Who still listen to CDs?


This guy does some good stuff on his channel about music ranging from the 50s to yesterday and one of the first things I noticed about him when I first started watching him a couple of years back is that everything he has and reviews, he has on CD. You can see tons of CDs in the back and when he's talking about a certain artist or era or genre or album covers or whatever, he always shows CDs. He has quite an audience and many of them report that they check out albums he talks about so it's pretty clear that CDs aren't dead, even if they're dying.
grimtraveller said:
other than replacing the copy I have on the ipod I won't play it
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There is a dual reason for this. On the one hand, by not playing it, it preserves it. I did exactly the same with my vinyl records back in the day, the logic being the same.
But there's another reason why and that is that I like to put the songs of an album in my own running order. I've been doing this since about 1980. Every album I'd get, I'd listen to a few times, decide very quickly which songs I liked least to most and then would put them on tape in that order, least liked first, most loved progressively. And if I don't like a song, I'd just leave it off. So for example, my White album has no "Revolution 9", my "In thru the out door" has no "I'm gonna crawl", my "Live at Leeds" and "Tommy" have a stack of songs not on them etc. And I've always done the same with CDs, when I was putting them on tape and since going the ipod route. If the particular CD is one I've bought, then obviously, I have some re~jigging to do. If it's a CD I've done myself from a vinyl album or cassette tape, then it is in the new order.
There's actually not many albums that I have that follow the artists original running order.
 
YanKleber said:
The only thing that bugs me about those machines is that the majority of them doesn't have a display then is hard to move along the tracks (it makes sense they don't have displays because since they are made for DVD playing you expect that they will be plugged to a TV).
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My Blu-Ray player will play CDs, but I've never used it for that. I'm still using the first CD payer I bought (JVC) which I really like, and has a very nice display, which I can read accross the room, and nice buttons too. Modern CD payers do not have controls or displays as good as mine.
 
Slouching Raymond said:
My Blu-Ray player will play CDs, but I've never used it for that
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My Blu-Ray and DVD players play CDs. I actually didn't know until one day, just out of sheer curiosity, I stuck a CD in the DVD player and received a mighty surprise when it started playing. now I use them as an essential part of testing my mixes. Playing through the telly is a great avenue of potential translation.
 
I have a ton of vinyl.
I have hundreds of cassettes.
I have thousands of CDs.

I still listen to CDs. I have three players around the house. Right now I'm listening to ELP Live at Nassau Coliseum in 78. I might have been at that show. They played a few nights. I know I went to one.

We have a 2022 Toyota and it only has an MP3 player. So, I'm slowly putting CDs to MP3 (highest quality). But, I'm keeping my CDs. We just drove 1200 miles to Florida, and I had enough music on one drive to last the entire trip without hearing the same song twice.

As a paranoid, there's too many ways to lose your MP3s.

CDs, vinyl, cassette, they're tangible. Vinyl can scratch. Cassettes are usually alright. Even if that little piece falls off, you can glue it back on. CDs are almost invincible.

I LOVE MUSIC!
 
A lot of players in cars will play Wave files, not just MP3s, which will give you the fidelity of the CD. Plus with today's USB storage capacity, no reason not to do the higher quality.
 
DM60 said:
A lot of players in cars will play Wave files, not just MP3s, which will give you the fidelity of the CD. Plus with today's USB storage capacity, no reason not to do the higher quality.
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That's almost pointless in a car. A 320K MP3 is so close to the original that 99% of the population couldn't tell the difference in a blind test with a proper high quality stereo. In a car, with a background noise of maybe 75 or 80dB, it would be impossible.
 
Getting back to my own thread, I really don't care about quality because honestly I cannot spot the difference between a CD, a vinyl or a good MP3 reaping. So the reason I still listen to CDs is because it's very straight forward: you pick it, drop it in the player tray and push the button. Over the years listening to digital media (MP3, WAV, etc) I realized that it's nice only when you are in front of the computer otherwise the good old physical stuff will always be better. For me, of course.
 
I don't play them - don't have a CD player, per se, though I guess the completely unused DVD player might read them, and there's an external drive plugged into the iMac for rare usage. I do occasionally buy a used one when I'm after a specific song to learn, or off a performer's "merch" table; but I generally buy digital downloads. I do like to "rip" my own 320kbps AAC files for my digital library when I start with a non-lossy (FLAC or CD) format. There's no difference that is significant or audible in almost any listening environment I would use them in. I miss the cover/insert info - I wish they'd sell me a nice Kindle version for a buck or something. I'd collect those!
 
YanKleber said:
Getting back to my own thread, I really don't care about quality because honestly I cannot spot the difference between a CD, a vinyl or a good MP3 reaping. So the reason I still listen to CDs is because it's very straight forward: you pick it, drop it in the player tray and push the button. Over the years listening to digital media (MP3, WAV, etc) I realized that it's nice only when you are in front of the computer otherwise the good old physical stuff will always be better. For me, of course.
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You can get dedicated rip/storage units from various companies. They'll have a terrabyte or 2 of HDD or SSD, and connect to your high end stereo just like a CD or turntable. You have a remote or an app that lets you pick your music. You can sit back in your favorite chair and listen to your Wilson WAMM or Alexx speakers and your McIntosh monoblock amps just like in the old days, but you don't have to get up to change the CD.
 
I still play CD's from time to time but years back....and still...I ripped hundreds of tracks from them and converted to wav's and mp3's. This allowed me to have a collection of my favorite tracks and shuffle or arrange them any way I like to play them or individually at will. I mostly play the wav's on my PC through my JBL monitors and the mp3's go on my phone. More tracks than I can listen to in days.

Mick
 
keith.rogers said:
I miss the cover/insert info - I wish they'd sell me a nice Kindle version for a buck or something. I'd collect those!
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You know, you kind of reminded me that one of the reasons it took me so long to acquiesce to getting CDs was because they were not more convenient than tapes and the cover art was lame compared to records. Even 7" singles had better cover art than CDs.
 
TalismanRich said:
You can get dedicated rip/storage units from various companies. They'll have a terrabyte or 2 of HDD or SSD, and connect to your high end stereo just like a CD or turntable. You have a remote or an app that lets you pick your music. You can sit back in your favorite chair and listen to your Wilson WAMM or Alexx speakers and your McIntosh monoblock amps just like in the old days, but you don't have to get up to change the CD.
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True!
 
grimtraveller said:
You know, you kind of reminded me that one of the reasons it took me so long to acquiesce to getting CDs was because they were not more convenient than tapes and the cover art was lame compared to records. Even 7" singles had better cover art than CDs.
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I am curious to know in what a CD isn't more convenient than a tape.
 
I still buy and own many CDs. I also buy and own many surround music discs in multiple formats.

Typically I only buy CDs of music significant to me, favorite or important albums, favorite bands, etc. For consumption I convert the CDs to FLAC (and high bitrate MP3 for the car).

I consider owning physical media a form of archiving, and on a long enough timeline and as more music becomes available solely via streaming, the prices will go up for access to the online library. I'm much more a fan of buying the album once and having it for, theoretically, ever.
 
I broke out some vinyl last night. I decided to check the price of my turntable which I bought at a yard sale over 23 years ago for five dollars. It sat in my basement
in NY for about twenty one of those years. They are going for around 3 to 5 hundred! It played flawlessly after sitting in a dank basement all those years.
 
YanKleber said:
I am curious to know in what a CD isn't more convenient than a tape
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Well, it's important to note that this was my thinking from 1983 through to '91 when I had to confront the viewpoint because there was no way I was going to shell out £400 {that's R$2550 then which would be R$111,035,427.33 now !} for "Freedom's Lament", no matter how intriguing it sounded when I read about it. Also, at that time, I'd been a cassette person since 1975 and a vinyl person even longer than that and I didn't foresee vinyl being phased out or cassettes being phased out. Such an idea just never occurred to me. Not to say that I thought they'd last forever, just that there was no reason to not think they'd last, well, forever. Or for as long as me.

Also at that time, the thing with CDs was that you couldn't record on them. I actually remember thinking around that time, that I would go the CD route if they would invent recordable CDs. I didn't hear of them until 1998 and the moment I heard of them, I mean literally, the moment, I went and bought a Philips CD recorder which I still have and use.

So that was what made CDs inconvenient when compared with cassettes. Yes, you could programme a CD player to play your CD in the song order you wanted it but that was the height of inconvenience for me. Whereas with a tape, you record the songs in the order you'd want them and that's it for the next 15 years until the tape goes dull or chews up.

One other thing I loved about cassettes, or at least, the way I used to do it, was that an album generally would come in at under 45 minutes and a double album usually came in at under 90 minutes. Probably 98% of my cassettes were C90 {90 minutes} and I used to really like filling those extra few minutes with a loved song from elsewhere. When I went over to the iPod, I thought I'd really miss that extra treat but interestingly, I haven't.

Cassettes were always more convenient to me until I started thinking about the iPod. Everything about them trumped CDs, especially once Walkmans started to come with the anti-rolling feature which meant that there'd be no wobbling and slurring when you were on the move.

The length of the tapes was always better for me than the length of CDs, 90 and 120 minutes always kicked up 65, 74 and 80 minutes. I could fit 2 albums on a C90 and 3 on a 120 which was great if I only happened to have 3 albums {or multiples of 3} by a particular band. By the time 90-minute blank CDs came by, I was already moving to iPods and many players that had been made before the advent of the 90-minute CD had real problems playing them once you got beyond the 82nd minute.
Pinky said:
I consider owning physical media a form of archiving, and on a long enough timeline and as more music becomes available solely via streaming, the prices will go up for access to the online library. I'm much more a fan of buying the album once and having it for, theoretically, ever.
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This is totally where I'm at. I never really bought vinyl to play it and I never bought CDs to play them, rather to put them onto the medium {cassette, MP3} that I do play. Also, I like to be in control of what I listen to and when. I ceased listening to music radio after 1976.
 
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grimtraveller said:
Well, it's important to note that this was my thinking from 1983 through to '91 when I had to confront the viewpoint because there was no way I was going to shell out £400 {that's R$2550 then which would be R$111,035,427.33 now !} for "Freedom's Lament", no matter how intriguing it sounded when I read about it. Also, at that time, I'd been a cassette person since 1975 and a vinyl person even longer than that and I didn't foresee vinyl being phased out or cassettes being phased out. Such an idea just never occurred to me. Not to say that I thought they'd last forever, just that there was no reason to not think they'd last, well, forever. Or for as long as me.

Also at that time, the thing with CDs was that you couldn't record on them. I actually remember thinking around that time, that I would go the CD route if they would invent recordable CDs. I didn't hear of them until 1998 and the moment I heard of them, I mean literally, the moment, I went and bought a Philips CD recorder which I still have and use.

So that was what made CDs inconvenient when compared with cassettes. Yes, you could programme a CD player to play your CD in the song order you wanted it but that was the height of inconvenience for me. Whereas with a tape, you record the songs in the order you'd want them and that's it for the next 15 years until the tape goes dull or chews up.

One other thing I loved about cassettes, or at least, the way I used to do it, was that an album generally would come in at under 45 minutes and a double album usually came in at under 90 minutes. Probably 98% of my cassettes were C90 {90 minutes} and I used to really like filling those extra few minutes with a loved song from elsewhere. When I went over to the iPod, I thought I'd really miss that extra treat but interestingly, I haven't.

Cassettes were always more convenient to me until I started thinking about the iPod. Everything about them trumped CDs, especially once Walkmans started to come with the anti-rolling feature which meant that there'd be no wobbling and slurring when you were on the move.

The length of the tapes was always better for me than the length of CDs, 90 and 120 minutes always kicked up 65, 74 and 80 minutes. I could fit 2 albums on a C90 and 3 on a 120 which was great if I only happened to have 3 albums {or multiples of 3} by a particular band. By the time 90-minute blank CDs came by, I was already moving to iPods and many players that had been made before the advent of the 90-minute CD had real problems playing them once you got beyond the 82nd minute.

This is totally where I'm at. I never really bought vinyl to play it and I never bought CDs to play them, rather to put them onto the medium {cassette, MP3} that I do play. Also, I like to be in control of what I listen to and when. I ceased listening to music radio after 1976.
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I see. Well you have a point. But as you mentioned when they invented the CDR this song order issue was gone. On a side note... would you want to record your albums in a different order than they were pressed? I never did this, but it's interesting.
 
YanKleber said:
as you mentioned when they invented the CDR this song order issue was gone
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It was, but I loved cassettes and you could always get more on a cassette than you could on a CDR.
That said, I hailed the value of CDRs when they came out because I had some pre-recorded cassettes {of albums from the 1970s and early 80s} that I'd tried to find on vinyl and never could, mainly because in those days, they had been deleted and were no longer available. The main reason I bought a CD recorder in the first place was to transfer those cassette albums onto them so that I would have them permanently. I had bought most, if not all of them in 1987 and 88 and although I had done tape-to-tape transfers, I was never confident in them "lasting forever", even though I didn't play the originals. But once I put them onto CDs {in the order of songs I liked, of course !}, I didn't care what happened to those tapes. In fact, I think I sold them for next to nothing. I did the transfers in 1999 and I still have them now.
YanKleber said:
On a side note... would you want to record your albums in a different order than they were pressed?
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If you mean would I have my own running order for the albums I record onto tape, CD or MP3, yes. I don't really care about what the artist had in mind with their running order. I record the songs I like the least first, then build up to the ones I like the most.
That said, there are some albums that I have in the proper artist's order because that's just the way it feels right to me.
 
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