Continuing with CDs?

As I said on some other thread, the only thing that's stopping me from getting back into CDs is that I have no room for them in my house

On a bit of research it seems that Super Audio CDs work on ordinary cd players but are there any issues to keep in mind? I didn't know they existed until recently.

Only hybrid SACDs will play in standard players, and not all SACDs are hybrids. Also, you can only hear the 5.1 portion (which only some SACDs include) if your player decodes SACD and outputs surround. A fair number of players do these things (Sony's blu-ray players, for instance).

My sense is that the blind-study consensus is that people can't really hear the difference between redbook (standard CD audio) and SACD (higher resolution), regardless of equipment (apart from the surround sound, of course). A lot of audiophiles disagree, however.

supposedly not all of them have a regular CD layer, but I've never owned one that didn't. you just get regular 44.1kHZ/16-bit PCM audio on a normal CD player, but not the "super" format which can be a lot of things... 24-bit stereo or 5.1 mixes are popular with the pink floyd crowd.

a lot of inexpensive DVD players can play DVD-A and SACD if you want to play them though.

I made quite a lot of money about 5 years ago selling a bunch of SACDs. It seemed that the more anodyne the album the more they were worth.

amazes me how there remains a market for optical media given that developments in storage space and fidelity have rendered it technically useless

I buy a lot of digital now (Bandcamp is awesome) but there's still a lot of artists who won't make stuff available lossless. Vinyl I try and avoid, it's massively overpriced and requires too much fucking around.

fucking around?

bandcamp is the best thing to happen to digital music - direct payment to artists, no social network, popularizing and normalizing distribution of FLAC! i hope they never update/ruin it.

fucking around, yeah. CDs require way less fucking around.

good grief

I've gone full-on back into CDs in the last year or two. I agree there's less fucking around. Sound quality is the best and because they are so cheap (essentially worthless) they require no TLC.

My first oreference for buying is Bandcamp. Or reasonably priced CD. If those aren't options i check 7digital and Boomkat. Otherwise I pester the artist to make their stuff available through one of those. This vinyl only bs needs to stop. Fucking around = storage, climate control, giving the stupid things baths to clean them and fighting the losing battle of degrading fidelity after each play.

amazes me how there remains a market for optical media given that developments in storage space and fidelity have rendered it technically useless

What developments are those? (Honestly asking, I’m curious.) How would you get CD quality digital version of a new album (on a major label, not some speciality thing sold in FLAC format)?

FLAC isn't too hard to get these days, although I was annoyed the new Lisa Gerrard is only available as mp3s... but that was first time in a while I haven't been able to buy FLAC if I wanted to. Or (eyeroll) WAV files.

i suppose people still like their physical items, but the CD as a physical medium doesn't have many redeeming features... susceptible to disc rot, small format artwork, easily cracked cases. FLAC is lossless (while being able to surpass CD redbook standards) and hardly a speciality - bandcamp offers it by default. it's just strange to me that we've stuck with such a lossy format of mp3 when hard disk space in excess of *terabytes* is readily available. i havent bought an LP in ages so i don't know what the standard is for download codes these days, but i think many labels offer WAV or FLAC, and if they aren't... why aren't they??

anyway, why are you listening to major labels? ;)

🤔

Forget vinyl-only releases, it's the cassette-only people that are the real bastards.

I've got a couple of thousand CDs, some going back to the late 80s, and have never yet encountered the dreaded bit rot.

Why is FLAC sold with a premium, over mp3?

ie mp3 albums at £4.99, FLAC albums at £5.99

why is shaker furniture sold with a premium, over Ikea?

Never encountered disc rot in 25 years and 2,500+ discs.

IIRC the problem was specific to CDs manufactured by a single company (PDO) between 1988 and 1993 so maybe you just got lucky.

I have, with discs pressed at the one PDO plant in England that was known to have the problem circa 1990-92

xpost

I LOVE the fucking around

"storage, climate control, giving the stupid things baths to clean them"

what is this nonsense? Yeah they take up some space but the other two things is not what people do.

This vinyl only bs needs to stop. Fucking around = storage, climate control, giving the stupid things baths to clean them and fighting the losing battle of degrading fidelity after each play.

― Fastnbulbous, Sunday, December 2, 2018 10:49 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

I like cds just fine but vinyl is not difficult to handle, does not require "climate control" (wtf) or baths and playing them does not destroy them, ask any collector rly

because of moving around I've been all Spotify this year and don't mind that either, people get too stuck up on media formats, whatever lets you enjoy great tunes is all good

abolish music listen to ~nature~

I've been buying a few CDs recently because they are cheap as fuck (cheaper than downloads a lot of the time esp 2nd hand obv) and I've been getting a bit pissed off with a) the (often shockingly bad) shoddy quality of new vinyl b) 2nd hand vinyl in crap condition

I've got a good record player and a new stylus, records should sound good but frequently they do not

I've been getting a bit pissed off with a) the (often shockingly bad) shoddy quality of new vinyl

give it time

To each their own, true enough. I've got two mates who are way into vinyl - one only buys high-quality original pressings, the other has been replacing his CDs with fresh LP pressings. It's fun for them and when I tag along on a record run it's a vicarious thrill for me, but I never liked the pops, clicks and potential bad pressings of vinyl but love the simplicity and easier storage of CDs. I do prefer the larger artwork - that's a clear benefit. I'm old, I want a physical copy if possible though I tend to shy away from doomed-to-degrade CDRs. MP3s are fine if that's the only option (I've been to way too many gigs to be able to hear the difference from FLACs), and I understand there are minimum print runs for CDs which might not work for small bands. This is the first year I've noticed the drop in CD releases - I expect that will continue. C'est la vie.

Why is FLAC sold with a premium, over mp3?

Because FLAC is a lossless format and mp3 isn't.

I've had two (out of about three thousand) CDs that had bit rot/bronzing... Disco Inferno's "Summer's Last Sound" EP and Trisomie 21's "T21 Plays the Pictures". It was definitely a pressing issue because every copy I ever got of those albums had the same problem.

My prediction that poorly mastered/pressed vinyl reissues from 2010-2015 would be filling up dollar bins by now has apparently not come to pass.

I think a lot of people who buy vinyl these days never actually listen to it; they buy it and put it on the shelf and listen to the album on Spotify. So a shitty pressing isn't necessarily a huge negative; it's a thing to have from the band you love. Plus vinyl has perceived value... give it 5-10 years, once people get tired of packing up that shit every time they move they'll ditch it and the used bins will fill up.

I buy CDs because I have a great stereo and it's easy and cheap way to get full fidelity music

My amp has an on board DAC so all I really need is something to spin the disc, I just replaced an old marantz CD player that broke (was pretty expensive in its day) with a $10 Sony DVD player with an optical out

Another thumbs up for CD's (although I did get swept up in the vinyl charade very briefly).

Yesterday, I was please to find a record company on Bandcamp selling the CD for half the price of the digital (Vakula's 'You've Never Been To Konotop' - £5 on cd). Obviously helps if you're living in the same country for postage.

susceptible to disc rot

ah shit already mentioned, nevermind

CDs are the new vinyl - cheap, underrated, widely available used, neglected & unwanted by a lot of "real" collectors

I just got 9 CDs in the mail today (12 if you count that one of them is a 3CD set) and I bought 10 others over the weekend, plus a deluxe box set that included 3 vinyl LPs and 2 CDs, and I only bought it because the second CD was only available in the box, not sold separately.

well, not exactly... the Internet has normalized the used CD market, and rare stuff is neither neglected nor unwanted. there was a sweet spot for used vinyl in the 90s where you had a confluence of three things that is unlikely to be repeated: 1. CD sales surging so everyone was ditching their vinyl collections 2. record companies were still pressing vinyl editions of new releases that were $3-4 cheaper than the CD 3. no real Internet market for used vinyl or CDs so the true value of stuff was difficult to establish (you had to have expertise vs. just looking at the median sale price on Discogs) and you were forced, except for really rare stuff, to price for local markets

I find Cocteau Twins and Big Star CDs in thrift bins these days, I'll take that as a win

I do agree that the vinyl market in the post-CD/pre-internet era was a unique convergence of factors

This was a problem with one batch (manufactured by PDO 1988-1993), it's pretty much a non-issue.

We've been over this several times on ILM already, I've had it on CDs from 1995 and 1996, and I think it was more than one manufacturer involved

a) the (often shockingly bad) shoddy quality of new vinyl b) 2nd hand vinyl in crap condition

OTM. this is what keeps me from investing in vinyl. QC/mastering is appalling, now. unless you can afford a turntable/amp/speaker system in excess of ~£250, its probably not worth the bother.

ah, format wars...

on digital carriers:
i wrote my uni thesis on the preservation of audio media - chiefly, the unprecedented challenges and risks of digital audio. i opened a real can of worms when discovering the complexity surrounding preservation - mostly institutionally, but domestic issues i hadn't thought about cropped up, too. for example, your mp3s files only play because the software you use supports the required codec. if software companies decide to cease supporting mp3 codec and make a switch in the near future, your collection is rendered useless - unless you have legacy software. this isn't an issue so much just right now, but if you look back at only 20 odd years ago, a wealth of digital media from the 90s - and 80s - is futile; it can't be played back; the technology is outdated already. try opening a pro tools project from the 90s. try finding a DCC player. DATs are mostly fucked. it progresses fast, and it's this rate of progression which prevents standards from being established. it seems we've settled with WAV and FLAC, though. i dunno. maybe that will change, too. bit rot is also a thing - to be discerned from disc rot. your digital media is still volatile, and susceptible to degradation as much as analogue carriers are.

i suppose you can get as technical as you like about all this racket, but really it just comes down to practicality and convenience. after ten years of critical listening in audio mixing/mastering, personally i can notice mp3 artifacts against a WAV if i listen to it that many times. but whatever. my hard disk space is limited. FLAC is ideal. am i worried about my FLACs rotting? not really. am i worried about my SSD failing? yes... do i want a load of CDs cluttering up my shelves (and probably skipping if i scratch them the slightest bit)? no!

it's weird how streaming services have made a wealth of music available in immediacy, while managing to render a lot of (painstakingly toiled over) art quite disposable.

ultimately, my whole study made me existentially question permanence and preservation of art! nothing lasts forever and ~life is transient~. erosion is beautiful.

now, where's my disintegration loops mp3 gone...? :)

OTM. this is what keeps me from investing in vinyl. QC/mastering is appalling, now.

To be fair, CDs can and often are released with breathtakingly bad mastering jobs, especially heartbreaking when it's the CD reissue of a rare vinyl-only release and they brickwall it, and you know there will never be another CD reissue.

^^ very otm

see: the Virgin Prunes reissues on Mute

CDs are the new vinyl - cheap, underrated, widely available used, neglected & unwanted by a lot of "real" collectors

Rather. Amoeba's CD dollar bins essentially allow you to collect full discographies for, say, ten bucks or so. (unperson's point re cheap CD box sets that are straight repackaging of albums rather than curated sets of things also applies.)

and - sincerely - how many of them are scratched up/skip?

I have literally never bought a used CD that didn't rip into my computer with no trouble at all