Continuing with CDs?

I don't think that has a headphone slot. Does freedom from stuttering new CDs have to be up in that price range?

there is digital optical out, i think, Mike, but neither my Kenwood receiver (Pro-logic!) nor my nad 350 does digital. can probably do the old minidisc-as-a-dac trick but life's too short.

i checked. hdmi and a LAN socket, nothing else. usb on the front.

you can get an external DAC for the optical out for pretty cheap these days

I don't think that has a headphone slot. Does freedom from stuttering new CDs have to be up in that price range?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Thursday, January 6, 2022 1:38 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

as far as actual CD player CD players I don't think anyone makes much for low end stuff, obviously you can buy really cheap blu-ray or DVD players than can work - but are you trying to just use it w/headphones and not run it into an amp or receiver?

another place is ebay/craigslist, you can get stuff that was once pretty high end cd players for peanuts

shhh ...

i am beginning to feel that the tide is begining to turn re cds.
now that the format that cannot be named is getting to be priced beyond the scope of anyone other than folks who can go into space,
i have read a few articles re the revival of the cd.
this is not good for us tight f*ckers who have soaked up the cd groove in recent years ...

I feel a bit lost with regards to amps, receivers, DAC and LAN, don't know anything about that stuff. I'm not buying anytime soon so the bluray player will have to do for 5 of my stuttering CDs

(the LAN socket is just a standard wired network connection to allow the bluray player to show me netflix, not that you'd ever choose to do that because the ui looks like it was an afterthought)

((all my stereo stuff, apart from the bluray player, is 200x vintage or before and i don't really use it enough to make buying anything else worthwhile. these days it's mainly standalone pi jukebox -> amp. could do with a dab radio for the bedroom so i can stop using the tv for 6music.))

Mark E: can you point to evidence (eg: sales figures) for this revival?

bugger, they were articles that i read via some twitter pointers.

found one of them : https://www.wired.com/story/you-should-listen-to-cds/

https://www.billboard.com/pro/cd-sales-up-2021-adele-bts-taylor-swift/

I think I have a simple criterion or concern which is somewhat pertinent to choice of formats, which is basically: I don't want to have to rely on Internet access to be able to hear music.

To be sure, I am not technically adept enough even to be able to set up the kind of dedicated high quality online streaming gear now available. I can, with effort, play Spotify from a computer (with adverts); don't know how do it from a phone and don't really want to. But even if I were better at those things, I wouldn't trust my wifi not to go down, whether momentarily or for an extended time.

It follows that I would like to own my copies of things, whether those are vinyl, CD or mp3. Sadly I don't have a working cassette player anymore.

I'm surprised that online unreliability doesn't bother more people. Maybe they, being so much better at such things anyway, have better internet than me?

I don't want to have to rely on Internet access to be able to hear music.

this.

also, the random removal of catalogues when royalty disputes kick in (see four tet and ilan tapes/skee mask for recent examples)

Yes, that is also a good case, I think. I don't want to be at the mercy of external agencies deciding what's available, which could change any time - though I admit that is mostly a hypothetical problem. And I admit that I am already 'at the mercy' of eg: my own CDs functioning properly which they may not.

xp yes on both counts. Streaming's great - imagine what it was like when you had to rely on a store, library or friend having a record in order to hear it - but you have no control over the catalog or the mastering/sound quality (that alone is a big deal breaker for anyone who doesn't want all of their music brickwalled with compression). For movies, it's even worse with Netflix and other major streaming sites - you take Criterion and Kanopy out of the equation and your choices in the U.S. get incredibly bland and shitty.

https://www.bandwagon.asia/articles/watch-how-scrapped-cds-opened-china-to-rock-music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn21ywCLQTs

Xpost - yes, I’d be cool not to have to depend on the internet to be able to hear music.

shhh ...

i am beginning to feel that the tide is begining to turn re cds.
now that the format that cannot be named is getting to be priced beyond the scope of anyone other than folks who can go into space,
i have read a few articles re the revival of the cd.
this is not good for us tight f*ckers who have soaked up the cd groove in recent years ...

Imagine being able to … find new CDs in stores.

It's kind of a nice memory now driving to whatever local store and picking up an album that came out that week. Now it's been reduced to just a few trackpad clicks and waiting for it to arrive, but even before COVID, I had to appreciate the convenience since I no longer have a car and would need to take the subway to wherever.

shhhh don't tell anyone how cheap CDs are, absolutely like LPs were in the 90s, grab em now

I did actually find a used CD player recently (Sony CDP-291) for $15 in a thrift store, but I'm still importing new discs into the laptop and playing the files thru my Dragonfly, I haven't even hooked it up yet. Nice to have the option though, especially for those pesky 3" discs

On the positive side of that, sleeve - wouldn’t it be cool to be able to sell most of your used CDs to a store and get real money for them again?

for a while I was selling 100-200 of my culled ones for like $4 each/5 for $20

I am actually trying to talk a local shop (that is vinyl & tape only) into taking them

If I order my discogs collection by median sale price, probably over half the top 20-30 most expensive items are CDs

(Not a new situation, this has been the case since i started a profile approx 10 years ago - mentioned it only cos it casts interesting light on the “cds are back” vibe - for a lot of premium/rare releases the market has been pretty steady)

that's interesting, what are some examples? other than box sets and Coil CDs most of my top 250 is vinyl

having a quick look it seems like library music comps (eg this kind of thing) & some doctor who/radiophonic workshop soundtracky stuff - the broadcast CD tour EP - jan hammer's DEFINITIVE Miami Vice collection (!) - some caretaker CD-Rs - the library music album that Eno put out - plus various Aust post-punk things eg laughing clowns "official bootleg" releases - the Dogs in Space soundtrack - releases from the Apartments/Roland S Howard/David Chesworth

(with the caveat that my collection is I guess not $$$ generally, maybe some of these median sales are a bit old? and that there's some pretty good records in my collection that I haven't added!)

In London you can certainly buy new CDs in Fopp, Rough Trade East, and I think still Sister Ray. Admittedly that's a poor ratio compared the miles of HMV megastore we used to have.

Nonetheless I don't think of new CDs as hard to obtain. I just only obtain things rarely, and then listen to them a lot.

yeah, i think there's very much a us/uk divide here. that said, i don't go to many places that sell second hand CDs, maybe that's where the bargains are

I was in and shop in Chichester recently that has a great range of secondhand CDs and they're basically all £3. I always end up buying about 15 when I'm in there, and always get a discount as well. (Coltrane's Africa/Brass, Bill Evans You Must Believe in Spring, Tupelo Honey, Rhythm of the Saints, Nation of Millions to name a few.)

I'm almost scared to post/mention itas I assume someone will find out and it'll shut.

Tom Carter of Charalambides in a thread concluding CDs are indeed the way forward, though he's not thrilled about it.

Everyone in my feed decries the vinyl bottleneck, laments the unsellability of CDs and the bad quality of cassettes. Everyone loves Bandcamp, yet somehow I don't see anyone talking about BC-only releases. (A self-serving tweet perhaps but a lot of my friends are in the same boat)

— tom carter: guitar (@OmtayArtercay) January 8, 2022

Finally got the CDs yesterday that I sent to the printer hoping for a July 2021 release. Shipping outstanding orders tomorrow and opening negotiations with a distributor.

Is part of the attraction to vinyl on the part of sellers that vinyl can be sold for more? Or is the markup related to cost? (I don’t know the economics of this.)

And: congratulations, unperson!

markup is def related to cost aiui xp

so few pressing facilities iirc. niche demand is high and wait times are silly.

does anybody have any knowledge of what it was like to press vinyl 20 years ago vs. today?

(not trying to make this a "and that's why my old school generation was better" thing, genuinely curious about how it compares)

it's much harder to get analog lacquers now (as opposed to DMM/direct metal mastering)

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/vinyl-industry-apollo-masters-fire-951903/

20 years ago I doubt there was even a waitlist for a big pressing plant like Rainbo, now the Garth Brooks box sets and pointless movie soundtrack reissues are clogging everything up

The majors may not realize it but if Byron abandons vinyl the format is over https://t.co/V2MAJHttKA

— Damon K (@dada_drummer) January 9, 2022

that's what i was mainly wondering about: vinyl being the go-to for smaller operations 20 years ago was an issue of cost-efficiency? i mean i'm sure there was always some purists wanting their music to be on vinyl regardless of how it was done, but i always understood it as "this is the cheapest way for us to get our recordings out there." again, i have no idea i was just a consumer at the time. maybe that's my romanticized interpretation?

In the 90s short-run CDs were massively cheaper than vinyl formats, at least in Australia.

I'm guessing vinyl might've easier to do 20 years ago due to low demand and the majors taking up all the time and resources at CD pressing plants. 20 years ago, you have major albums shipping well over a MILLION copies the first week in the U.S. alone vs. a vinyl release that was likely shipping nowhere close to a thousand (and a thousand copies might be the entire run). Some of the audiophile labels at the time had similar press runs of vinyl that would take forever to clear out of storage.

Easier for a small label to get out, that is.

I feel compelled to note that I can buy new/sealed grey-area Euro LP represses of e.g. Magma and Sun Ra and Brazilian stuff etc for $12 at my local store, but I realize that may be an exception

I do think the vinyl format is largely dead/problematic but exceptions still exist (the An'Archives label)

i was mainly asking because i have been theorizing for a while that vinyl runs back then were probably as "limited" as they are now, it just wasn't part of any marketing scam because the format didn't have the same prestige.

something tells me pop punk and hc bands in the early-to-mid 90s were not as concerned about the supremacy of the format as the nerds on the Hoffman forums are today. I think it was just the cheapest and / or most practical option at the time, plus it didn't have the corporate stink of the CD. Not much to it more than that, I don't think. I mean, anyone who ever bought a punk or hc 7" in the nineties can attest that they pretty much all sounded like shit

True, maybe, but my 90s CD of Spiderland has a stern note that it’s intended to be listened to on vinyl, and Autechre had the notation “incomplete without surface noise” on an early release around the same time.

Vinyl was never the easiest or cheapest option. At least not in my lifetime.

The privilege afforded the format is 99% consumer demand. The “unsellability” of CDs noted above is very real: you can hardly give them away right now. This will change.

I can't remember the point at which new LPs became more expensive than their CD equivalents, but I'm guessing it wasn't something that happened gradually while both formats were widely available in chainstores, but something that happened in one blow, after a period in which LPs had almost vanished. Mid-'80s to late-'90s, IIRC, CDs were 25-40% more expensive than vinyl. Then vinyl mostly ceases to be on the shelves in mainstream shops (and perhaps rising to CD-level price-wise in independent shops?) and, when it reappears in that context (mid-late '00s?), it's 50-100% more expensive than CD.

That's very accurate, Mike.

War Mice: "This will change". Why?

I've read in a couple of places that MDC in Japan stepped up lacquer production significantly -

We can source enough lacquers from MDC to keep our cutting operation running. And we cut more then ever. They must have expanded their production bigtime.
I don't think lacquer is the bottleneck - there is just not enough pressing plants for the demand right now.

https://www.lathetrolls.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9268&p=59037&hilit=mdc#p59037

The price of polyvinyl chloride meanwhile has gone up something like 70% -

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-business-health-hurricanes-46bce9cc36dab2b330309dae0354cf53