10 votes

You should listen to CDs

22 comments

  1. [4]
    TooFewColours
    Link
    When I was just getting into music around 2010 I spent some of my weekend-job money on a second hand CD from eBay about once a week. Within a couple years I amassed a shelf's worth, and ten years...

    When I was just getting into music around 2010 I spent some of my weekend-job money on a second hand CD from eBay about once a week. Within a couple years I amassed a shelf's worth, and ten years later they may as well all be paper-weights.

    I would love it to have a comeback, if only to give purpose to that shelf again. It's a tidy format, although I never liked the brittle plastic cases. I really don't see it happening.

    They do sound better, but they don't sound different. Historically things 'sounding better' doesn't drive mass interest.

    I find myself listening to full albums over and over

    I don't think you need to rely on a format to encourage (or force) you to listen to albums in full again.

    "You don’t have to listen to the absolute least convenient music format to escape the prison of hyperconvenience"

    Nor the most redundant.

    Keep a local, digital collection that you can browse, but trim anything that doesn't 'spark joy'. Keep the collection tidy, and as well tagged as you can, with the highest resolution artwork. I've been buying an album every month from Bandcamp, and seeing my collection growing is taking me right back to the thrill I had with my CDs ten years ago.

    Back when you had to buy a physical album to listen to it, you really listened to it—even the songs you didn’t like at first. Eventually, some of those tracks would become your favorites

    Buying digital certainly doesn't change this.

    But anyway, vinyl is a joy. It offers something meaningfully different. It's a project, and a way to spend more time on the music you already love.

    CDs for me remain a symbol of the awkward digital teething that's come to the define that era.

    Also, if looking like a hipster is actually a concern, I've got a hunch you'll end up looking like even more of a hipster if you start busting out CDs at a dinner party.

    16 votes
    1. PhantomBand
      Link Parent
      I follow this system: I have four directories, one is called "Albums", another is called "Check", then I have "Try Again" and "OSTs". Albums is organized by Artist->Album, and the whole idea is...

      Keep a local, digital collection that you can browse, but trim anything that doesn't 'spark joy'. Keep the collection tidy, and as well tagged as you can, with the highest resolution artwork. I've been buying an album every month from Bandcamp, and seeing my collection growing is taking me right back to the thrill I had with my CDs ten years ago.

      I follow this system: I have four directories, one is called "Albums", another is called "Check", then I have "Try Again" and "OSTs".

      Albums is organized by Artist->Album, and the whole idea is that I just store albums, EPs and singles I like there.

      Check is a directory for music that is new to me and is in need of "checking out".

      Try Again is a directory for music that I've already listened to and can't say I like much but I feel some sort of potential in, so I leave it there in case I want to try it again and hopefully have it click later on. Though I do waste a lot of time replaying that sort of stuff over and over to make it click rather forcefully, but that's another story..

      OSTs is for soundtracks. I further divide those between OSTs for anime & visual novels, and for games. I organize everything by franchise->series->entry->release name. This also includes things like rearrange albums, remix CDs, etc.

      3 votes
    2. [2]
      TavisNamara
      Link Parent
      Agreed on everything, but especially just... Having a digital collection that is YOURS. You have the files, right there, on your system, no locks, no keys, immediately playable...

      Agreed on everything, but especially just... Having a digital collection that is YOURS. You have the files, right there, on your system, no locks, no keys, immediately playable mp3/wav/whateverthenewformatsare. And definitely actually keep it well organized (unlike my mess, I keep going back to organize it but it's already too big). Start small and build it up and, again, KEEP IT ORGANIZED. You'll thank yourself a million times over when you're a thousand songs deep.

      But also, the idea that CDs would be the go-to if the idea is listening to the whole thing, beginning to end, is also kind of ridiculous? Think on it- you have a cd playing. You get to the song you're kind of uninterested in. What do you do?

      ... You press skip. CDs were, most often, made such that each song counts as a different thing and you could jump between them. While not always possible, it's possible enough that you're most likely going to end up hitting that fast forward.

      Vinyl, you get to the song you're kind of uninterested in. What do you do? Well, you're not about to carefully skip over just that song on vinyl (unless you're really crazy). So you just... Let it play. It's an inherent part of the system that reinforces listening to the songs you wouldn't otherwise, unlike imminently-skippable CDs.

      I prefer digital myself due to a mix of storage and convenience, but vinyl also has plenty of benefits due to the physical and definitive nature of the medium as well as the quality which never seems quite the same otherwise. CDs? Well... They certainly do work. Usually.

      2 votes
      1. Akir
        Link Parent
        TIL I’m really crazy. Skipping songs on a record isn’t that hard.

        Well, you're not about to carefully skip over just that song on vinyl (unless you're really crazy). So you just... Let it play.

        TIL I’m really crazy. Skipping songs on a record isn’t that hard.

        3 votes
  2. [5]
    Akir
    Link
    I think the author is struck with a bit of romanticism for the format. The thing about CDs is that for a very long time there simply wasn’t a better way to buy music. Even after we divorced music...

    I think the author is struck with a bit of romanticism for the format.

    The thing about CDs is that for a very long time there simply wasn’t a better way to buy music. Even after we divorced music from media, it was often the CD that had the better quality because everything else came with lossy compression, whereas CDs are about as high quality as you can get with the average human ear (hi res is a can of worms I refuse to open right now). It’s only in recent times where it’s becoming standard for download stores to support lossless audio and streaming services are finally starting to take that seriously too; it’s not just the niche ones offering them now.

    Personally I do still prefer to buy CDs but I don’t actually “listen” to them. I rip the audio, transcode to FLAC (or ALAC if I want to keep it on my phone, thanks Apple), and listen to it that way. There is just something special in having a physical release complete with the extra effort that had to go into designing everything. And if I were to somehow lose my music library, I have an easily accessible backup. Beyond that I am just a few dozen miles away from a legendary music store stuffed to the gills with historic releases.

    11 votes
    1. [2]
      frostycakes
      Link Parent
      Small aside, but I thought iOS 11 added FLAC support? Might save you a second transcoding step, at least. And while I can respect the nostalgia factor, even as a 90s child CDs were just clunky....

      transcode to FLAC (or ALAC if I want to keep it on my phone, thanks Apple)

      Small aside, but I thought iOS 11 added FLAC support? Might save you a second transcoding step, at least.

      And while I can respect the nostalgia factor, even as a 90s child CDs were just clunky. Easily scratched, the portable players were bulky, skip-prone, and also prone to damage the discs themselves due to dropping the players, something I experienced often as a clumsy kid. I'm grateful that having an uncle who has always been an early adopter of tech with no kids of his own meant I got a hand-me-down Rio S30S from him in 2003, turning CDs into something I'd just immediately rip on my computer and forget about afterwards.

      The only time I went back to physical CDs at all was once the 128MB limitation of the SD card slot on the Rio bothered me enough that I got a Sony CD player that supported Atrac3 burned discs through SonicStage (something I wish I had forgotten existed), so it had a larger capacity than the little red bean.

      Honestly, if I'm nostalgic for any music experience, it's more the whole experience of getting music off of LimeWire or WinMX, discovering random bands thanks to mistagged/misnamed files, and the goofy string of mp3 players I had in high school (since my stepdad, the family tech guy, was and is staunchly anti-Apple and will not buy anything from them), things like this zippo-sized thing, or my ridiculous poo-brown Zune that I bought with my first-ever paycheck (surprisngly, Zunes were rather common in my high school, it made that inbuilt music sharing thing actually useful). That seemed to hit the sweet spot of less clunky than CDs or physical media, but still having independent devices that were in their "this tech is new enough to do funky experimental product designs and have some variety" phase. CD's only advantage of sound quality became irrelevant with the advent of broadband fast enough and data storage becoming plentiful and cheap enough to have lossless files sent that way, IMO.

      6 votes
      1. tomf
        Link Parent
        no flac yet with iOS. I have this for zsh to quickly convert flacs (often 24-bit) down to 16/44 FLAC and ALAC. Not the prettiest thing, but it does the job. function convertalbum(){ mkdir FLAC;...

        no flac yet with iOS. I have this for zsh to quickly convert flacs (often 24-bit) down to 16/44 FLAC and ALAC. Not the prettiest thing, but it does the job.

        function convertalbum(){
        mkdir FLAC;
        mkdir ALAC;
        for i in *.flac;
         do echo $i;
          ffmpeg -i "$i" \
            -y -v 0 -vcodec copy -acodec alac -af aresample=osf=s16:osr=44100 "ALAC/${i%}.m4a" \
            -af aresample=osf=s16:osr=44100 "FLAC/${i%}.flac";
          done
        }
        

        You can listen to FLACs on iOS with another app like Foobar2000, though. You add the tracks through file sharing.

        I used to want a Zune. It looks like there are some basic mods like swapping out the battery for a 3000mAh one and adding an SSD. Nothing close to the iPod scene, but still nice to see options.

        5 votes
    2. nothis
      Link Parent
      I can't be bothered with physical media anymore, personally, but I don't think it's useful to dismiss "romanticism" in this case. It's a feature. There is no argument to be made about quality or...

      I can't be bothered with physical media anymore, personally, but I don't think it's useful to dismiss "romanticism" in this case. It's a feature.

      There is no argument to be made about quality or efficiency, it's romanticism all the way down, it's a psychological angle. The friction of having to manually place CDs in the CD player, sorting them in a shelf, having them stack up as a physical presence on your couch table, with a corner of that weird cover photo peeking at you when you least expect it... it does something to your brain that forces you to think differently about your music, interact differently with it. That's a real consequence of using physical media.

      5 votes
    3. ahatlikethat
      Link Parent
      I do the same. I come from the age before streaming and I like to know the music I love is "mine," not dependent on some music publisher's whim or streaming giant's contract. Also I've bought CDs...

      I do the same. I come from the age before streaming and I like to know the music I love is "mine," not dependent on some music publisher's whim or streaming giant's contract. Also I've bought CDs from self-published musicians, where the money really does go to the people making it.

      4 votes
  3. Protected
    Link
    CDs are terrible. They're slow, get scratched easily with time/use and AFAIK merely encode digital audio data, meaning they're a waste of plastic (on top of being a waste of space). Buy the full...

    CDs are terrible. They're slow, get scratched easily with time/use and AFAIK merely encode digital audio data, meaning they're a waste of plastic (on top of being a waste of space). Buy the full album on bandcamp or (if that's your fetish) a large corporate arrow-themed or fruit-themed service.

    10 votes
  4. [3]
    weystrom
    (edited )
    Link
    Vinyl is making a resurgence as a physical media because of a nice ritual of spinning the record. To me the CD don't have the same attraction.

    Vinyl is making a resurgence as a physical media because of a nice ritual of spinning the record.

    To me the CD don't have the same attraction.

    5 votes
    1. AugustusFerdinand
      Link Parent
      I have no interest in vinyl (don't care what an purists have to say, vinyl sounds worse), but I do enjoy the ritual/tactile feedback of physical media. It's one of the reasons I still have...

      I have no interest in vinyl (don't care what an purists have to say, vinyl sounds worse), but I do enjoy the ritual/tactile feedback of physical media. It's one of the reasons I still have physical magazine subscriptions, use notebooks, complete newspaper crossword puzzles, etc.

      CDs never really had that tactile feedback though. It either was silently sucked into a car stereo or pushed onto the three ball bearings holding it in place in a CD player. It always felt fragile and never rewarding. Cassettes (both audio and VHS) always had a better feel to using them and the audio feedback of mechanisms preparing your media. However both of those are like vinyl, a categorically worse format for enjoying the media. The perfect balance of mechanical feel and audio quality is available in my physical media of choice, the MiniDisc. Using them gives me that oh so delicious dopamine hit.

      4 votes
    2. vili
      Link Parent
      The very first CD players actually prominently featured the spinning disc, but when Sony came out with their more compact design that hid the disc, that became the standard. There was a pretty...

      The very first CD players actually prominently featured the spinning disc, but when Sony came out with their more compact design that hid the disc, that became the standard.

      There was a pretty good YouTube video about this a few weeks ago: How CD players got boring & why the Technics SL-P1200 is one of the exceptions.

      3 votes
  5. [8]
    soks_n_sandals
    Link
    I'll bite on this one: CDs are great. I'm not a CD evangelist, but I find them practical, economical, and I think they have lots of pros. I'll note that I don't support the staunch opposition to...

    I'll bite on this one: CDs are great. I'm not a CD evangelist, but I find them practical, economical, and I think they have lots of pros.

    I'll note that I don't support the staunch opposition to physical media ("digital is superior") or the blindly faithful support of a single medium ("vinyl has more soul"). I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach to accessing music media, and while I like CDs, you may find them cumbersome. This stuff is totally subjective.

    Bandcamp is super useful for smaller bands. I usually try to buy the CD from a band and then download the hi-res FLAC. That's a great bet since the hi-res download is better-than-CD-quality for the price of a CD. But bands that are signed to major labels usually aren't on Bandcamp. Enter streaming - I get to listen to an album enough to decide if I want to buy it. If I'm impressed by the album on streaming, then the CD will be even better.

    The beauty of CDs is that the CD can be purchased on Discogs for a low price in mint condition. I like to read the records details in the CD booklet: who produced, mixed, and mastered the records; where the studio was; and so on. I found some of my favorite bands by looking to see who mastered the record and finding other bands they mastered. Example: Free Love by Sylvan Esso was mastered by Huntley Miller, who mastered for S. Carey, Siv Jakobson, Flock of Dimes, and big bands like Bon Iver and Low.

    I have these opinions as someone with a dedicated hi-fi system and someone who spends a lot of time doing dedicated listening. So yeah, you should listen to CDs if you can, but you don't have to write off every other medium to do that.

    5 votes
    1. [3]
      Akir
      Link Parent
      Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. CDs are basically the only zero-compromise all-digital physical media, and part of why it’s such a convenient media is that it can be mass produced for...

      Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. CDs are basically the only zero-compromise all-digital physical media, and part of why it’s such a convenient media is that it can be mass produced for literally pennies per unit and is still playable just about everywhere with compatible hardware that is still common.

      All of the extra stuff associated with album releases are nice, but the thing I think we tend to ignore is that people put more stake into real world objects more than conceptual files. If you email someone a link to an album they will eventually forget where it came from. But if you give them a physical album then any time they come into contact with it they will remember how it came into their life because there are now more sensory reminders involved.

      6 votes
      1. Micycle_the_Bichael
        Link Parent
        Your comment made me curious so I dug out my cd collection and texted my friend who has 2 massive trunks full of vinyl and cds. I can remember exactly where I was and/or who gave me every cd in my...

        Your comment made me curious so I dug out my cd collection and texted my friend who has 2 massive trunks full of vinyl and cds. I can remember exactly where I was and/or who gave me every cd in my collection. My friend cannot do the same given he has over 1000 cd's some of which were bought/given in bulk, but he could do it with a shockingly high percent of his collection. I never really thought about and realized how much of my love for my cd collection came from the memories associated with them. So thank you for that :)

        5 votes
      2. soks_n_sandals
        Link Parent
        I totally agree with you. CDs are as good as music files need to be. It's not hard to guess why SACD died out and why people are antsy about Spotify Hi-Fi. CD-quality is perfectly adequate, unless...

        I totally agree with you. CDs are as good as music files need to be. It's not hard to guess why SACD died out and why people are antsy about Spotify Hi-Fi. CD-quality is perfectly adequate, unless you want/need 5.1 channel mixing and then a DVD is the way to go. In the pursuit of quality, it's hard to beat the convenience, ubiquity, economics, and quality of a CD since you have a de facto backup of your files and tangible album art.

        And to your point about hanging on to physical media, I have lost my school project digital files from 8-10 years ago, but I still have the CD mixtapes from my then-crushes. It's not such a conscious choice to keep them, they just pop up. Those mixtapes could only fit 12-16 songs, and I think that in those constraints came a certain kind of elegance.

        3 votes
    2. [4]
      Micycle_the_Bichael
      Link Parent
      Out of curiosity, have you or @Akir tried Tidal? If so, did you notice a difference in quality? I got a free subscription for a year when I signed up for my phone contract. The big pitch on all...

      Out of curiosity, have you or @Akir tried Tidal? If so, did you notice a difference in quality? I got a free subscription for a year when I signed up for my phone contract. The big pitch on all the signs and marketing was that the sound quality was significantly better than any other streaming service. However, I have terrible hearing so I doubt I'd ever be able to pick up the difference if one existed.

      2 votes
      1. Akir
        Link Parent
        I haven't tried Tidal. When they started they simply didn't have enough music and I wasn't a huge fan of the stuff that they had. When it comes to services like Tidal and these other hi-res...

        I haven't tried Tidal. When they started they simply didn't have enough music and I wasn't a huge fan of the stuff that they had.

        When it comes to services like Tidal and these other hi-res offerings you have to realize that most comparisons you'll find out there are unfair. In many cases hi-res versions are remastered, and what most people consider quality comes down to how much they like the choices made in the production and mastering phase. I have a copy of Fragile by Yes that is the high-res remaster, but I didn't buy it because being high-res made it any better. I know this because I transcoded it into standard "CD Quality" FLAC and I can't tell the difference. The same has been true for every other high-res audio source I have tested.

        Tidal has a lot more music now, including some stuff I would be much more likely to listen to, but I still wouldn't pay them because they are backing MQA which is yet another audiophile scam product.

        To be honest, a lot of the time I am listening to music I am out and about and that means that I'm probably going to be using relatively low-quality Bluetooth links to listen to them (i.e. on my car stereo), so I'm not a stickler for quality as much as I used to be. As long as I'm not hearing weird artifacts I'll probably enjoy my music just fine. The biggest reason to get CDs or lossless downloads is to have a high quality master that won't degrade if I have to transcode it to another format for whatever reason. High quality Vorbis and AAC are very difficult to distinguish from the originals, and the sounds of their artifacts are much less noticable than low-bitrate MP3.

        In any case if you can't tell the difference it's generally not worth paying extra for.

        3 votes
      2. 3_3_2_LA
        Link Parent
        It's not just you, a lot of people struggle with telling different bitrates apart. Here's a good one, for reference: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

        It's not just you, a lot of people struggle with telling different bitrates apart. Here's a good one, for reference: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

        3 votes
      3. soks_n_sandals
        Link Parent
        I have not, but I did trial Qobuz, which had Hi-Res streaming. I couldn't tell a difference on my system. Qobuz doesn't have a native Linux app, so I was using Chrome and there was no audible...

        I have not, but I did trial Qobuz, which had Hi-Res streaming. I couldn't tell a difference on my system. Qobuz doesn't have a native Linux app, so I was using Chrome and there was no audible difference compared to Spotify at its highest setting.

        Instead of hifi streaming, I use Strawberry to play my FLAC files when desired, which is a media player. With that, I do hear a bit of a difference against Spotify. Not for everything, and it's hard to say if it's "better", but it is "different." I didn't get the same experience out of Qobuz.

        Now, I will note that I compared Spotify to my dad's high-end system and it was night and day. Laughable, almost, comparing Spotify to the quality of his CD player. But, Spotify through my friend's tower speakers was downright spooky how lifelike some songs sounded. So I think Spotify can safely impress on systems that cost as much as $5k, so beyond that it really comes down to taste. Does Qobuz/Tidal have more music in their library you like? Can you use the Qobuz discount on buying hi-res albums? Or make use of the Tidal MQA files (which needs special hardware)? For me, the big thing is that none of my friends use those platforms, so I can't share playlists with them.

        2 votes
  6. knocklessmonster
    (edited )
    Link
    I'm of the opinion that anything but digital storage is a horrible medium. It's not about the medium to me, it's about the music. Vinyl was notorious for not capturing the sound "in the room" when...

    I'm of the opinion that anything but digital storage is a horrible medium. It's not about the medium to me, it's about the music. Vinyl was notorious for not capturing the sound "in the room" when recording, for example. Tapes degrade, and a walkman near a wifi router is a recipe for random electro-magnetic interference. CDs skip and scratch, gem cases break if you sneeze wrong in the next room.

    It doesn't come down to physical media and Spotify either. There are plenty of marketplaces where one can even buy major label music to download in minimally lossy formats (320kbps MP3, FLAC). The rest is simply issues of wanting to do something enough to do something about it.

    In the pre-streaming era, I’d buy an album and listen to it over and over.

    In the streaming era I'll listen to an album over and over. I'll take in the stuff that sounds like it barely made the cut. I'll bump the same album all week even, if I enjoy it enough. I'm pretty organic with my listening habits: If I want to listen to the album for a week straight I will. If I want to listen to the combined, complete discographies of Aesop Rock and Rob Sonic together for two weeks, I'll wind up doing that. If I don't listen to an album from front to back, or shuffled, or whatever, it's probably because it didn't capture my attention properly.

    This is not a nostalgia play.

    It most certainly is, because it isn't a technically valid argument. It doesn't have to be one or the other, but he fails at making a good reason for it, and claims to not be nostalgic. To me this reads as trying to inspire a vinyl-like resurgence for CDs. I frankly don't miss CDs, and think that if I already need a phone I can also effectively have my CD player in my pocket.

    I still buy CDs, but now I mostly buy music on Bandcamp, which most artists I listen to are. I also buy collector's editions or regional editions that look interesting where medium matters. I had a point where I was going to buy everything I wanted on CD, but realized it was untenable and even pointless: CDs break, but you can compress and copy data to a new device.

    5 votes