Continuing with CDs?

I've recently rediscovered my love for CDs - partly due to how cheap they've become and partly due to mp3 ennui.

I've recently rediscovered my love for CDs - partly due to how cheap they've become and partly due to mp3 ennui.

― Poacher (Chinaski), Sunday, February 21, 2016 9:00 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^

I never really stopped buying CDs, but I've always chosen vinyl over CD when there was a choice. Now, it's usually the opposite. I can buy a Joanna Newsom LP for $25 with no download code, or I can buy the same Joanna Newsom album on CD, a new copy of Back in Black on CD, and a used copy of Tical on CD for the same price. And given that the pressing plants are backed up and vinyl isn't what it used to be and the same masters are being used and blah blah blah, why buy new vinyl when the CD sounds the same except that it eliminates those pops, ticks, and clicks? At that point, choosing vinyl becomes solely about visual aesthetics, and since I keep records in boxes (no room to display them despite owning two of those Ikea shelves), I don't give a shit about that.

Now, I don't have 'hi-fi' equipment, My receiver is an old Luxman and my speakers are JBL ES20s (I think they were a hundred bucks). I use the DVD player to play CDs and I have a Rega RP-1 for vinyl. I bet if I seriously upgraded (specifically my receiver and speakers), I might come around to vinyl again (at least old vinyl, which I still think sounds better), but that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

Rich man's 8 track tape forever!

i like CDs a lot. i tend to stay away from big label american stuff though cuz most of their CDs sound terrible. maria and the kids got the adele CD for christmas and i couldn't believe how bad it sounded. you turn it up and it's just mush. there is some seriously state of the art digital sound coming out now if you like experimental/electronic music though. and i have no need to own any of it on vinyl. i don't really care about new vinyl at all though there is certainly good stuff if you buy the right artists/labels.

also, if you buy a new record and it has "pops, ticks, and clicks" you should return it. unless you just treat records like crap then its on you.

I can buy a Joanna Newsom LP for $25 with no download code

fuck drag city in the eye for this bullshit

One recent major label CD I think sounds amazing: good kid maad city

I was still doing the CD thing all the time until somewhere mid last-year, when the cheap cd player/stereo system in my room crapped out, and I was too cheap to replace it. and got a decent-ish pair of headphones and realized I liked listening this way better as it's not reduced to background noise.

that and the fact that I buy most of my music as mp3s on Amazon (so they all go to the cloud), started wondering why the point of buying cds anymore. Illustrated mostly by the space waste - I just switched rooms in my condo for a new roommate and 90% of the clutter in my room were mother...fucking....jewel cases, just everywhere. threw most of them away.

Plus I tend to be careless and lose shit which is a problem I avoid on MP3. I could listen to most of this shit on Spotify but since most of what I buy is metal for bands that literally work day jobs I feel like giving them some cheddar helps (though I prefer bandcamp when I can do it - esp cos you can get nice Lossless files there).

It has basically stopped me from paying $20 for that 'uber rare' cd that is only $20 cos some asshole label guy won't reissue it or give the rights to the band to do what they please with it.

However I still get cds now and then - like Voivod were selling their new EP early at the show this week so naturally I jumped on that, and there was this one Church of MIsery album that you can't legally buy on mp3 so I wound up getting it from Amazon.

It does feel weird tho, voluntarily paying for something when I know I could have it for free with another click. guess I like knowing that if I ever do Spotify the songs the band will get a little small cheddar on top of what I already paid them for the album, as opposed to just leeching them.

I do find myself though not buying many major label albums anymore - like the Lorde album I just pulled up the Prime version and have no intent to buy even though I like it.

also haven't even bothered to try them but a lot of the cds I still have are of the 15+ years old variety, and I know that's when they're supposed to start disintegrating (if they do).

most of my oldish cds have played fine thus far. at least the ones that I didn't break in a fit of rage when I was losing on FIFA on Xbox.

Probably bought around 500 albums on CD last year, two albums in FLAC (because no CD was available), and one LP (to get the "bonus" CD that came with it). Don't have room or time for vinyl, nor much patience for clicks/pops/sibiliance; and I don't like paying money for something I don't permanently own/can't lend/can't resell. Hence, CDs, which I own somewhere around 6,000. Great format, great sound, great portability. Inferior to LPs only as artifacts to hold/frame, and I'm only interested in the music as far as all that goes.

sometimes I will buy a cd when Amazon is offering it via AutoRip and the price is comparable or cheaper than mp3 only. and then sometimes just sell the cd, though to be honest they don't have great resell value anymore unless they're a rarity. isn't like the early aughts where I could sell any damn cd for 5.99 on eBay. I couldn't even sell sealed copies of new albums for 7.99 (not major releases, lesser knowns) on two tries last month.

also haven't even bothered to try them but a lot of the cds I still have are of the 15+ years old variety, and I know that's when they're supposed to start disintegrating (if they do).

most of my oldish cds have played fine thus far. at least the ones that I didn't break in a fit of rage when I was losing on FIFA on Xbox.

― you are no man. take the balls. (Neanderthal), Sunday, February 21, 2016 5:35 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Disintegrating CDs can almost entirely be traced to a Polygram plant in West Germany that, in the 80s, didn't use the correct manufacturing process, causing its discs to deteriorate over time. This is not a fate that will eventually (or ever) befall all CDs. My oldest CD is an Italian bootleg of a 1968 Who show; it's 28 years old and still sounds great. So great, in fact, that recent-ish speaker/amp/CD player upgrades have revealed it to be a needledrop of an LP boot.

good to know! always heard it as such a truism but found it weird none of mine really had the pinpricks I had heard about. most of the playability issues have to do with normal wear and tear/scratches from poor upkeep as opposed to age.

CDR's, on the other hand, will definitely start to disintegrate after 15 years. At least that's been my experience almost universally.

Disintegrating CDs can almost entirely be traced to a Polygram plant in West Germany that, in the 80s, didn't use the correct manufacturing process, causing its discs to deteriorate over time.

did not know this, thanks, see also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_bronzing

Bronzing became a thing again in the last few years with early Blurays, most notably some of Criterion's initial efforts in the format.

i lost some good shit on cd-rs. and yeah a lot of import cds, "mastered by nimbus" bronzed and got shitty.

here in the tropics this happens

disc weevils!?

God, CD-Rs were the other thing cluttering my room...so glad to be free of them

Spotify has mostly weaned me off CDs, but I still buy the odd box and am also slowly buying up all the Italian prog titles I can find on the cheap

Disintegrating CDs can almost entirely be traced to a Polygram plant in West Germany that, in the 80s, didn't use the correct manufacturing process, causing its discs to deteriorate over time.

People keep saying this, and in fairness you did say "almost", but I've had several CDs from the mid-90s go brown/stop working, so this "it was only a specific factory in the late 80s" doesn't add up for me.

Tarfumes misremembered how long the manufacturing problem continued. If you read that Wikipedia link above, it says it continued until the mid-90s, and possibly there were similar problems with one or two other CD pressing plants besides the best-known example in the UK.

But it's not something that affects all CDs from that era, and CDs produced after that will not decay over time, provided you take decent care of them. I have hundreds of CDs from that era (from 1988 to 1993), and some even older ones from the mid-80s, and none of them have suffered from bronzing.

Any problems I've had with CDs have been caused by my own mishandling of them, such as keeping them in a full CD wallet for months... You really shouldn't do that, because if the discs constantly rub against each other they may chafe, which can result in tiny damages in the reflective material inside the disc, which will make some tracks unplayable. Unlike scratches on the outer plastic layer of the disc, the damage in the reflective layer cannot be fixed so that the CD will play again.

Throwing away all the packaging and keeping your CDs in a big plastic wallet strikes me as the worst of all worlds really.

Disc bronzing is different to disc rot, apparently. Same end result but bronzing is almost entirely associated with discs made at the PDO plant in Lancashire in the late 80s - early 90s. Of the first CDs I bought in 1986 that I still have they all seem good as new.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_bronzing

Those PDO discs do seem to have a very high failure rate up to 1993, after that they are fine.

Yeah, but AFAIK disc bronzing is the only thing that can destroy your CDs even if you take good care of them. The other types of disc rot are avoidable.

I have bronzed CDs from 1996. I have never kept my discs in a disc wallet or left them lying around outside the case (maybe overnight if I was playing music with friends, but that wouldn't be the case with these). Just saying.

Never checked out those alternative cases, btw. Still faintly interested, as space is finite (obvs) so I'm just moving more out to the loft / under the spare bed every year.

I've never noticed a CD bronze or rot or disintegrate and we must've had 3,000 go through our hands over the years.

From that wiki link, "The problem is also prevalent with many discs that were manufactured by Nimbus during the late 1980s to the mid 1990s" - yep, the one I can remember being bronzed to fuck from 1996 is Tanya Donelly's Sliding and Diving CD single, which was mastered by Nimbus. And one from 1995 that was PDO - Pulp, Common People.

Most painful victim of bronzing: Disco Inferno's "Summer's Last Sound/Love Stepping Out" EP. I bought three of them over the years until the 5 EPs got released, and every one of them bronzed out.

My second hand copy of that was always bronze. Played ok though I thought.

Apologies for misleading info on poorly-manufactured CDs; I didn't realize it continued into the 90s. Not surprised it wasn't big news at the time, though; surely, the industry didn't want the sustainability of their massive cash cow to be questioned.

The bronzing is interesting because it causes an actual deterioration of the sound, not skipping or refusal to play at all... it sounds like road noise that gets louder and louder on mine.

one of the lamest things is that it seems like laptops are being made w/o CD drives now?

external drives are p cheap though

(xp re noise)

I had a CD that deteriorated like that to the extent it sounded like Merzbow had hijacked the recording studio when they were mastering it. I suspect it was probably a CD-R since it was released on a tiny label in around 2003.

I've got about as many CDs as Sick Mouthy and as you can see I've been quite a bit less lucky with this over the years.

Oddly (?) never had a problem with older CDRs -- I still stumble across plenty for a buck from CDR-only labels last decade that rip/play fine.

And yes, pretty simple to get an external. I have a Samsung Blu-Ray drive for my MacMini, under $100, and it doesn't even need a separate power line -- just plugs directly into a USB connection. As I still get promos and scrounge the used bins as noted, it's a perfect addition.

I won't buy CD-Rs any more after getting 2 duds in a row from Hyped 2 Death.

yeah, i should get one of those external thingies.
and it's true, even when an old CDR seems to be having problems in a CD player (which is rare), I can usually get it to rip to the computer without problems.

I've been lucky with CD-Rs, too; I still have some from 1999 and 2000 that play fine (but I've never stored them in wallets).

Oddly, I did! The story here -- starting around 2000 I (like a lot of other people I suspect) ended up burning any number of mp3s to CDR as they were around, and after a while they all ended up in CaseLogics. In 2010 when I finally made a full switch to an external hard drive for the collection as such, I went back and imported them all in...and they all seemed to import just fine. Haven't removed them again since but hey.

When you burned mp3s to a CD and then ripped them as mp3 again you double compressed them... do they sound okay?

There were a couple of instances where that happened but I actually mostly directed burned them as data discs -- I had a separate player by 2001 or so (may even have been my first DVD player) which read/played mp3s directly. Therefore, no need to compress further.

The first 10 or so Burnt Sugar releases, which are some of my favorite music in the world, were all on CD-R; my copies play fine, but I've considered ripping them to my hard drive in CD quality (I usually rip stuff as 256kbps AAC files, for my iPod).

I would personally advocate for multiple backups of any CDR material

i think you should make at least 10 copies of every CDR/CD you own and send them to friends and family for safe-keeping. also keep one copy in a safe deposit box on CDR and also a digital backup on some sort of external drive and also keep a separate digital copy of every CD on a separate computer from your main computer that runs continuously via its own emergency power source separate from your main power grid (diesel generator, etc.) 24/7. also, commit the CDRs/CDs to memory and hum a little bit from them every day in case you need to duplicate them acoustically on ukelele/banjo/etc if every physical and digital copy is somehow destroyed.

otm

You should back up everything to vinyl. It's the only format that can be played without electricity.

yep as long as there are cactus needles and styrofoam cups we can always listen to those sweet 180 gram lps.

I bought a limited run CDr from Mark Burgess' short lived band Bird and it totally crapped out within a year of purchase. Bummer too, as it features the brilliant guitar work of Yves Altana. But it's essentially unplayable now.

Often you can still extract usable files on a computer even if the CD won't play without skipping.