Continuing with CDs?

idk, I probably beat this drum a lot on here but I like CDs for some things and vinyl for other things and tapes for other things and Qobuz for some other things and it’s like… we don’t have to choose one or the other, it’s great

Pretty much. I'd just hold on to what you'd want to listen to. I rarely have more than one single copy of an album, and if it's an album I really like with no other physical alternative, I'll hold on to it even it's valuable.

The toughest thing to part with would be 78's - nothing beats hearing a 78 from the original record, much more so than a LP vs CD of an album that had a tape master. But they can be expensive and tough to find, especially in the best condition. A great CD, like the ones John R. T. Davies used to master, makes it a lot easier because 1) he does an incredible job, often from 78's in great shape and 2) it's nice hearing all the records in one 60-80 minute sitting rather than spread out over twenty records that only have three minutes before you need to lift the needle.

I am planning on semi-retiring in about 15 years, selling all my shit and house, and driving a Winnebago around the country as a traveling poker dealer until I drop dead or cannot do it anymore.

I hope that my CD collection is worth something when I do.

War Mice: thanks for your explanation.

"I just smell the tide beginning to turn for CDs" - I hope you're right!

Today at a charity shop I bought 3 CDs for £1. My excuse is that this is to test my CD player. One of the CDs was the best of A Flock of Seagulls. It's good!

oh hey look

https://www.spin.com/2022/01/cd-sales-increased-in-2021/

Qobuz for some other things

Qobuz changed my opinion of streaming so much, running that through a DAC into my stereo sounds really really good

Yeah it absolutely rips and is def helping me feel OK about clearing a little space on my CD shelves

Or at least not adding to it

why were so many domestic CD players so ugly...? ugh. trying to find a nice used full-size unit with a headphone port and good DAC...

also london ilxors hit up music & goods exchange in greenwich for super cheap discs!

The only risk with CDs these days is ordering them from Amazon. I try to order via bandcamp, straight from an artist or indie shops as much as possible, but sometimes I run into things where Amazon, unfortunately, it just the best option. I've had plenty of minor cracks in jewel cases over the years thanks to them just being thrown in those envelopes with absolutely no padding, but yesterday I opened one that looked like it had been stomped on several times over. It was a tri-fold digipak that looked just fine when I pulled it out of the envelope, still wrapped in plastic. But once I pulled off the wrapper, dozens of pieces of shattered plastic fell all over the place along with a tiny shard of the CD itself that had snapped off. Portions of the plastic tray were literally ground to dust. It's getting replaced, but jfc how hard would it be to provide even a little padding for these?

my issue with buying from amazon is: why are the only people who have certain things (of which there is ONLY a US PRESSING) located overseas and 1) charge an arm and a leg and 2) take literal months to get the damn thing.

fuck amazon. i don't begrudge anyone who buys from them, but i certainly won't. and if it's between buying the cd through amazon or just listening on youtube or whatever, well, i'm glad i have a smartphone.

i'd rather throw money in the trash than deal with amazon at this point.

I never buy physical music media thru Amazon (I do get printed media sometimes) specifically because every time I did it the package was damaged (well, twice, but that was enough)

music & goods exchange in greenwich

their Instagram page has convinced me the next time I'm in London I will be spending considerable time there

I was in SE10 the other weekend and was surprised that shop was still there (I lived in Greenwich 20+ years ago, and the town centre was rather different then). Walls of cheap CDs downstairs, and racks of more "premium" content (incrementally-reduced price card + booklet), organised by genre, in the main island. Even classical SACDs/DVD-As, for a few quid, if that's your bag.

Inspired by this thread, I decided to give Qobuz a go last night (free one-month trial). I did previously have a short, free trial of Apple Music, which I mostly wasted on toggling Dolby Atmos on/off (Ringo's behind you! Oh, now he's over there). In my entirely flawed comparisons, I can just about convince myself that there's a bit more there vs Spotify 320k-OggVorbis. Spent a while this morning bouncing between Víkingur Ólafsson playing Glass Études on Spotify (Connect, direct streaming to the Marantz) and same on Qobuz (24/96k FLAC, but (presumably) transcoded to 16/44.1k ALAC over AirPlay from my phone to the Marantz). Bit more space, smoother, an inkier backdrop, if you will :) No doubt I'd flunk any blind comparison but I was really hoping not to hear anything.

And then someone started drilling outside, so that was that.

I like the UI, it's pretty good. And the digital liner notes, and pop-up track info. There's really none of this on Spotify, as far as I can tell. But early days, and I'll almost certainly cancel before Feb 11th, because the whole family is locked into Spotify and I can't afford another subscription.

This performance by Dinosaur Jr. on Letterman from 1993 is so insane. As usual, Paul Schaffer and Co. sit in, but they’re throwing in bells, a wild sax solo, high harmony vox, and it is SO LOUD. They crush it; the Ed Sullivan Theater is fully melted🔥🔥https://t.co/5K0fjJhI1B

— Ben Boyer (@sleezsisters) January 11, 2022

when letterman holds the album up, is that a CD? what format is that?

me:

https://www.meme-arsenal.com/memes/73f55da57c7ecac379d98646974cbda9.jpg

xpost - Maybe my sarcasm detector is broken, but I'll answer earnestly realizing there are people that weren't alive to see those - that was a "longbox" that CD's used to come packaged inside. The actual jewel case itself took up less than half of the length, but this was how record stores were able to keep using bins designed for LP height well into the CD era.

lol Whiney

wasn't sarcasm. thank you!

looks like longboxes were no longer a thing when i first started buying CDs (1997)

There's one of those Letterman Dino Jr. clips where he holds the longbox up backwards so it looks extra-weird.

XP Longbox were done by the mid-'90s.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/longbox/

"millions of trees"!

I bought a Julius Hemphill CD on eBay last year — Julius Hemphill Big Band, from 1988 — that came in a longbox. Part of me wanted to keep it for nostalgia's sake.

Late '90s cutout bins were flooded with early '90s flops that had been salvaged out of longboxes and subsequently resealed. Good Stuff by the B-52's and the Little Village album were especially common.

there weren't really a thing in the uk. popular in US and japan though (for ages we'd get japanese album art in longbox format that we'd try and display in a square image on screen, with hilarious consequences)

aron's in LA used to lock cds into plastic cages which made them longbox size and would put those in the old lp shelves.

theres a store by me that still does that

Something I don't miss about shopping for CDs in the 90s: when stores displayed the jewel cases on the sales floor but kept the actual discs behind the counter.

I remember this being done for new CDs as well as used. Like, "Great, thanks, now it's no longer new."

one of my most favorite things in my collection is the original cure peel sessions with the original longbox.

but yeah, longboxes were preposterous.

And oh yeah, tons of places still use those plastic keeper things. I guess at this point it's less to deter theft than a case of "well, we have these fucking things, so we may as well use them"

i remember a buddy declining to go shopping at amoeba with me because he said he couldn't stand the constant clackclackclack of the keepers in the racks being flipped through. seemed weird to me.

when i worked at tower, it was more cost effective to just individually tape the sensor things to each cd by hand. we would get reprimanded if we broke too many keepers. they're fucking expensive.

also never stopped anybody from stealing a damn thing. people who want to steal are going to.

Re: the value of CDs in the '90s, it always tickles me that in To Die For, Casey Affleck's character does the crime because Nicole Kidman promises him like five CDs and a boombox as payment for murder.

haha wow

i stupidly left my car unlocked a while back and they took some stuff from my car but didn't even bother taking the cds in the glovebox

I can just about convince myself that there's a bit more there vs Spotify 320k-OggVorbis. Spent a while this morning bouncing between Víkingur Ólafsson playing Glass Études on Spotify (Connect, direct streaming to the Marantz) and same on Qobuz (24/96k FLAC, but (presumably) transcoded to 16/44.1k ALAC over AirPlay from my phone to the Marantz)

This calls for an Alexis Petridis GQ article exploring what kind of quirky, socially outcast people write such things.

I don't think I've ever seen or heard of a Longbox. Nor of Qobuz.

I noticed that, for instance, BOB DYLAN 1970, 3CD release (of which 2 of my discs are flawed, but do load music OK to iTunes), was *not* released for streaming. Wouldn't this, then, be quite a good reason for buying the CDs? Well, if the CDs worked.

re: iTunes, btw, I have maybe 15,000 songs on there but don't see it as very steady and reliable. For one thing, iTunes seems to be constantly updating, but that computer isn't capable of updating anymore, and there are things my iTunes could do 12 years ago that it can't do now. (My experience of tech typically involves decline as well as, sometimes, improvement. Oh yes, there's a whole thread for that.) For another, I am incapable of saving the mp3s from the computer to a hard drive. It's not that I don't have a hard drive with tons of space on it. It just won't save anything from that computer. So maybe those 15,000 tracks will vanish in due course and I'll be left with ... my CDs.

aron's in LA used to lock cds into plastic cages which made them longbox size and would put those in the old lp shelves.

― koogs, Wednesday, January 12, 2022 11:40 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh man i remember these! another incredibly wasteful plastic thing.

been reading this revive with interest, scored one of those cool new yamahas after seeing how few affordable options are out there these days:

https://i.imgur.com/ujvAMHW.jpg

I always felt terrible tearing open the longbox, seemed like it should be preserved. Like the way I'd cut the hype stickers off the cellophane on LPs and keep them in the sleeve. But there wasn't an easy way to preserve or store them. Does an intact longbox have any collector value?

i remember seeing a few longboxes (i forget which releases) that even included the info for some kind of anti-longbox campaign, like "longboxes are wasteful, write to your congressperson and tell them you hate longboxes" or something

I used to carefully open longboxes and then pin them in a row along the ceiling of my bedroom. after 2-3 years they went all the way around the room!

David Byrne included a sticker over the packaging of his album Uh-Oh reading "THIS IS GARBAGE", referring to the excessive material use of the packaging and encouraged customers to complain to retailers

I bought exactly one longbox CD: NIN’s The Downward Spiral, on release week. Not sure if I still have the box anywhere.

$16.99

I think I saw an intact longboxed CD for sale at the swap meet sometime last year.

many of them were ugly and undecorated, just grey cardboard with a window where the CD art could be seen. 4AD, however (and many others) took full advantage of the larger canvas.

i used to cut out the covers and hang them up in my locker

CAD - how is that Yamaha? Really been curious, I ended up buying used Rotel but the disc tray is flimsy

people not knowing what a longbox is makes me feel ancient

It seems as if every single thing about CD packaging was a mistake. The longbox, the too-bulky plastic case, the security sticker that you can't peel off, the plastic spokes that so easily break off. No wonder people don't like CDs.

I like the jewel cases when they were made of better plastic - if they were recyclable everywhere, it would be nice though.

The plastic wrap could be annoying - remember how they used to sell little blade thingies designed to open CD's? - and the sticker on top that had the album and artist name along with a thin bar code could be a pain to get off. I learned to unhinge one side of the case as an easy way to peel it, but 1 of every 3 or 4 would always leave some residue that I'd have to get off by sticking and unsticking the same sticker.

I had that blade thingy! and yeah I know exactly the trick you're talking about in unhinging the front cover and sticking/unsticking the stickers. started not bothering with getting the stickers off towards the end

I'm glad that was all we had to deal with when it came to CD's, and not off-center holes, warping, "non-fill" and all the other complaints I keep hearing from vinyl enthusiasts.