Death of the CD.

['CHARD]

I just saw the title of this thread and expected an obit for Grayson Perry or Barry Humphries.  

[teaky]

Does your car happen to have a half eaten apple logo on the front?

 

You cant say no one from this era appreciates older music devices.

I may be young, but I fondly remember car rides and putting a cassette into the slot. Or rewinding a VHS by hand. Oh the joys of youth.

 

I also have a cabinet Victrola to my name. Works pretty damn good, except for the speed dial.

Does your car happen to have a half eaten apple logo on the front?  -  Nope just an ordinary blue oval.  In fact, I don't own any fruit-labelled technology as I find it a little over priced for what it is.

 

You cant say no one from this era appreciates older music devices.  -  I didn't.  See my comment about my sons LPs (which he calls vinyl).

I may be young, but I fondly remember car rides and putting a cassette into the slot. Or rewinding a VHS by hand. Oh the joys of youth.  -  Pain the backside!  I fondly remember putting my first CD into the slot, pressing play and sitting back to enjoy a whole album without having to get up to turn the tape or LP over.

 

I also have a cabinet Victrola to my name. Works pretty damn good, except for the speed dial.  I had to look up what that was.  Maybe you're older than you think. 

[Ron Ron Ron]

Some examples of Download stores offering Hi Res files.

 

HD Tracks

 

Pro Studio Masters

 

HiRes Audio

 

Bowers and Wilkins - Society of Sound

 

The Classical Shop

 

Naim Label

 

 

.

[teaky]

Thanks Ron Ron Ron.  I've a done a few spot checks and they're still a bit pricey for my wallet, especially since I don't own a hard drive or similar device linked to my hi-fi.  Good to know you can get this stuff though and something for me to file away for the future if/when hi-fi rises to the top of the pile of things to spend money on.  (Need a railway room first!)

[PGC]

Here's a recent graph charting the demise of the CD in the form of US sales over the last 10 years.

 

 

 

 

Can't be bothered to read all the other posts on this thread, so if someone else has said this, apologies.

 

Remember the doom-mongers who said exactly the same about vinyl when CD's were launched?

 

What would they say now, with vinyl sales increasing?

 

Phil

[Ron Ron Ron]

Thanks Ron Ron Ron.  I've a done a few spot checks and they're still a bit pricey for my wallet.....

Watch out for music being sold as HiRes when in fact it is just the standard 44.1 /16 music, up sampled to a higher res format. 

A complete con.

HD Tracks were publicly caught out by doing this on a number of albums and charging 3 times as much for the privilege.

 

HiRes only comes into its own when it delivers from a master file of the same or higher resolution.

Up sampled material would sound good or OK, but isn't worth paying more than for CD resolution.

 

 

Is it worth the bother of any downloads now though, with good quality music available from streaming services?

 

 

.

[Ron Ron Ron]

What would they say now, with vinyl sales increasing?

 

Phil, the resurgence in Vinyl sales only accounts for 6% of the market in the US and less in the UK.

It's tiny.

 

Remember, 20% of bu**er all, is bu**er all.

 

Also, Vinyl is not selling to the "mass market", but mostly to audiophiles, young and old.

 

Much bigger than the resurgence in Vinyl, is the huge rise in sales of high quality Headphones and dedicated Headphone amps and DAC's.

Younger adults are the main market, spending hundreds of pounds on expensive equipment and a lot of the HiFi and speaker manufacturers who have never produced Headphones, have now gone into this market.

Virtually no mention of this in the useless popular press, but it completely dwarfs the Vinyl market.

 

 

 

.

 

.

[Spitfire2865]

Does your car happen to have a half eaten apple logo on the front?  -  Nope just an ordinary blue oval.  In fact, I don't own any fruit-labelled technology as I find it a little over priced for what it is.You cant say no one from this era appreciates older music devices.  -  I didn't.  See my comment about my sons LPs (which he calls vinyl).

I may be young, but I fondly remember car rides and putting a cassette into the slot. Or rewinding a VHS by hand. Oh the joys of youth.  -  Pain the backside!  I fondly remember putting my first CD into the slot, pressing play and sitting back to enjoy a whole album without having to get up to turn the tape or LP over. I also have a cabinet Victrola to my name. Works pretty damn good, except for the speed dial.  I had to look up what that was.  Maybe you're older than you think. 

Im sorry, only the first bit actually responded to your comment. I was actually trying to add to the discussion, though, in the end, I guess I did.

Yes CDs are nice and simple, but at this point its no longer a "better alternative" but the lazy norm.

And technically, your son is still right. Still vinyl.

[Ian J.]

Having done a bit of 'back-of-envelope' research, I've found that the various streaming services are all very pop music oriented (and by pop I mean anything from jazz through to hip-hop, R&B, metal, etc). They would be of little or no use to me as they don't cover the film music I like (which I admit is a niche interest). It appears that some of the services don't allow offline listening either, which is essential in my book as internet connections can never be guaranteed. So while there is increased usage of streaming, it would appear that there's less money in the less common music genres and therefore a lack of support for them. I wouldn't be surprised if CDs and downloads remain the only practical way of listening to such music.

[Dava]

We should consider Neil Young's much hyped Pono music player, not that you can get it outside the US or probably afford it either!

 

Dava

[PGC]

Phil, the resurgence in Vinyl sales only accounts for 6% of the market in the US and less in the UK.

It's tiny.

 

Remember, 20% of bu**er all, is bu**er all.

 

Also, Vinyl is not selling to the "mass market", but mostly to audiophiles, young and old.

 

Much bigger than the resurgence in Vinyl, is the huge rise in sales of high quality Headphones and dedicated Headphone amps and DAC's.

Younger adults are the main market, spending hundreds of pounds on expensive equipment and a lot of the HiFi and speaker manufacturers who have never produced Headphones, have now gone into this market.

Virtually no mention of this in the useless popular press, but it completely dwarfs the Vinyl market.

 

 

 

.

 

.

 

What I was trying to emphasise is that 30 years ago or thereabouts, many pundits foresaw the invention of the CD as the death of vinyl, yet vinyl has never died and sales are now increasing.

 

Will the CD die? Of course not - vinyl proves this.

 

Phil

[Horsetan]

....Will the CD die? Of course not - vinyl proves this.....

Every time people mention vinyl, I keep thinking of the stuff they use to cover a car's roof.

[DropTheTap]

I'm a complete idiot.

 

When I emigrated, 11 years ago, I disposed of my entire vinyl collection and transported hundreds of CDs across a continent with me. I've bitterly regretted both ever since. I started buying vinyl again a couple of years ago having listened to one on a high quality system in an electronics store. It was like my ears were reborn!

 

Anyway, the point of my post is that I would very much like to dispose of all my CDs (which are copied to a hard drive), yet don't wish to feel the same pain of regret I did with my vinyl records. My gut feeling is that CD is a dead, not to be missed medium for the music listener, which won't make a significant resurgence in any fashion. But I have a habit of being wrong.

 

Advice? Should I, shouldn't I?

[PGC]

I'm a complete idiot.

 

When I emigrated, 11 years ago, I disposed of my entire vinyl collection and transported hundreds of CDs across a continent with me. I've bitterly regretted both ever since. I started buying vinyl again a couple of years ago having listened to one on a high quality system in an electronics store. It was like my ears were reborn!

 

Anyway, the point of my post is that I would very much like to dispose of all my CDs (which are copied to a hard drive), yet don't wish to feel the same pain of regret I did with my vinyl records. My gut feeling is that CD is a dead, not to be missed medium for the music listener, which won't make a significant resurgence in any fashion. But I have a habit of being wrong.

 

Advice? Should I, shouldn't I?

 

You shouldn't. A hard drive can fail and if you have got rid of the originals, you've lost your music. You know how you felt about getting rid of your vinyl - do you want to get the same pains again?

 

Your gut feeling is that CD is a dead medium. Think how many people said that about vinyl 30 years ago, yet you yourself say that you've started buying vinyl again.

 

Phil

[Ian J.]

I'm a complete idiot.

 

When I emigrated, 11 years ago, I disposed of my entire vinyl collection and transported hundreds of CDs across a continent with me. I've bitterly regretted both ever since. I started buying vinyl again a couple of years ago having listened to one on a high quality system in an electronics store. It was like my ears were reborn!

 

Anyway, the point of my post is that I would very much like to dispose of all my CDs (which are copied to a hard drive), yet don't wish to feel the same pain of regret I did with my vinyl records. My gut feeling is that CD is a dead, not to be missed medium for the music listener, which won't make a significant resurgence in any fashion. But I have a habit of being wrong.

 

Advice? Should I, shouldn't I?

 

If you've taken steps to have backups of backups of your HDD copies, and you've scanned all the liner notes in their entirety, and you're happy with the idea of not having the originals as a backup or for 're-ripping' purposes, and you're happy with not having the originals as proof of ownership of the music for any possible legal reasons, and you know you won't want or need to ever play a CD on a CD player, then I'd say let them go. Digital bits are the same regardless of the format they're stored on and there's no specific reason why that should have to be an optical disc. Vinyl records are an analogue medium and, in that case, keeping as close to the original source as possible is always preferable.

 

As for me, I can't answer yes to all but one of the 'questions' I've raised above so I keep my discs.

[t-b-g]

There is something rather pleasant about browsing second hand CD stalls in markets and finding some unexpected gem.

 

Then, sitting in my shed, I browse through the big pile of CD boxes and pick one out that I had forgotten I had ever got and put it on.

 

I have a few vinyl albums but have put the ones I still like onto CDs, so my little Radio/CD player sits on the shelf next to me and is on most of the time, with the radio on if there is something worth listening to and the CDs when there isn't.

 

I know that the modern world is going digital but there is something slightly more satisfying having a physical object in front of you that is hard to explain but to me at least, is quite real.

 

My daughters have iPods and seeing them struggle when things go wrong also puts me off a bit!

[ZiderHead]

Having spent a good part of my early 20's Mastering CD's …

 

I hope you were doing a better job of it than Peter Mew at Abbey Road!

 

I buy music on CD and rip to ALAC lossless for my iPhone and iTunes. How does it sound? Well it depends entirely on what you plug it into …

 

Stereo out to my car system or my Audioengine PC speakers sounds tolerable (the DAC is pretty good - for a phone!), the MacBook is better.

 

Digi out to a Denon 39 mini system sounds really good, no doubt it would be better still through an Apogee and a pair of SCM20s. Of course the "player" is largely irrelevant if you are using the digi path because you don't hear it - you are listening to the 0s and 1s from the master and the DAC onwards.

[MJI]

As a lover of film music, most of it comes on CDs from specialist labels so I don't have a choice on how I buy it. I also like to rip CDs using my own settings to get better quality, and in some cases better compression too. I bought 'The Last of Us' game soundtrack from Amazon, which included their automatic rip of it. Once I got the actual CD I did my own rip in Winamp and got better sound and better compression - the Amazon one came out at 102MB total, the Winamp at 67MB. So unless the future of streaming and downloads is fully lossless and better than CD, I'll stick with CD (and the same goes for movies - the compression artifacts in downloads and streamed movies are abysmal compared to viewing a movie on blu-ray).

 

I listen to that soundtrack on Bluray, comes with an interactive game as well

[MJI]

I liked MD, was a good format, great for car use.

 

As to home sound, best was a toss up between SACD and DVD-A, as a Pioneer DV575 owner I have the choice

[PGC]

I hope you were doing a better job of it than Peter Mew at Abbey Road!

 

I buy music on CD and rip to ALAC lossless for my iPhone and iTunes. How does it sound? Well it depends entirely on what you plug it into …

 

Stereo out to my car system or my Audioengine PC speakers sounds tolerable (the DAC is pretty good - for a phone!), the MacBook is better.

 

Digi out to a Denon 39 mini system sounds really good, no doubt it would be better still through an Apogee and a pair of SCM20s. Of course the "player" is largely irrelevant if you are using the digi path because you don't hear it - you are listening to the 0s and 1s from the master and the DAC onwards.

 

Sorry, but that's wrong. Each piece of equipment in the playing path has many electrical components inside, and every single component affects the sound in some way. If you're using CD as the source, each laser tracks in a different way and therefore affects the sound and so on.

 

Phil

[ZiderHead]

As long as the source can supply the DAC with the data with no errors, and at a rate that keeps the DAC's buffer topped up it will make no difference at all to the sound. A digital stream has no sound - its just data.

 

Now it may be that some CD players have no/poor error checking, or the CD is damaged, but thats why I always rip with error checking on and do a bitwise verification (i.e. check that the ripped file is exactly the same as the CD.) Its a real shame that the CD audio spec doesn't include a checksum so we can confirm that our files are exactly the same as the master, but I've really only ever met a handful of people who could hear these errors anyway (some people apparently have superhuman hearing and can detect stuff down to a few samples!).

[Guest]

Sorry, but that's wrong. Each piece of equipment in the playing path has many electrical components inside, and every single component affects the sound in some way. If you're using CD as the source, each laser tracks in a different way and therefore affects the sound and so on.

 

Hogwash.

While the data's in the digital domain it's either 100% accurate or broken.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

...I would very much like to dispose of all my CDs (which are copied to a hard drive), yet don't wish to feel the same pain of regret I did with my vinyl records...Advice? Should I, shouldn't I?

 

Easy tool to assist your decision. Put an axe through the hard drive (or if you are indecisive, lock it away in a storage facility for a year). Miss it?

 

If not, sell the CD's.

 

If you do, hang on to the CD's because hard drives are of limited life.

[Nile_Griffith]

Without delving into a whole bunch of reference material and the sort of eye watering number crunching that remains the domain of the analy retentive. I'll offer my own professional viewpoint. 

 

Although digital audio is indeed a stream of '1's and "0's in some ways it is akin to it's analogue cousin in that the quality of both design and manufacture of the of the electronics does impact upon the data stream. High quality audio ADC's and DAC's cost thousands of pounds and for very good reason. Yes you can buy a nifty little box for not much more than a hundred quid that will perform the same task, but present the digital throughput to one of those analy retentive's I mentioned earlier and they will soon pull up for you a display that shows just how much of that digital data stream got lost along the way from input to output in that cheaper box. Believe it or not mainline audio studio's don't like spending more money than they really have too, particularly on bits of kit that the end customer has no appreciation or awareness of. Yes some handy little chineese company may well be able to make a box that matches the required input and output standards of my Apogee DAC's and certainly for a lot less money, but bitter experience knows why the Apogee kit is in the rack and not the budget box from Shanghai.

 

However what I am truly amazed by are the large numbers of people who quite happily stick their hands in their pockets and stump up thousands for the playback system of their choice and then choose to situate said "audiophile" quality apparatus in a bog standard living room, replete with plastered parallel walls, steel radiators and various quantities of furniture dotted around for aesthetic benefit. Yes they may well have marked an 'X' in the middle of the rug and found exactly the right height of chair to get their ears in the optimum position with regard to their speakers. But their rooms acoustics are a disaster.

 

As I alluded to earlier in my own studio the control rooms acoustics got through a budget of the better part of twenty grand. Now yes I will concede that the acoustic treatment is designed so that anyone in the control room (and behind the mixing console) gets to hear the mix at the same level and audio quality as the engineer and producer sat at the desk. Appreciated, your average audiophile is only concerned with his own personal piece of heaven about a meter squared. But I have endured more than a handful of conversations with enthusiasts, who have quite gleefully informed me of the investment they have made in the audio set up and then stood there slack jawed while I patiently explain to them that their hallowed place has some pretty glaring resonant frequencies in it's acoustic make up that are defeating the cash investment. I once got drawn into a conversation with a guy in his mid fifties who was rather chuffed with his latest purchase. ten meters of oxygen free copper speaker cable. He eruditely explained that this new cable would give him a 4% improvement in frequency response above 18 Khz. I really wasn't sure whether I should have gently explained to him that he possibly hasn't been able to hear much above that point since his mid forties and that possibly the only beneficiary of the 4% improvement was his Labrador.

 

Personally I do feel a lot of what is touted about is a continuous state of Emperors new clothes. I have had the opportunity to record most things (and get paid) from Punk Bands through to Symphony orchestras. At no time can I remember a producer or artist turning around to me and demanding that we break the scopes out and investigate the audible dynamics of a particular instrument or such like. My task was to grab and record and artistic performance that matched the producer or artists expectation. Yes, we invest a lot of time money and effort to make sure that our recording equipment and at times environment match very specific standards. It is critical important that what is recorded at one studio, sounds the same when replayed at another. But when all said and done recorded sound is ultimately heard and interpreted by the most compromised and yet most brilliant of all devices....... the human ear and in turn our brains. 

 

A vinyl record is, not matter which way you look at it, five pence worth of plastic squashed between two metal plates. A CD is just a spinning reflector of light. All anyone who writes, plays and records music or any other form of entertainment genuinely wants from it's audience, is for them to enjoy the creativity of it......... well thats my experience of it at at least.

[PGC]

As long as the source can supply the DAC with the data with no errors, and at a rate that keeps the DAC's buffer topped up it will make no difference at all to the sound. A digital stream has no sound - its just data.

 

Now it may be that some CD players have no/poor error checking, or the CD is damaged, but thats why I always rip with error checking on and do a bitwise verification (i.e. check that the ripped file is exactly the same as the CD.) Its a real shame that the CD audio spec doesn't include a checksum so we can confirm that our files are exactly the same as the master, but I've really only ever met a handful of people who could hear these errors anyway (some people apparently have superhuman hearing and can detect stuff down to a few samples!).

 

So if digital data is the same when you send it from A to B, why, in computer networks, which are a different form of digital data transmission, and therefore a series of 0's and 1's,  do you get packet loss and transmission errors?

 

Phil