CDs are making a comeback.

Post Reply New Topic

I've heard that many people feel that way, so I can't knock it. For me it's mostly about just hearing the music in high sound quality with the minimum of fuss and bother. But I do have a fondness for vinyl records with those lovely big pictures on the covers and the smell of the laminate, but vinyl records rarely last long in my hands - it's too hard to keep them free of dust, dirt and scratches. I'm much the same way about CDs but to a lesser extent. I quite like the inlay card pictures (though they're so small compared to vinyl covers) and I live in fear of something going wrong with the CD itself. Those jewel-case hinges are very easy to snap. But if CDs float your boat, you have my blessing.

Digital formats are often compressed. You can't really beat a retail CD for sound quality in my experience! I've never tried vinyl so I have no idea about sound quality on that kind of thing.

^
.wav files at a high enough bitrate and bit depth (16kHz and 16 bits) are said to be indistinguishable from the original sound for very nearly everybody. CD music is essentially .wav files but they're somehow squeezed onto the disk so the disk can hold a bit more music, which can result in reading errors while they're being played, so most players have error-hiding technology so that people don't notice the errors. Intellectually, CDs are therefore something of an abomination, but in practice they usually work very well.

There are many other music file formats, .mp3 being a very common compressed one. Whether or not any sound degradation can be heard depends on the actual music, the degree of compression, and the listener. I can rarely tell anything wrong with compression up to about 10:1. Above that the cymbals and other high-frequency sounds start to sound mushy, but it depends very much on the individual song. 20:1 nearly always sounds obviously bad to me. So I prefer 5:1 just to be on the safe side, though it takes twice as much storage space as 10:1. Not that storage is much of a problem because a 2TB hard drive can hold about a million minutes worth of mp3s at 5:1 compression, which is over 16,000 hours. Theoretically at my age, my high-frequency hearing shouldn't be good enough for me to need to worry much about audio formats unless they're quite highly compressed, but I've never taken a formal hearing test.

It makes sense.

A lot of people liked Kanye's older work, are embarrassed by what's coming of him, but probably don't see the justification for his music disappearing.

And so they realize something like the crypto dictum 'Not your keys not your coin', similarly if you're just streaming 'Not secured on your hardware - not your music'. Better to have hard copies that aren't going anywhere.

vinyl has surface noise consisting of groove roar, pre-post echo, crackle, tracing distortion, hiss, rumble, inner groove pinch effect distortion. some people think of these as "euphonic colorations." i say "garp."

Now if you're *really* into the oldskool hi-fi formats and you've got $1000 burning a hole in you're pocket you can follow Kerri Chandler's lead and grab a Pioneer RT-707, or if you want to dj with them the way Kerri does you can grab four:

i would love to be able to find a WORKING open-reel deck in the first place, but all that are working cost multiples of what they cost new.

Yeah, Kerri's an electrical engineer which has it's benefits (he can buy them broken).

I also did see what you were saying - almost all are on EBay, Reverb, and places like that, and the only 'new' brands are thousands of dollars.

I also see where vinyl is making a comeback (which, TBH, with my friends in the late 90's and early 2000's when they were rave dj's - they all had Technics SL-1200's, vinyl was super common).

I think what people are missing with digital music as well - there's no 'bonding' with it as an artform in the way that it was personal when you had a physical cd with cover art and sleeve, or a nice vinyl jacket and a thick black disk that looks as heavy as a black hole when it's rotating.

audio compact cassettes are also in vogue now, and 8 tracks always have had a retro fan base. i have a few myself, quad-8 8-tracks which i was collecting for a while.

at the tail end of the LP/phonograph era, records put out by CBS [now Sony] and other companies were encoded with CX noise reduction which when decoded upon playback, resulted in no surface noise, no more clicks and pops and hiss. i don't see too many of these records being sold used today.

Over / Shadow (reincarnation of Rob Playford's Moving Shadow) spun up last year. They've been keeping things pretty colorful:

Which is better for sound quality - vinyl or CD?

vinyl has surface noise and tracing distortion of various kinds, those are totally absent on tape/digital-sourced CDs. now of course there are CDs out there mastered from vinyl or even shellac that faithfully reproduce the distortions embedded in those sound mediums. but overall CD has the capability of pure music playback without surface noise and tracing distortion, just pure uncompressed digital sound, so of course CDs will objectively and subjectively sound better.

It makes sense considering CD is a technological successor to vinyl on a chronological timeline.

I would say CD, if it's done properly, which it very often is. I'm assuming that by "sound quality" you mean objective fidelity to the original sound or original electrical signal that was recorded.

Subjectively it may depend on the listener's taste or faith, some people claiming that a good clean vinyl played with excellent equipment has a "warmth" that can't be had from a CD, but I think that could be in their imagination.

If there's truly anything "warm" about the vinyl, it would be cheaper for the studio to transfer the recording to vinyl and then from vinyl to CD, rather than expecting the punters to buy posh vinyl players and to keep their vinyls in immaculate condition. Studios have been known to similarly put digital recordings through a tape stage to get the subjectively pleasing (to some) colouration of tape, and there may be some merit in doing that, but I've not heard of any studio bothering to put a digital recording through a vinyl step.

in the final baroque period of the LP, various technological developments came along to make ordinary [not half-speed mastered boutique LPs such as Mobile Fidelity et al] sound very much improved on all fronts, a worthy competitor to CD based on sound quality at least. CX noise reduction, direct metal mastering, new generation CBS discomputer et al combined to make these vast improvements in the last decade of LPs broad-market existence before CDs took over. the same kinda thing happened to compact [phillips] cassettes, what with vastly improved real-time duplicators, dolby hx-pro, improved CrO2 formulations et al, on good cassette decks most folks couldn't hear any daylight between those new cassettes and CDs based on audio quality. even 8-track tapes registered similar tech and sound improvements [dolby NR, redesigned cartridge designed to eliminate overheating/spills/tape stability/wow and flutter, improved tape formulations and duplication equipment] shortly before they became obsolete. a pity these things weren't enough to forestall the march of technological progress in terms of the CD. the last gasp of the analog was the phillips digital compact cassette whose players were backwards compatible with analog cassettes, but the new digital compact cassettes were a digital format on tape, with the concomitant improvements in sound quality over the analog cassette [no noise, no wow and flutter, no drop-outs over time] but it failed in the marketplace.