Continuing with CDs?

- lots of old music still hasn't been properly mastered to cd, but i say that every week around here.

- lots of new music isn't pressed on cd, period. i don't know about rock music but new techno vinyl still sounds pretty good.

- yeah it sucks having to spend 20 seconds cleaning a record. but it does actually prevent the whole "sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them" thing.

- seriously, though, it does suck having to spend $100 every 5-10 years for a new stylus

- cds are cool

good breakdown imo

like, deep purple in rock, the 1995 remaster that's out there sounds so bad. i'd have to find a 1980s out of print edition, one of those $50 out of print audio fidelity edition, or *GASP! HIPSTER! UNCLEAN!* some 70s vinyl edition to fully get my rock on

i bet the friday music lp reissue of in rock sounds awesome. that's a label whose vinyl pressings really sound great. no crackle or nothing, honest!!

maybe these 00s japan cd issues are worthwhile..

so, in conclusion, everybody's wrong and everybody's right. this court is adjourned *pounds gavel*

- lots of old music still hasn't been properly mastered to cd, but i say that every week around here.

- lots of new music isn't pressed on cd, period. i don't know about rock music but new techno vinyl still sounds pretty good.

- yeah it sucks having to spend 20 seconds cleaning a record. but it does actually prevent the whole "sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them" thing.

Thanks for adding this so I don't have to. I also like the format, I like that I can watch it play and handle records when DJing. I accept the fact that there is a resurgence of vinyl and have read about the quality issues that have stemmed from that demand, but I haven't personally had that experience. I download music for many genres and if there's a nice vinyl release, then I will purchase that.

Actually I don't even own a CD player, except in my old Mac. That said, I'd sooner get a cassette player these days.

haha great posts brimstead

I bought a cassette a couple of weeks ago, I just rip them to digital like LPs, no big deal.

Yeah, there's the occasional cassette where I think that it would be cool to own it with the artwork as the official release and listen to it that way as well.

I feel less like a persecuted minority after this thread. CDs are fine by me, although I sometimes wish the brittleness and unnecessarily generous depth of the standard jewel case had been resolved in some other way early on. When it comes to storage they're not really all that compact.

I have plenty of vinyl but can't imagine any situation where I'd buy it new unless it was cheaper than the corresponding CD. Given the cost of used CDs these days, this situation doesn't seem to arise. Downloads too are comparatively expensive, especially lossless, and frankly I find it too easy to skip around a collection of soft copies, thereby failing to really listen properly. I came to the latter conclusion after doing precisely that for a decade.

One area where where I suspect there's little chance of a major vinyl revival is with classical audiences. There seems to be an expectation that both new recordings and reissues of older recordings should be filled out (often twofer style, in effect) to near the capacity of a CD. Makes the prospect of listening to 4 sides of vinyl to hear, say, one Bruckner symphony seem a tad archaic.

I haven't bought CDs since my whole collection was stolen in 2008. I can't say I miss them at all.

Buying second-hand CDs benefits the artists even less than streaming. My main issue with CDs is that a whole wall full of cases looks fucking ugly, especially once they get past a certain age, they're just not nice as an artefact and they mostly look cheap and shitty. A wall full of vinyl looks cool, a wall full of books looks cool, a wall full of CDs looks like a 90s student bedroom.

as someone who has been through traumatic hard drive crashes, the "u might lose ur entire collection!!!!!!1111" fear is really misplaced. the only things impossible to find again are the ones never available in physical form in the first place (rip all my grime mp3s). and as someone who still owns boxes of old CDs that i still haven't got round to ripping or selling, it's also my experience that it's often easier, when i suddenly think of an old album/song i know i own on CD and want to hear years later, to grab it off the internet than root around in those horrible boxes.

i feel like society moving away from physical possessions is only a mark of progress. unnecessary physical possessions = clutter and dust and a terrible time when you move house. begone.

(lol @ anyone who argues that buying vinyl isn't a lifestyle signifier. it's a perfectly valid one of course but c'mon!)

might start a project to knit jewel case cosies to make them look nicer, get the innocent smoothy generation on board, hey people we can do this

I haven't bought CDs since my whole collection was stolen in 2008. I can't say I miss them at all.

Yeah, my CD collection just look depressing and hideous. For me, a prevailing image of the late 90s/early 00s is that of hundreds of cracked jewel cases with ugly minimalist inlays chucked in an Our Price cut out bin.

I like my CD collection. It doesn't look hideous.

Panoramic shot of my CD collection in my office:

https://scontent-lga.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/1452014_10153555178025597_159051485_n.jpg?oh=9fa8f1b73ffb84ff21e065c423df66f0&oe=55A1F36F

I just bought a new CD shelf that is in the living room as I have no room anymore.

I don't think it looks hideous.

no it looks nice.

I like how my HD looks:
http://www.wexphotographic.com/webcontent/product_images/large/142/1552330.jpg

(lol @ anyone who argues that buying vinyl isn't a lifestyle signifier. it's a perfectly valid one of course but c'mon!)

I wouldn't necessarily argue it isn't, but music consumption is somehow always about lifestyle signifiers. Not sure what you're getting at, unless you're suggesting it's elitist to purchase vinyl? I dunno, maybe it is, but I don't find it expensive, I don't have a problem with sound quality, I like that it's a way to support artists and get their music in often the only format that it's officially released in, I like that it's not skippable in the same way as digital, I like the physicality of it, and the artwork. And it does feel nice having an actual release of something fairly limited as well (recently like Mood Hut or the Workshop releases). I supposed I have a bit of a post-digital investment with vinyl in that respect.

Of course it also helps that there's interesting record stores like Rush Hour nearby with a great selection of stuff as well, and that I'm into house and techno, for instance, where vinyl is still a key format anyway.

I should say as well that I don't begrudge people being into CDs either. I just couldn't see myself in general buying them in light of MP3s.

"Cheap"/"disposable" re CDs seems a common sentiment amongst vinyl fanciers. Which is interesting given vinyl-plus-sleeve = not terribly dissimilar set of basic materials. :)

That HD looks like a solar powered dingy.

It's vvverry bouncy. Floats in water too.

Actually the other day I was looking at friend's copy of the new Aphex Twin CD and the Designer's Republic really did an exceptional job on that. It was the first time for ages that I considered getting the CD.

Cd's all the way for me although I do buy FLAC's occasionally. CD's sometimes have a bit of re-sell value on discogs plus they're small enough to hide away if necessary. And the art work can be innovative(see above). I look at vinyl prices in record shops and my stock response is: "you are having a fucking laugh...?!"

Although I do agree with this:

i feel like society moving away from physical possessions is only a mark of progress.
― lex pretend

Mmmm, I like less clutter, but I also miss going to people's houses and making snap judgments about them based on their bookshelves and CD libraries.

I managed to get everything restored from my last couple of hard drive crashes but that's made me more assiduous about backing up, and the price and storage of cloud services has got to the point where it's relatively easy to back up an entire digital music and photo collection. Profoundly un-rock and roll obviously.

Technically I should have got rid of every book I've already read and just keep one at a time, but there's a reason I don't. Somewhere between 'It looks nice on my shelf' and 'I have read and absorbed this - it is a part of me, and while I don't intend to re-read it I feel reminded of it when I see the spine'. Same with records and CDs - being able to flick through album covers feels natural and I feel as though I can ascribe more to an album if I have a visual/tangible stimulus to go along with the music. Digital is very useful and tidy, but looking at a long list of folders and artist names just isn't as appealing. My eyes get used to seeing the same list each time and I often automatically skip over some folders out of habit. Later I'll find myself in a record shop and see an album from my HD folder that I haven't played in years and suddenly get an itch to listen to it - something I don't generally get from the 'detail' view in a windows folder.

"Cheap"/"disposable" re CDs seems a common sentiment amongst vinyl fanciers.

The cheapness/disposability of CDs to me comes partly from how many junk CDs there are in the world, and in my flat specifically. Free magazine CDs, installation CDs for random software hardware, stacks of blank CDs that will never now be used, things that look like blank CDs that turn out to contain my shitty demos from 2002, or someone else's shitty demos, or random bits of porn. I hate it all. If home vinyl pressing had ever been a thing I would have now at the back of a cupboard dozens of discs containing loads of terrible 90s bands' live performances recorded off the TV, and I certainly wouldn't be buying any fresh stuff.

i'm kind of on board with lex here too. when people talk about music formats i think about the transition to a post-scarcity economy.

because most of my youth was spent trying to gain access to recordings that were mythologized but unavailable, so when downloading became a thing i hoovered down everything i could get my hands on, under the assumption that any minute now THE FEDZ would swoop in and it would all be shut off.

except that never happened, and as it didn't happen i became more and more comfortable about the notion of not "possessing" or "owning" music. an album isn't "my" album unless i made it myself, and even then the point is debatable. music is now attaining the status of unsubsidized public good. which is bad for the musicians, but good for everyone else.

i still download instead of streaming, but if i was 20 years younger i'd definitely be streaming.

Illuminating, Eyeball Kicks! Turns out that deep down I 'get' this more than I thought I did.

Hoovering up music comes with it's own unique set of issues though. Other than filesharing and streaming being 'bad' for musicians, there's the fact that everything collapses into flatness and excess, attention itself become scarce, while a whole bunch of new ways of measuring and monetizing user behaviors through networks have been put in place - hardly what I would describe as an unsubsidized public good.

I have a folder on my HD called 'John Cale - Everything he's ever done'. Have I listened to more than one album from it yet? No. One day maybe. I guess it's like having the collected works of Shakespeare sitting around at home.

(lol @ anyone who argues that buying vinyl isn't a lifestyle signifier. it's a perfectly valid one of course but c'mon!)

I disagree because I grew up buying vinyl and never stopped even when I was 15 and got a CD player i still bought vinyl and by the early-mid 90s i was buying vinyl as much as cd. i still have 2x the amount of cds than vinyl tho. up until 5 or 6 years ago vinyl was cheaper.

I have a similar folder w/Bob Dylan stuff. Still haven't unzipped any of it.

wait... what's a lifestyle signifier?

I occasionally think about moving the CDs to binders - keeping the discs and the art/liner notes, but freeing up a lot of the space currently being occupied by shatter-prone clear plastic and dead air. My wife is resistant.

I doubt she's bought a CD in at least 5 years, and I don't think she's listened to a CD in months. But I guess she finds the neatly alphabetized array of cases on a shelf soothing, and necessary as a way affirms her vision of her self and her taste and her personal history, in a way that hidden binders would not.

Plus, as sic notes above, visitors get a sense of you from what you have on the shelf (just as with books). All those spines present you as a mixture of who you are but also who you would like to be seen as. As a person with eclectic taste, as a person with "cool" taste, as a person with guilty pleasures, as a person with surprising lapses in judgment. As, in summary, a person with a particular train of 20th century allegiances and infatuations and obsessions, dragging behind you like a long scaly tail.

If I think she's being silly to want the CD shelves out there for mere social display, I would have to examine how I approach bookshelves. We have perhaps a thousand books up on shelves, most of which we will never re-read or refer to, but which we keep because they show us (and our visitors) who we think we are.

um, I think I meant "necessary as a way of affirming"

CD's disintegrate quick. If you have a CD from the 80s you will know about this. Old CD's go quiet. But a CD is much better sound quality than the highest MP3 and and even better than flac. Yes there is a large difference between the quality of 320kbps and CD. Basses are richer, highs are more existent.

My personal favourite aurally is old FM/AM radio and tape. For me these give the nicest, fullest, warmest sound. Vinyls I discount because theyre only for the rich.

The interesting part for me is how the shift to MP3 and Youtube has effected the music we get. Most people under 20 may not have any experience of listening to music on a CD or tape, they may literally never have heard or be accustomed certain frequencies in music. Therfore they might begin to prefer what they know. MP3s and youtube are certainly more limiting to the range. But as ppl get used to that the music will move away from certain freqs, I wonder.

xp What do you mean "disintegrate?" You mean oxidize? Peel? Are rendered useless?

Buying second-hand CDs benefits the artists even less than streaming. My main issue with CDs is that a whole wall full of cases looks fucking ugly, especially once they get past a certain age, they're just not nice as an artefact and they mostly look cheap and shitty. A wall full of vinyl looks cool, a wall full of books looks cool, a wall full of CDs looks like a 90s student bedroom.

― Matt DC, Thursday, April 23, 2015 5:13 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

True enough that artists don't see money from used CD sales (and neither do labels -- which is why majors tried to stamp out used CD sales/stores in the early 90s). But unless the cool-looking wall of vinyl was all purchased new, little of what was spent on that went to the artists.

Haven't bought a CD in many years. I still have a bunch, that I keep in a couple of boxes similar to this: http://www.amazon.com/Aluminum-Storage-Holder-Hanger-Sleeves/dp/B00CDWQK7A/

But I haven't opened those boxes in like 5 years. Should I just get rid of them? They certainly don't have much resale value, especially without the artwork/cases. But just throwing them out seems wasteful.

I would get rid of every single book that we own too, since I will never read them. But I don't think Carl will let me do that, since most of the remaining ones are hers.

CD's disintegrate quick. If you have a CD from the 80s you will know about this.

The other day I listened to the first CD I ever bought, an Italian bootleg of a 1968 Who show that I got in 1988. Still sounded perfect (and loud).

I will never, ever understand people's affection for vinyl, especially not people younger than me. I'm 43, so I was already buying music before CDs were introduced, and I fucking hated records as a kid. If they didn't get scratched enough to skip, they still sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them; if your turntable was shitty (like mine was), the speed wavered so the singer's voice slowed down and sped up...plus they took up so much space and my room was tiny already...a fucking terrible format. I preferred tapes to vinyl, for all of the aforementioned reasons plus portability (I was never without my walkman starting in about eighth grade), and when CDs came out I was all about that shit, and have never looked back. Now, I do 90 percent of my listening on my iPod, but I still buy and rip CDs, and every once in a while will actually throw something on the stereo and lay on the couch and listen to it.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Wednesday, April 22, 2015 7:48 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree with much of this, except I remember being almost as annoyed with cassettes as I was with vinyl; the high-end always had a swooshing sound, walkmen always broke/died, and unless you remembered to clean your heads/pinch rollers, tapes would get eaten. And, as Dave Marsh wrote, "rewinding is the longest distance between any two points."

i feel that if you're going to transfer all your CDs to a binder you may as well just rip em and chuck em.

CDs don't get quieter with age u mad? they oxidise sometimes... the surface of my copy of SAWII looks like a rock pool.

- yeah it sucks having to spend 20 seconds cleaning a record. but it does actually prevent the whole "sounded like ass, all crackly and getting a little worse every time you played them" thing.

Except, there's usually more involved that using a cleaning or anti-static brush over a few revolutions of the record.

It's still staticy.

"Try rubbing alcohol, with the record laid flat on a lint-free cloth, and..."

Wow, hm, OK, let me write this down...

"Or, you could use that Spin-Clean machine."

Is that expensive?

"Nope, only $80! But you have to make sure you get the combination of distilled water and cleaning solution right."

That actually sounds a little complicated...

"Well, there's a bunch of other record-cleaning machines, usually starting around $400."

Yeah, no. Any other methods?

"Yeah, you can spread wood glue all over the LP, make sure you let it dry enough, then peel-"

[leaves, puts on CD]