Who still listen to CDs?

[brassplyer]

By god a Walkman was good enough for great-grandaddy and it's good enough for me!





Listen to CDs, vinyl, even tape on occasion. Of late I've been buying more vinyl - much of what I'm interested in will never be on CD. I create mp3s if there's something I want to share online, generally a demo of something.

 

[keith.rogers]

I got a lot of mileage out of my original (or "close to") Walkman. Bought one in early 1982. No idea what happened to it, but there were a couple years I was walking around a lot, and it sounded great - nothing like it at the time, really.

 

[grimtraveller]

a Walkman was good

I invented the Walkman, you know ?

In 1977 when I was 14, I did a lot of flying abroad and I used to take my cassette recorder with me as hand luggage and I listened to the Beatles {Abbey Road, Please Please me and A Hard Days Night come to mind. "When I get home" and "Anytime at all" remind me of those flights} with the earpiece as I flew over the earth. I'm almost convinced that on one of those journeys, someone saw me that ended up either working with SONY or living with someone that ended up working for SONY or cleaning for someone that......you get the picture. They saw me, mentioned it and the rest is history and I'm a pauper ! 🤑

much of what I'm interested in will never be on CD

I used to think that. Then recordable CDs came along. Now much of what I listen to will never be on anyone's CDs but mine ! 😸

I got a lot of mileage out of my original Walkman

Once I got that walkman, it was permanently on my person. I would basically use it until it stopped playing. Usually, the pinch roller just gave out.
I learned about recording at high levels with walkmans because if the level was high, batteries would last longer because I didn't have to have it up as high because the level was high.

Bought one in early 1982

I got mine one Friday in mid-December 1981. It might have been the same day I got my ear pierced, got my first camera and my first bass guitar and was turned down for a date by beautiful Dee Holder that used to work in Waitrose.
It was quite a day !

No idea what happened to it

I think mine just died. They usually did. I usually had them for just under a year. And I don't think I ever got the same one twice. They used to slur if one walked with them too fast. Once the anti-rolling ones came into the equation, I never went for one without again. And then when the auto-reverse ones with extra bass came by, that's what I went with until 2015.

but there were a couple years I was walking around a lot, and it sounded great - nothing like it at the time, really.

I rode all over London on my bike with mine, as well as walked, went on buses and trains, cooked, wrote letters etc. I did everything with my walkman. I even drove at times with it. For the time, I thought they were a mega-invention and thinking about it, they probably played a large role in me not adopting CDs sooner.

 

[brassplyer]

I used to think that. Then recordable CDs came along. Now much of what I listen to will never be on anyone's CDs but mine ! 😸

Well yeah but of course I was referring to commercially released CDs where they go back to the master, ideally re-tweak a mix specifically for CD resulting in something higher quality than you'll get digitizing it off an LP.

Sorry those dirty thieves at Sony ripped you off - lol. 🤣

 

[grimtraveller]

Well yeah but of course I was referring to commercially released CDs where they go back to the master, ideally re-tweak a mix specifically for CD resulting in something higher quality than you'll get digitizing it off an LP

One of the things that I used to really hate about CD versions of albums that I'd been used to for years on vinyl was that they sounded slightly different. It was subtle little things like fading a song two or three seconds early when I loved those last few seconds as the song is fading out. I think I noticed things like that happening because I spent the majority of my listening time on headphones on that walkman {!!} and I'd catch things that you didn't really hear clearly or that significantly on speakers.
But it wasn't only fade-offs. Some things came through so clearly on CDs that the balance that I'd been used to felt "off." On the Beatles' "Birthday" for example, on my vinyl version, the backing vocals of George's wife Patti and Yoko Ono are kind of masked and buried and don't interfere. But on the CD they come out so clearly and they sound terrible.
For me, recording the vinyl onto the CDR was the best of both worlds because permanency was really my goal when it came to CDs. The overwhelming majority of CDs that I've bought of the commercially released stuff was stuff that was new to me so I didn't know any different. Those of old stuff {for example, Amalgam's "Wipe Out"} are clearly inferior to my ears and were kind of annoying to me because I had actually recorded the vinyl onto CD but unfortunately the CDs were part of the "Blackburn batch." 🤬😤

Sorry those dirty thieves at Sony ripped you off - lol. 🤣

Yeah, it was the naïveté of youth, before I turned into a callous, ruthless, heartless, hard-headed business mogul.

 

[YanKleber]

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.

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.

Very interesting points!

 

[YanKleber]

little things like fading a song two or three seconds early when I loved those last few seconds as the song is fading out.

I hated when they did it on vinyls with radio hits. LoL.

 

[grimtraveller]

I hated when they did it on vinyls with radio hits. LoL.

I stopped listening to the radio as a kid, partly because I wanted to listen to what I wanted to listen to, when I wanted to, but also because I hated the way they'd cut songs short or worst of all, have the DJ talking all over the end of the song. I was told by someone that they did it to discourage people from recording off the radio. Funnily enough, my Dad had thousands of recordings from the radio as he was into classical music. On classical radio, they always let the piece finish before talking.
I recorded two episodes of the top 20 {one from Dec '75 and one from April '76} from the radio and I eventually, years later bought all of those 40 singles, either on an album or the actual single or a download.

 

[TalismanRich]

I stopped listening to the radio as a kid, partly because I wanted to listen to what I wanted to listen to, when I wanted to, but also because I hated the way they'd cut songs short or worst of all, have the DJ talking all over the end of the song. I was told by someone that they did it to discourage people from recording off the radio.

You would have hated me when I was on the campus radio in college. I had the 9-1 shift and we had a sign-off that was supposed to be read at the end of the night. I used to use either the Beatles Good Night, or Moody Blues Nights in White Satin for the last song, and I could read the whole sign off either over the orchestra part of Good Night, or the gong hit at the ends of NiWS.

I could talk over the intro or out of a song pretty well, but as the night got later, the music got heavier, and I didn't step on the songs.

We had an FM station locally, WSAC, that did the "underground" music at night. At 11pm, they would do an album complete, no interruption. Most times, you got the whole thing on a single side of a C90. I think they used to even tell you how long the album was, so you could use a C60 and flip in the middle.

 

[Slouching Raymond]

I hated the way they'd cut songs short or worst of all, have the DJ talking all over the end of the song.

The beginnings too. There were some good beginnings on 70s singles, but the Radio1 DJs always talked right up to the first words of the song, as if words were all that mattered.