Comment by breezybottom

3 days ago

Which is why it's so bizarre that CDs are generally less dynamic than vinyl. There's no technical reason that should be the case.

18 comments

breezybottom

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functionmouse  3 days ago

CDs were most commonly played in cars on the loud highway

  • mancerayder  3 days ago

    Says who? I remember having one of those cassette adapters that was a tape that you'd stick in the tape drive, and you'd attach to the headphone jack of a portable CD player. Maybe I was poor, but cars had cassettes most of my youth, while people had CD players at home.

    • bbatha  2 days ago

      Exactly cd players in cars didn’t become common until the 2000s when anti skip became common place.

  • breezybottom  3 days ago

    That's a good point. CD mastering was very dynamic until around the mid-90s, and that probably correlates with CD players becoming a standard option in cars.

  • aidenn0  3 days ago

    And the first CD player I saw in a car had a button to apply dynamic range compression.

  • mixmastamyk  3 days ago

    Huh? CDs are a poor fit in cars to the point that the ten disc changer in the trunk was a thing. To avoid the inevitable damage from swapping them.

    • mjr00  3 days ago

      Now, yes, but in the 90s/00s the alternative to CDs was cassette tapes, which were both inferior audio quality and took up more space. CD players in cars were a very desirable feature back then.

      At my peak in the mid-00s I remember counting and finding I had just over 500 CDs in my car, almost all of which were MP3s burnt to playable CD-Rs laying in the passenger seat... the good old days. Nice thing about using CD-Rs is you didn't have to care about them getting scratched, either.

      3 replies →

topranks  1 day ago

There is, see my other reply.

CDs are able to store much louder tracks than can be cut on a record. The technical reason things on CD got louder is because they could.