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In Defence of the CD

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Worth a read. Adds to my (possibly shaky) argument that CDs are the format of choice.
And if anyone is thinking of going fully digital and clearing their shelves of physical product, I know a place that will gladly re-home them.

(I know that the authors of the article can’t spell ‘Defence’ but please don’t let it detract from your reading of the article.)

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/in-defense-of-the-cd-20160204

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Comments

  1. I have thought long and hard about replying to the last , parenthetical note. I’m trying to imagine anyone who would allow obvious (and extremely well known) cultural spelling differences to ‘detract’ from reading anything. I could only think that person would have to be some form of dullard or dolt and ultimately deeply bigoted.

    The notion that there are ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ ways to spell or pronounce anything have for so long been relegated to blinkered imperialist ignorant xenophobes.

    I enjoyed the article but cannot agree entirely. The vinyl experience is still delightfully tactile.

          • English spelling wouldn’t have been fixed in the 16th or 17th century. There were variants for many words, and even names, including that of the man who signed his will as William Shakspeare.

            The main difference in British and American spelling is due to Noah Webster. He wrote grammar and spelling books in the late 18th century, and as part of this he changed the spelling of some words, like theatre. He did this because he thought it was more logical, and also as a deliberate break with what he saw as British conventions.

            There are some words in American English, like Fall meaning Autumn, which were used in Britain, but aren’t any more, and would have gone there with the early settlers.

            Back to the point I do like CDs, and can’t here any difference from vinyl.

  2. I love CDs – I still buy ’em & they sound superb.

    I rip them to the iPod & then have the hard copy for the groovy hi-fi.

    Also, these days they are pretty damn cheap & I don’t resent paying for music in any case.
    Streaming doesn’t appeal to me & I’m pretty sure the dinky disc will be still be around for as long as I am.
    I’ve never had a romantic affinity with vinyl, except for 45s & I hardly ever bother to get them out for a spin. My teenage daughter like a lot of youngsters, has been sold the idea that everything vinyl is the best, but obviously has no experience of scratched & knackered records or of crappy pressings.

  3. I dig what that article is saying. As a teen in the late 80s, just as my music-buying was taking off, I was lucky enough to land myself a CD player and I switched immediately from LPs-copied-onto-tapes. By 2004, I had amassed a lot of CDs and it accounted for a significant amount of my disposable income. But I had to move country and couldn’t take them with me, so I spent weeks ripping everything, and that got me used to the concept of having my music but not my discs.

    Two years later, we were asked by a relative if we wanted an old 80s Sony hifi , with turntable. We said yes, and discovered the fun of the LP again. The second-hand stores were moving vinyl slowly. Pristine copy of Tusk for £5? Ok then.

    By the end of the noughties, these two events meant I was a sitting duck for streaming and the vinyl revival.

    Like the article says I do feel a certain resentment, or payback, for the years I would spend £14.99 on a soundtrack just to get that exclusive They Might Be Giants song. I happily pay my Spotify subscription. I’m often listening to stuff on Spotify that I own physically somewhere. I enjoy music a lot. I enjoy record stores. What I buy now is generally vinyl with a download code. It’s been a long time since I bought a physical piece of music that I hadn’t checked out on Spotify first. Less physical copies of things are coming though my door, but they’re all thoroughly listened to and enjoyed. I don’t “waste” money on physical music anymore.

    Two final thoughts: (1) most people thinks vinyl sounds better because they have had to set up a decent system to hear it through. They then forget to play their CDs through that same system. I have an old DVD player hooked up to my vinyl amp and CDs sound great through it. (2) One thing that has really put me off buying CDs is the Jewel case being replaced by cardboard sleeves. You could always replace a cracked Jewel case. You can’t replace damaged cardboard cd sleeves. The new Suede CD is in a Jewel case and it sticks out a mile on the record store racks.

    • Jewel Cases – share your annoyance (?) of Jewel Cases being replaced by cardboard sleeves.
      The Jewel Case provides a certain uniformity to the view of the shelves, making it easier to spy and retrieve things (and it appeals to my OCD nature). The cardboard sleeve is smaller and thinner making stumbling across stuff more difficult.

      • Call it a product of the inferiority complex of CDs, particularly since the vinyl revival has kicked in. For most people CDs in cases are not especially nice objects, just functional. They probably sell better in shops if they look and feel nice. Then, as you say, you get them home and find them a total pain in the arse to store and look after.

        The only LP I can think of offhand with this problem was PiL’s Metal Box – which is the correct size to stack with your LPs but has a tendency to roll out of the shelf, particularly if you have inquisitive children or pets. Many’s the ageing punk who has come down to breakfast to find the dog licking his Albatross.

      • I hate jewel cases and always have. They’re ugly, they break/scratch easily and they make a horrible clicky-clacky noise when browsed through. I was was delighted with the advent of card digipaks, and reckon that if CDs had always been sold in these they’d be regarded with almost as much affection as LP sleeves.

        • Wot she sez.
          Jewel cases were a grave mis-step, in my opinion.
          Digipacks are aesthetically a much better proposition and are somewhat “greener”.
          All-cardboard sleeves are the greenest option, but don’t offer as much physical protection. Both of these options allow the collector more efficient use of precious storage space than jewel cases, too.

          • It’s odd that being able to replace cracked jewel cases is cited as a benefit when, to me, it is a flaw- they crack. And the hinges break off far too easily- I hate that.

            Don’t get me started on odd size CDs that wont fit on the shelf.

    • I half agree. Second-hand vinyl was cheap as chips up until about 2 years ago (and, despite an uptick in prices, there are still bargains to be had).

      However I agree that CDs are ridiculously cheap at the moment, both used and in box sets (eg that 5 classic albums series). That’s part of the problem with them, I think; they’ve become disposable. For me, a watershed came when Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches by the Happy Mondays (a proper album) was given away free with a newspaper.

  5. Remember the Hancock episode ‘The Missing Page’?

    At the end of it, stung by literature, he ends up filling his room with the hi-fi of the day – speakers here, speakers there, slightly to the left, slightly to the right – to await his first (classical) record.

    In a sense, the better joke by Galton & Simpson would have been if he’d awaited a pop record with such reverence.
    Late 50s/early 60s, pop was instant, fun, and disposable.
    Imagine what a ridiculous concept it would have been if Hancock had afforded such a luxurious expense on Little RIchard or Buddy Holly.

    Fast forward to now and, whad’ya know, all the po-faced hi-fi crap, beloved of the classical music and easy listening (Sinatra) bores of the 50s, has been almost entirely given over to pop.

    Got myself the 3 Little Richard CD reissues on Ace the other day – ’57, ’58, ’59 – £3 each.
    Bought a £20 (!) portable CD player (new) at Christmas; play them on that; easier to listen to, much cheaper, and actually more accurate to how pop music was consumed when it was (a) great, and (b) genuinely ‘popular’.

  6. I like going in record shops and still buy CDs and Vinyl, I stream stuff to try it out, and I download from my beloved emusic account, but I’m still a bit wedded to the physical format. I couldn’t imagine going all streaming …although my bank balance would be healthier…Music is too important to rely on an Internet connection staying up to be able to hear it

    .I’m not really an audiophile but Some music is best heard on CD, particularly synthy 80s pop…or CD or ambient/electronic music which really doesn’t benefit from ‘surface noise’ and crappy pressings. As others have said you can pick up CDs v cheap nowadays, way less than 8 quid it would would cost for an iTunes album.

  7. I agree with mini breakfast – digipacks are preferable to jewel cases which I think age very quickly. Still buy cd’s by the shed load and some vinyl too. Personally I think the article was a piece of fluff and started with the premise that cd’s were dead and didn’t bother to challenge the notion. My understanding is that physical sales still outstrip digital sales and cd is still the biggest format.

  8. I am still pro-CD.

    Wasn’t there a legendary music biz quote to the effect that the CD was a disastrous hit to the business model as it put a studio quality master into the hands of the consumer. I know there is lossless, hi res audio and the like, but for me the price/convenience and reliability (no wifi signal needed!)/quality mix favours the CD.

  9. Too many LPs come without a download code. And ripping vinyl to the computer is too much work, frankly. I much prefer CDs, vinyl is overrated. Also, very few album covers have anything interesting written on them, so not being able to read the fine print is no big deal. When I want something to read, I pick up a book.
    In fact, I don’t really care what the cover looks like at all, jewel case or cardboard makes no difference, but I’d argue that cardboard ones breaks more easily than jewel cases – they easily rip when you try to get the disc out of the very tightly glued middle section of a three panel fold-out sleeve…

    • With you there, Locust. The number of album covers I care enough to gaze longingly over is very small. This is probably why all my CD’s are now FLAC files (really must sell those discs now, it’s been years since I actually played a CD in my home system).

      I keep some vinyl because it’s not on CD or for sentimental reasons but as far as sound goes, my Fiio x3 played through he line-in of my amp offers me the best sounding music I’ve ever heard and without the pissing about that comes with vinyl.

  11. I’ve always liked CDs, and quite like the ‘mini LP’ feel of CD digipaks. It’s the old physical versus virtual product argument. There’s something intrinsically pleasurable about having an actual music carrier in your hands – the disc, its box, its booklet etc etc etc. It shouldn’t be the case, but it just is. Infuriating as those impenetrable cellophane wrappers are, you can’t beat the experience of opening up a pristine shiny jewel box for the first time and slipping the disc into the CD player drawer. I really should get out more.

    • Me neither, I feel like they are just renting it to me.

      I may be paranoid but I don’t trust big corporations and I have had this fear since I first heard of “the cloud” that one day we were going to be charged to listen to our own music collection.

      I consider my cds to be back up to what is on my computer. Almost all of my listening is through my ipod anyway. One day computers won’t have cd drives and that’ll be me completely buggered. I had a fantastic game on floppy disc that is absolutely useless now. It was a perfect replication of arcade games such as Rally-X and Pac-man. Man I gave that a hammering.

      • You’re right to be paranoid.

        I certainly plan to get another couple of cheap (£20-£50) portable CD players over the next year to cover the inevitable ‘return to CD’ campaign of 2030, when CD players will, no doubt, be re-sold as luxury items and the ‘only way to truly experience the magic of Black Lace in the studio’.

  14. Can’t remember the last time I listened to a CD. As soon as I get a new one I load it onto my Mac, yes the dreaded iTunes but it’s easier to play from my library than try to find it in my wreck of a room.

  15. The trouble with the CD was that it spoiled the purity of the album by being a continuous listen with the possibility of it being made longer than needed. Plus there’s the unloveable aspect of the object itself. A vinyl LP while not technically sounding better is a more involved experience somehow – it makes you pay more attention. There’s nothing difficult about playing vinyl either. You just have to be careful handling it and it’s fine. The odd pop and crackle is part of it’s pleasing analogue character, like reading a proper book. I have CDs that are damaged and won’t play. I got an original, mono vinyl Sgt Pepper recently. The surface looks a bit worn but it plays fine. It’s nearly 40 years old.

      • I don’t pay less attention when playing a CD rather than an LP.
        Indeed, the fact that the CD player is in my favourite room in the house, the kitchen, always means I pay far more attention to it.

        It’s also bizarre that the sheer amount of music you get on a CD, in the 1980s a major promotional tool for the new medium, is now regularly used by the ‘vinyl’ police as a negative.

        • Yeah but more can be less. Also limitations and restrictions are a good thing when producing an artwork.

          CDs are OK. I listen to them as I have both formats on my shelves (I have cassette tapes as well, and I do Spotify). I just think LPs, despite their faults, are the right format to work with to make the best album, and for the listener as a ‘slow’ way of consuming the content.

        • I’m no Vinyl Policeman, but there was rather a lot of “CD Stuffing” going on at one time.
          Eerybody seemed determined to make 50-60 minute albums just because on a CD they could, with little regard to whether they had 50-60 minutes of actually-worth-releasing material. Now, seemingly, a little common sense has returned and a lot of album lengths have shrunk back to the same amount of music as one used to find on a single vinyl album.

          Where CDs of up to 80 minutes a pop -do- come in work is for compilations of oldies. The 4-CD “Proper” box “The Cosimo Matassa Story”, classic New Orleans singles from Little Richard, Guitar Slim, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair etc. has 30 tracks a disc.
          120 tracks and a booklet in a slim cardboard box? Just the ticket!

  16. Cant understand people playing CDs on DVD players- give the disc half a chance.

    Following on from the greatest album covers I was looking up the cost of Allman Brothers eat a peach double album. $45.00 buying it locally and a lot cheaper on the internet but heaps of postage costs.

    I can buy a remastered deluxe cd with an extra Filmore concert for $US2.80 plus postage.

    • @Fentonsteve, apologies for going slightly off topic, but I’d be interested to hear your take on modern CD players and the growing trend for separate CD transport and DAC (digital to analogue converter). Is this progress or more marketing? A few years ago I picked up an old 90s Rotel CD player on eBay for 50 quid or so. It sounded okay, but when I bypassed the CD player’s internal DAC by adding a digital link to an external DAC (Beresford Bushmaster), the sound improvement was pretty impressive. I’ve tried the same DAC with a DVD player, and another CD player, and the Rotel/Beresford combo clearly remains the best for sound. So what’s going on here? You’d think that the DAC was the key component of sound reproduction, but evidently the transport also plays a part.

      But ultimately, isn’t this just another layer of choice to confuse the humble punter? Now if I want a new CD ‘player’, do I go looking for an all-in-one player or shop around for a transport and DAC separately (with all the usual hi-fi compatibility and matching issues)? I’m actually pretty happy with my current system and am not looking to change it. But I feel like I’m losing touch with how one assesses all this stuff.

      • Ah, this is a can of worms. Can CD transports influence sound quality? Certainly the quality of the mechanics can, and CD players should use infra-red lasers to match the pit size on the CD whereas many DVD players only have a blue laser which has a beam too small to best read the bits. Leaving aside whether that can influence sound – it can certainly influence jitter, which definitely can – better transports can play scuffed/scratched discs without skips, which many DVD transports can not. I have both BluRay and CD drives fitted to my PC for that very reason.

        Once the digits are coming down the S/PDIF cable or optical fibre, the DAC chip is required to convert the digits into something your amplifier can deal with. One of the trickle-down benefits of BluRay Audio / Hi-Resolution downloads is that DAC chips have got a lot better in the last few years. Modern DAC chips typically have 24-bit performance (120dB signal-to-noise) and some nifty linearization & noise-shaping. They really are more like DSP systems now. Today’s market-leader is the ESS Sabre 32, as used in Oppo BluRay players. Similar ideas implemented in FPGA are available for a few hundred quid from Chord Electronics (the kind of thing which was first done by dCs in Cambridge for the MoD a few years ago, for the price of a house).

        Say what you like about Hi-Res audio, but the quality of CD mastering has benefitted hugely from the improvements in studio ADCs, mastering, and DACs.

        Given the high cost and poor reliability of a decent mechanical CD transports, a top-quality DAC (the ESS Sabre is £35 in production volumes), the rapid advances in DAC technology, the vast number of digital audio sources in a typical home (CD, DAB, TV, BD player, streaming player, Sat box, iDevice, smart phone, etc), I think separate DAC with lots of inputs makes perfect sense.

        Erm, does that answer your question?

        • Yes, thanks @fentonsteve. You’re right the DAC works really well as a standalone device these days, and for many folks it’s probably replaced the amplifier as the main hub of their hi-fi system. I’ve got a Mac, a DVD and CD plugged into my DAC, with lots of empty inputs on my amp. I’ve noticed a few manufacturers are introducing combined amp/DAC units now, which makes sense I suppose.

          Still, the external DAC set up can introduce a lot of redundancy in the system, as you are simply bypassing a whole load of internal DACs in order to feed the signal to a (hopefully superior) external one. I guess the essence of my conundrum is this: if you have a decent external DAC and want to add a CD ‘player’ to your system, the choices don’t seem that obvious. Buy an average CD player and then immediately bypass a major component of its internal electronics by plugging it into your DAC? By a used player with a renowned transport and do the same? Or buy one of the newer dedicated CD transports? Until punters understand how transports affect sound it’s not an easy choice to make.

          There’s also your option of using a CD drive through a computer, but I don’t like the idea of having to turn a computer on to play a CD.

          Doesn’t it seem odd that the compact disc – the dominant recording medium of the last thirty years – still has all these unanswered questions about the best way of listening to it? Perhaps the hi-fi world has always been thus.

          • If you’re bothered about bypassing the inbuilt DAC, I’d go for a purpose-built-for-CD transport like the Audiolab M-CDT. I’m just in the process of buying a Naim amp with more digital than analogue inputs, no CD transport, and built-in streaming.

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