a normal turntable.
Most of my CD collection is from the 80's and 90's and I've never done much to take care of them. Many have spent a decade or more of their life in a car. Most of them spent ten years in my attic that gets very hot and very cold.
Out of 100 disks, only five or six have failed and all have been because of scratches on the foil side (or whatever the media that the music is encoded into is called).
Note that if you don't store your records in a climate-controlled environment, they'll melt. You don't need to play a record to degrade it; just keeping it around is enough to render it completely unplayable.
Pressed CDs do not fail in this way.
CDs suffer from different forms of degradation. I wouldn't trust a 50 year old CD if there was one as I do a vinyl record I picked.
Using the same master a CD would always sound better than a vinyl record, but I and many people would always take vinyl over a CD because of the praxis. Set and setting is important, in the end. Vinyl is more demanding in every aspects, it imposes more care and respect for what you're listening to.
The oldest CDs are from 1982 (43 years old) and are still working perfectly fine.
I don't have any that old, but I have some from the late 1980s which my dad bought. All still fine, my parents listen to them in the car.
They don't, because just about anything available is better than CDs. Vinyl craze is actually not about "warmth", just genuinely more data.
The only additional data that (some) vinyl has over CDs is inaudible ultrasound. Ultrasound is intentionally omitted from CDs because they're intended for humans to listen to. In all audible aspects a correctly mastered CD release is closer to the original sound than any vinyl. And if you really want ultrasound (perhaps your dog enjoys it), you can get digital releases at higher sample rates.
It's not really about the data on the vinyl, and not really about sounding closer to the original. The vinyl flavor comes from the equipment. It's an analog device interacting with the real world, so the process of getting the sound from the vinyl to the speakers introduces a different sound. And some music sounds more pleasing with that process. Could you achieve something similar by using the digital release and running it through a filter? Probably. But it definitely does impart a sound difference.
Since CDs are digital sound, there's not really the same reason reason to use CDs over a digital release.
edit: fwiw, I don't agree with the parent talking about more data, either. Since pretty much all the music these days is digital pretty much right through the entire recording process, I don't think this is all that relevant. I guess maybe sometimes they might use a different master for vinyl though? But regardless; if you're looking for "more data", you're not going to use either a CD or a vinyl.
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Phonograph records tend to top out around 20,000 Hz. It's limited by groove and stylus size. CDs top out around 21KHz.
There's some audiophile content on Blu-Ray disks encoded at 24-bit/192 kHz, intended for people who subscribe to The Absolute Sound.[1]
(Typical TAS review: "Their Crystal Cable Infinity power cords markedly lower background noise; increase resolution, density of tone color, and dynamic contrast; and add a more substantial third dimension to images." US$34,000 for a 2 meter AC power cable.)
[1] https://www.theabsolutesound.com
[1]
And vinyl has no sub bass, unlike digital formats. They would run it through a high-pass filter (disturbingly close to where the fundamental frequency of a kick drum is) in the mastering process, because record player needless jump from low frequency energy.
People used to say human eyes can't perceive >60fps.
It's also just CDs, not digital formats in general. Grab an audiophile and ask their opinions about digital PDM/PCM formats, high bitrate AACs even, against true vinyls. They wouldn't have as much opinions as they do against CDs.
Also: 44.1kHz sampling rate != arbitrary waveform up to 22050Hz, unless music you're listening to consists of pure sine waves(and not even classic Yamaha FM sound chip signals).
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> just genuinely more data.
Mastering is mostly done purely digital, so only when they are pressed are they converted to analog grooves. This can never add new data / information.
So is mixing and recording. Nobody is dropping $100K for a decades-old mixing console and tape recorders when a couple thousand dollars worth of computers and software will not only suffice but blow away the other for flexibility and fidelity.
Gain staging against an analogue noise floor, not having nonlinear/nondestructive editing, etc. would be, to use a technical term, "fucking stupid."