Has there been a resolution to the "CD vs vinyl" debate?

The main problem is that vinyl degenerates much more than CDs

where is there a 1tb exHD for that much money? or are you just flashing forward six months?

He's just saying syllables together, to see what they sound like.

check it before you wreck it:
http://www.jr.com/JRProductPage.process?Product_Id=4170215&JRSource=googlebase.datafeed.LAC+301156U

I'm so glad someone brought this topic up. I'll read the thread later when I'm not so drunk and when I don't have a cold on top of it.

Also I admit this funky bad ass Betty Davis CD is distracting me not a little bit.

CDs in inevitably going the way of the audiocassette shockah.

more otm than nabisco, even.

in ten years there'll be nostalgia nerds w/CD collections and remember the 90s websites. CDs will seem almost campy/absurd as 8-track tapes.

Am I the only one who anyone feels it's just expected from a music nerd to be annoyingly conservative about these things?

I find vinyl works well for some music, stuff that doesn't lean heavily on squeaky-clean production (which I guess rules out major parts of the pop market). I'm gonna be stupid and ambiguous and say it is better at creating 'deep' sounds.

XP That is bullshit. The CD - to a much larger extent than vinyl - will survive. You will maybe have a younger generation clinging to insisting on listening to downloaded music on their mobile phones.

But there is a chance that downloading business will collapse too, since downloading for free will always be way to easy for commercial downloading to be the same business as the CD. Thus, the labels will rather sign acts likely to appeal to the new 40-50-year-old CD buying demography, and they will give up about appealing to teens, as they realize the teens are lost to commercial biz anyway.

Thus, they will kick all R&B, hard rock and rap acts, and search for more people like Norah Jones and Katie Melua instead.

Geirbot unit overheating... danger... imminent

sure...and the big bands are coming back!

xpostoastee

geir were you the secret svengali behind this magazine?

http://www.tracksmusic.com/images/covers/01-sting.png

i've said elsewhere, but the cd business is already going downhill; try selling your (non super rare or super new) cds at amoeba and see how much you get for them, compared to what you would have gotten for them five years ago. the manager told me they have warehouses they'll never see the bottom of. they wouldn't even buy half my stuff last time (and it wasn't all junk either).

cds are still going to come out from indies, i think; but expect more majors to turn to dvds or dualdisc combos to keep their prices high

don't forget 8 track tapes accounted for 25% of recorded music sales in 1975 and had virtually disappeared five years later.

8 track died because it was a notoriously crap format. I remember as a child having many, many 8 tracks break. Cassettes were much less likely to break, were around the same price point, and you could copy them really easily: ergo cassettes superseded 8 tracks.

I like this new strategy of labels to provide free mp3 downloads packaged with vinyl releases. I'm not going to stop buying records, but if labels offer this, then I will buy more new records.

At this point, CDs are basically a way of conveying data. In the 80s and 90s, they were an actual format that you played on an actual hardware device. Now, you buy a CD, you rip it and it goes some place never to be retrieved. The packaging is inferior to vinyl, so what do you care what actually happens to the actual object that put the music data on your computer or wherever?

I've seen a few vinyl-and-download-only releases recently, ie not on cd at all.
Also yesterday it was announced that the Virgin Megastore in Chicago, which is right across the street from the itunes store, is closing up shop.

In a sense the Perfect Sound Forever aspect of CDs is starting to work against itself, in that the ones that still work sound exactly the same as brand-new copies. So really they've just been piling up for the last 25 years, and now finally the demand is falling and there is a huge backlog of used CDs. All the CDs you can get on Amazon for a penny. Used vinyl LPs, a lot of them just disintegrated, basically, because people took such poor care of them. But jewel boxes are pretty sturdy and I would guess a much higher percentage of CDs are still in circulation.

sure...and the big bands are coming back!

For a while, maybe. When today's 60 year-olds are dead, the market will be more dominated by acts in the genre of Sting, Robbie Williams, Travis, Coldplay or Keane though.

So really they've just been piling up for the last 25 years, and now finally the demand is falling and there is a huge backlog of used CDs.

Used CDs were almost more interesting 10 years ago than they are now. Now, most back catalogue titles have been remastered, sounding better than the earlier versions, and also often with louder audio (which is needed in today's mp3 players and portable CDs because they have a rather low maximum sound level).

The CDs you find in the used stores are usually older versions, before the HDCD remaster, and with too little sound to use in today's portable equipment.

Also yesterday it was announced that the Virgin Megastore in Chicago, which is right across the street from the itunes store, is closing up shop.

also see:

The Data Migration Thread

(the Data Migration thread, for depressing info about how long those flacs and hard drives might (not) last)

Mastering For Laptops?

(thread about loudness wars and mastering for laptops which in spite of what Geir says above is a horrible, horrible thing to do to music)

The National Archivist Association still says that reel-to-reel quality magnetic tape is the only viable, proven long term storage method for data (that exists currently).

If a thief breaks into an apartment, does he still steal CDs? Wonder if their size/weight-to-value ratio is such that they're not worth taking anymore.

Last time I had some CD's go missing (thought they were stolen, but they were found) I called a bunch of pawn shops and was told "we don't deal in CDs at all any more" every time.

they'd be more likely to steal a hard drive or ipod

will insurance cover mp3s?