Continuing with CDs?

CDs that are new now, I mean.

a lot of the indie label I'm buying CDs from are doing pressings of like 300 or 500, so I'd guess they'll be rare (if anyone wants them or not)

Yeah that's kind of my observation as well. When I look at ownership stats on Discogs for new releases there may be one or two hundred for vinyls's and a handful for the CD. Of course I expect a limited demand for them in 20 years as well but there will always be a few supporters for any format.

My anecdotal observation is that the small CD pressings of reissues in particular seem to sell out faster than vinyl, but I get that there's not much incentive to spend time and effort re-pressing the format with the lower profit margin, and risking using up that crucial under-bed storage.

that's true, it feels like you can just slap an extra $20 onto the price of a vinyl release and people will just pay it. doesn't work for CDs.

Is that slightly overstated perhaps? Vinyl is expensive to produce unless you're making a significant amount and the profit margin on CDs can be pretty good even on 500. I mean, I think presently it's simply the lack of demand.

Ah sorry, when I said profit margin I meant total profit. Like I say, I see CDs selling out surprisingly often considering how much I hear there's no demand, which makes me think the demand is probably both low and underestimated.

nah, I see vinyl releases they're charging $50 for with like one record and maybe a gatefold cover, there's no way that's costing them that much to manufacture... if you're pressing up 1,000 copies it's like $3-4 per record plus whatever the sleeve costs. you just can't ask for that kind of premium on a CD release today.

I feel like a shark at Half Price Books these days, just cruising through and scooping up mouthfuls of $4-5 CDs

How much support does CD-R's still have? I know Amazon does a lot of MOD for catalog titles now. With new music, I'm wondering if the new model is to press a limited run and let people burn their own from the FLAC's offered on bandcamp and elsewhere.

both low and underestimated.

I'm sure it's often very difficult to guage. A guess but I suspect that in some areas / genres there's a certain amount of return to the format and demand is actually rising.

It's striking to see CDs go "out of print" quickly and this goes some way to couunter the perception of it was a "landfill" format.

I think the fragility and low barrier of entry for CDr is at odds with the reasons many CD buyers have for wanting them. It's kind of a different market? xp

Been considering getting back into CD-Rs now that I drive again

I was going to pick up the new Sleater-Kinney at a preferred shop on Saturday, then changed it to Sunday when I realized Saturday was RSD. So I go Sunday, and not only had they sold out of the CDs, they just had a couple copies of the vinyl. I was back by there on Wednesday, and still no CDs.

Yeah, I can see cars making a big difference with CD's. When I was still driving around Chicago, I only played CD's. The only time I drive now is if I'm at a relative's place - for the older cars it's CD's but for the newer cars my iPod (which I still use because utilizing my phone for movies and music would be too much of a memory and battery drain given the amount of usage).

I still like CD-R's because I often do custom tweaks. I never stopped buying compilations, but I often burned an additional CD-R with tweaks to take care of glaring omissions, wrong mixes or a haphazard track sequence.

First CD-R I remember burning was a Changesbowie just to reinstate the original mix of "Fame." There was a gold CD reissue that also took care of that, but at the time $20-30 was waaaaay too much money, especially when most of my CD's were just "free" CD club selections I got through my parents.

I still burn them, especially after I found a stack of a few hundred left on a wall. Also still spend money on them on Bandcamp but mainly to support the artists and get the files.

Sooner or later working burners and blank media are going to become exotic items.

I'd been without a non-car CD player for about 5 years after the 1994 Discman earned with Camel Cash gave up the ghost. Just found a 5-disc changer at my first trip back to the thrift store since lockdown, $11. Fits under the turntable nicely. Haven't been tempted to pick up any CDs, but it's nice to work to full length records without the temptation to skip around or having to turn over LP sides every 20 minutes.

Graphic design student daughter just told me she first realized she was interested in lettering design watching me decorate CD-Rs with a Sharpie, circa 2004.

Which is an indication that some of the artists whose work I like don't even have enough of an audience to jusify a small CD run, sadly. xp

I often burn my Bandcamp flacs to play in the car. Unfortunately the car's CD player eject mechanism is giving up the ghost so I'm stuck with a Trojan reggae comp for the foreseeable.

I experimented with one of those Bluetooth adapters but it's a real faff. Much prefer CDs in the car.

xxxp they already are

Forced obsolescence just like they did with vinyl in the 90s.

I still listen to cds/cdrs a bunch as I got a boombox at work and in the car, but I think it is an old fogey thing to do now.

Ah well the world moves on...and if you want to listen to music on the go, one of the f'n tech companies is going to get a cut somehow.

the 1994 Discman earned with Camel Cash gave up the ghost

woah, this gen-xer wants to know how many camel wides did this cost?

backing up my 1.6 TB library of lossless rips/downloads to my NAS, before transplanting the 2TB drive inside my Mac Mini and adding it to the hifi stack.

(where my nice CD player also resides alongside the DAC)

Camel Cash: about 365 camel bucks got me a Discman and a set of silk pajamas spangled with camels ( but not JOE CAMELS!)

But I could have gotten a museum piece

https://www.instagram.com/p/B7UDDZgncHS/?utm_medium=copy_link

Now I have fourth and fifth faulty cd releases to complain about.

Morgiana/Cremator soundtracks (Finders Keepers)
Frost - Day And Age (Inside Out/Sony)

I started to think maybe this is my CD player but I don't think it is. With the possible exception of Lal Waterson & Oliver Knight - Once In A Blue Moon (from 1996 but I heard this was a reissue, but there's no discogs record of that), all of these faulty cds have been from the last decade. They play fine until the last quarter, but not always, occasionally they play fine, but I'm reluctant to play them when I know they might start getting skippy.

It's making me a bit scared about buying recent cds. Especially when one was Inside Out/Sony, I'd be really pissed if this happened on one of those big expensive Jethro Tull releases.

I can't find out very much about this. I'm probably not the person who listens to the most CDs here, so I'm surprised nobody else has come across it. Seen a little discussion of it on Steve Hoffman forums, but not much at all.

I'll end up buying some of these on digital and I wish the labels wouldn't bother with CDs if they can't do them right. The Lush - Chorus box set is the only release I've seen a bunch of other people complaining about.

I know this is obvious, but have you actually tried playing them in a different CD player?

It's difficult to nail down, since a faulty CD will generally work in some percentage of CD players, just not ALL of them. I rip a ton of CDs and if you set aside the physically damaged ones, most of them can be ripped if you try a different drive. Are they faulty? Yes and no.

I can believe that CD manufacturing is getting sloppy too, since the demand is way down.

Any pressing info on those CD's? (i.e. the name of the pressing plant on the inner rim, if there is one listed)

I should try them on the bluray player, I don't have another cd player but I'm fairly confident standards are slipping

I can't see any common pressing details

And sometimes they play fine, the Morgiana/Cremator disc has only screwed up a couple of times.

I had major problems with the recent Sign O' The Times reissue (3 CD version.) Took it back to the store to replace it, same thing happened with the new one. And on the same song too (the title track.) Thing is, it eventually started playing fine, so who knows?

Got to think many releases now are just like indie cds, only in the hundreds pressed. Knock wood, on the two I pressed in the last decade, they turned out fine.

I think DVD players are kinda bonky in general for reading other discs. DVD players have data protection in them to read head when you play movies so you don't have flutter and distortions in the signal and I think it screws up other kinds of media sometimes. They burn these update discs where I work to update GPS software in field toughbooks and they run like SHITE in them as it seems to have to read the whole disk before the script will run to update the software. Same stuff copied to a thumb drive runs like nothing. I can't remember the name it's some 3 letter thing, but I found on some of the models if you went into the settings and turn off that read protection they ran better (for those update disks). These toughbooks that had burners seemed to work better odd enough... criminy the code on some of those devices has to be old as shit at this point as all of them pretty much auto-install from some generic driver in Windows.

Anyone fuck with 50-disc or 100-disc changers? Any particular downsides to them?

I have a 100-disc changer that I got in college about 25 years ago via an insanely cheap floor model deal. I used the hell out of it back in the day, but I rarely use that function these days and mostly just play 1 at a time. It was fun to put on "random" back before you could just do the same thing with your iPod or phone, but slow to change discs and the shifting mechanism was kind of loud.

Cool thanks!

I mean, it still works great, if that's a selling point! The model I had made it easy to also just play 1 CD at a time, without the changer function.

https://images.crutchfieldonline.com/ImageHandler/trim/620/378/products/2002/130/x130PDF908-f.jpeg

this is the one I have, fwiw

Hunting for a new player myself now as the drawer mechanism in the Sony MXD-400 I bought refurbished two years ago is failing. I realize it probably just needs a new belt, but I looked inside and the idea of taking everything apart to get to the belt gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I really like the Sonys c.2000-2005 because of the track access dial and CD-text display. Unfortunately for me, a lot of them are changers, whose clunky mechanism tends to take forever to load a disc. I'm thinking about getting one of those top loading CMT-EX bookshelf systems and using it as a transport, anticipating the joy of watching the disc spin (though I'm guessing it'll have maybe a year of life left in it before something goes wrong). Simple pleasures.

I inherited a Pioneer that had a six-disc changing cartridge. Someone else I know had it for several years before it broke, which is amazing because I played the shit out of mine and even though it was already old and used, it still worked perfectly until I sold it.

I've since streamlined everything to two universal players - one region-free player pre-dating UHD (4K Blu-rays) and one that plays them. Both are compatible with SACD (true DSD playback) and all DVD formats as well.

My car (a 2009 Nissan Versa) has a six-CD changer that I don't think I've ever put more than one CD in. I just plug my digital player into the aux port.

My 2012 Nissan has one of those dumb proprietary audio outlets that I think they only included for like one year, that doesn't connect to anything now.

When I worked at my college bookstore, they had a 100 CD changer. Off rush season, they only had one person running the store all day on Sundays, so I would come in with a garbage bag full of CDs and leave it on shuffle all day. The changer was incredibly loud, like you would hear it from the other end of the store when it changed discs if the store wasn't busy.

I guess it's kind of funny to think about how much work we used to put into what Spotify and other streamers now seem to want to do by default, eg. shuffle play a massive playlist

I had a two Sony CD changers in the late 90s--want to say they were 200 and 300 discs respectively, and could be daisy chained to shuffle together, with one queuing something up while the other was playing. I ran them via line-in to my desktop computer freshman year of college, to broadcast a 24/7 "radio station" (can't remember the name of the tech but it was built in to Winamp I think) that I later calculated was sometimes using up to 70% of my school's T1 line (nobody ever asked me to stop...).

So in a way, shuffling a lot of music has been part of my listening for a quarter century. Replaced those CD changers (gave them to a friend's record shop) with an mp3 player into which you inserted your own (100GB) laptop HDD, circa 2003 or so...

Now I don't even own an actual CD player of any kind--just a USB CD-R drive that I rip new CDs from. Keep my collection on multiple 1TB microSD cards--nearly 10,000 albums on a few fingernail-sized bits of plastic...

I finally reached the point where I have to de-jewel case all my CDs if I want to fit everything on my racks. I've wanted to do this for years but having to get rid of two racks to make way for a bathroom was the impetus I needed. It's a terribly tedious process, though. I can do about 100 in a sitting and then I have to uncurl after sitting on the floor and do something else for a while.

I'm using these: https://spacesavingsleeves.com/ and I like the minimalism. If I cram too many on a shelf, I do lose some of the spine readability though I have enough digipacks and unique packaged CDs to keep a good amount of identifiers.

I like how they give the discs a bit of an LP vibe too

Thanks for the inadvertent reminder to order some more of those. I like how, on their website, the photo shows a bunch of CDs by The Fall. That very much mirrors my situation.

Came across two other CD format defending things this past weekend - Super Deluxe Edition pointing out that the vast majority of Abba sales this past week have been CDs yet the press are just reporting on the record vinyl sales. And a critic on an Uproxx podcast suggesting that maybe indie fans (like me) should consider buying CDs rather than blaming Adele for the pressing plant delays. That is, if their favourite artist has even bothered to make their album available on CD.

i wonder how much of the "death of cds" is due to hardware, which is the chicken and which is the egg? laptops don't come with optical drives anymore, and i flicked (quickly) through this year's What HiFi awards edition and didn't see a cd player category.

(still my prefered format, cd and dvd, but am increasingly ok with digital music purchases)