7 ms·

CD box sets are wonderful

56 points by smackeyacky 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
I was going to say I hate those brittle hard plastic jewel cases but there are many better form factors out there and this blog post shows box sets made from better materials. At higher bitrates mp3 (and AAC) is OK, but through good headphones the difference between common 128kbps mp3 files and CD audio is night and day.
- andrewzah 5y ago
  Higher bitrates are better than “OK”. 320kbps MP3s are indistinguishable (by human ears) from CD quality audio (FLAC/ALAC/PCM/WAV). Both are a night and day difference from 128kbps. Agreed about jewel cases - I have about 150 odd CDs and I just -despise- the cheap jewel cases.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    > Higher bitrates are better than “OK”. 320kbps MP3s are indistinguishable (by human ears) from CD quality audio (FLAC/ALAC/PCM/WAV). It depends on what you are listening to. High dinamic range (classical music for example) is hit hard by the mp3 compressor.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    Jewel cases are horrible. The box sets above mostly house the jewel cases in a plastic moulding (which helps them not get damaged). The "Tougher than tough" set unfortunately uses the digipak style of packaging, so when the little plastic fingers in the CD centre start failing, the disks fall out every time you open it up and it can't be repaired. Not sure how they managed to come up with packaging that was worse than jewel cases, but digipaks succeeded remarkably well at just that.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  128k mp3s haven't been "common" in years. Every store I know that sells MP3s gives you either 320k CBR, or a high quality VBR encoding. Neither is perceptively different (by humans) from a CD, even with the best equipment. And most stores are now offering lossless downloads anyway. If you're making your own MP3s, don't make 128k MP3s. Later codecs (AAC, Vorbis, Opus, etc.) all allow you to use fewer bits for the same quality.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    I still have a NAS full of nasty 128kbps MP3 files I really should just delete. All that time ripping CDs 20 years ago wasn't a complete waste of time, the MP3 player I had only had a tiny amount of memory and the fledgling NAS I had didn't have a lot of disk space as it was. Time to delete them has come though, funnily it's much quicker to <arrgh me hearties> CDs I already own than rip them myself.
    - LeoPanthera 5y ago
      I prefer to rip my own CDs if only because I don't trust someone else to do it right.
      - tinbucket 5y ago
        I’m the opposite: I trust others to do it better than I can.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    >Neither is perceptively different (by humans) from a CD, even with the best equipment. There are certain trouble files that can't be encoded well with MP3 even at 320k. I once successfully ABXY tested one such file 20 times in a row.
    - LeoPanthera 5y ago
      These kind of examples are always encoder specific, and even encoder setting specific. They are never general rules.
werber 5y ago
My college boyfriend worked at a radio station and I ripped so many box sets during that time. Seeing the stax one reminded me of being a bit younger than I am these days
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  It's surprisingly affordable 2nd hand. Not to mention fantastic.
rp1 5y ago
Having a box set as a tiny relic of what you consumed is pretty cool. Not only are they attractive shelf pieces, there was something cathartic about ritualistically putting the Sopranos in the DVD player during a binge. So many things we consume now are ephemeral. Do you remember that movie you watched last week, or that article you read two days ago on HN? Probably not... But, we consume so much now that a physical relic for all our media would be impractical.
- jmopp 5y ago
  Tying into this: I really liked the concert DVD - especially around the gift-giving time of the year. I could get a DVD of my parents' favourite musicians for Christmas and I knew it would be a hit with them.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  This is part of why vinyl is so appealing - storing them is tough but being able to pore over the artwork or using it as a display is the only advantage they have over CDs. The box sets of CDs make up for that display-ability and the booklets can be fantastic little history lessons.
- deergomoo 5y ago
  I still buy shows and movies I really like on Blu-Ray (though usually after a first watch on streaming services). For one, I’m betting that bit rot on the disk will take longer to happen than shenanigans with the streaming rights. For two, the video quality of most streaming services is god awful. The resolution is there but the bit rate absolutely isn’t. I watched Mr Robot on Prime Video recently and dark scenes (of which there are a lot) looked like a blocky watercolour mess.
  - c120 5y ago
    Not only is the video quality awful, unless you're watching on a controlled device like and ipad or a TV with netflix included, the video and audio are also slightly out of sync. Another reason to own media is that companies like netflix can't change the playback experience. There's already annoying "skip intro" buttons, ads on the end credits and age and strobe warnings whenever you touch the pause button. These annoyances have the tendency to creep in and I would not be surprised if at some point they include unskippable ads and a permanent Netflix logo in one of the corners. Disney, who are the worst offernders here, already displays a Disney+ logo for the first and last 15 seoonds. Once the bluray and DVD market has died, streaming companies may get a lot braver with this kind of stuff. (Remember when you could watch TV without a channel logo and banners advertising other shows?) Oh and then there's the SJW patrol that gets streaming services to alter or cancel episodes of shows. So there's really a good argument for buying the stuff you really like and owning a copy.
jakecopp 5y ago
I for one think CDs will be the new vinyl! (in a few years, when everyone who's been collecting vinyl realises it sounds like rubbish [1][2] and they don't use it anymore - but still want the physical medium experience) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bMI2JB-vY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bMI2JB-vY [2]: https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/761231 https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/761231
- taeric 5y ago
  Hard to agree that vinyl sounds like rubbish. Though, easy to agree it is no better than cd. I suspect it is a bit of "buy in" with vinyl. Also, the art sleeves are nice.
  - jakecopp 5y ago
    > Hard to agree that vinyl sounds like rubbish. Maybe I was too harsh - the warm, compressed sound isn't for me :) > Also, the art sleeves are nice. I do absolutely love the size of vinyl art sleeves - I've noticed some friends effectively buying vinyl to display rather than to listen to.
    - mcormier 5y ago
      Vinyl is going to sound as good as the money you put into it. The needle is important, but so is your phono preamp.
      - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
        Ill take my MP3 and FLAC thank you very much
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    > Hard to agree that vinyl sounds like rubbish. Well, the recent resurgence of vinyl has had a lot people buying substandard all-in-one-decks from online stores. For vinyl to sound good you need to invest a significant amount of money in equipment.
uhoh-itsmaciek 5y ago
I love having the context from a good set of liner notes. Session dates, musicians, back story. It anchors the music as work done by real people, and not just content to consume. I don't really care about the physical discs, but it seems like there's not a lot of options (at least in bluegrass): a lot of this content is just not available digitally. (And when it is, the liner notes are usually lost in the process.)
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  > And when it is, the liner notes are usually lost in the process. And sometimes the tracks themselves are inexplicably mangled: The digital versions (both streaming and for download) of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series inexplicably leave out the between-tracks material on the live albums even though those bits are definitively part of the charme and appeal of that material. Plus when ripping myself I get to choose how to handle that kind of gap material: Standard procedure seems to be to stick it onto the end of the preceeding track, whereas personally I've found that for live albums I tend to prefer having it combined with the following track.
thom 5y ago
I treasure few objects more than my Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy box set, like this one: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Douglas-Adams-Hitch-Hikers-Guide-to-the-Galaxy-Box-Set-6-x-CD-1988-Rare-/133928860631 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Douglas-Adams-Hitch-Hikers-Guide-... I don’t even have the ability to play it anymore, and I’ve no doubt the CDs are scratched and unlistenable. But I still consider it a beautiful object, and one that got me through various long dark teatimes of the soul.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  I have the BBC tv series on laserdisc, perhaps not as good as the radio show but a great artifact anyway. You've reminded me to track down the radio serial.
aasasd 5y ago
Kinda expected to see some elaborate packaging, in the spirit of Les Joyaux De La Princesse, or something like that. https://www.discogs.com/release/200521-Exposition-Internationale-Arts-Et-Techniques-Paris-1937/images https://www.discogs.com/release/200521-Exposition-Internatio... https://www.discogs.com/release/578626-Die-Wei%C3%9Fe-Rose/images https://www.discogs.com/release/578626-Die-Wei%C3%9Fe-Rose/i... https://www.discogs.com/release/726505-1940-1944/images https://www.discogs.com/release/726505-1940-1944/images https://www.discogs.com/release/198981-Aux-Petits-Enfants-De-France/images https://www.discogs.com/release/198981-Aux-Petits-Enfants-De... I thought boxsets are usually in large part decorative items, owing to the limited but quite paying demand and the physicality of the goods.
l72 5y ago
I suppose it depends on the genre of music that you listen to, but I tend to avoid box sets or collections for the same reason that I avoid streaming, shuffle, and playlists. Often times, the artist put tremendous thought into the album as a whole and how the songs transition and fit together to create the desired atmosphere. Breaking that up feels like taking random chapters of an author's books and recompiling them.
inpdx 5y ago
As someone who bought his first CD in 1985, no. CDs never had charm. Nerd allure at first? Sure. But they were a means to an end. Lossless streaming solves that problem better and less wastefully. Streaming and vinyl are here to stay.
randomhodler84 5y ago
More plastic garbage in your life, eventually to fill a landfill until the end of the Earth. Stop buying music on physical media. It hasn’t needed to be this way for decades.

56 points by smackeyacky 5y ago

I was going to say I hate those brittle hard plastic jewel cases but there are many better form factors out there and this blog post shows box sets made from better materials. At higher bitrates mp3 (and AAC) is OK, but through good headphones the difference between common 128kbps mp3 files and CD audio is night and day.

andrewzah 5y ago
Higher bitrates are better than “OK”. 320kbps MP3s are indistinguishable (by human ears) from CD quality audio (FLAC/ALAC/PCM/WAV). Both are a night and day difference from 128kbps. Agreed about jewel cases - I have about 150 odd CDs and I just -despise- the cheap jewel cases.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > Higher bitrates are better than “OK”. 320kbps MP3s are indistinguishable (by human ears) from CD quality audio (FLAC/ALAC/PCM/WAV). It depends on what you are listening to. High dinamic range (classical music for example) is hit hard by the mp3 compressor.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Jewel cases are horrible. The box sets above mostly house the jewel cases in a plastic moulding (which helps them not get damaged). The "Tougher than tough" set unfortunately uses the digipak style of packaging, so when the little plastic fingers in the CD centre start failing, the disks fall out every time you open it up and it can't be repaired. Not sure how they managed to come up with packaging that was worse than jewel cases, but digipaks succeeded remarkably well at just that.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
128k mp3s haven't been "common" in years. Every store I know that sells MP3s gives you either 320k CBR, or a high quality VBR encoding. Neither is perceptively different (by humans) from a CD, even with the best equipment. And most stores are now offering lossless downloads anyway. If you're making your own MP3s, don't make 128k MP3s. Later codecs (AAC, Vorbis, Opus, etc.) all allow you to use fewer bits for the same quality.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  I still have a NAS full of nasty 128kbps MP3 files I really should just delete. All that time ripping CDs 20 years ago wasn't a complete waste of time, the MP3 player I had only had a tiny amount of memory and the fledgling NAS I had didn't have a lot of disk space as it was. Time to delete them has come though, funnily it's much quicker to <arrgh me hearties> CDs I already own than rip them myself.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    I prefer to rip my own CDs if only because I don't trust someone else to do it right.
    - tinbucket 5y ago
      I’m the opposite: I trust others to do it better than I can.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  >Neither is perceptively different (by humans) from a CD, even with the best equipment. There are certain trouble files that can't be encoded well with MP3 even at 320k. I once successfully ABXY tested one such file 20 times in a row.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    These kind of examples are always encoder specific, and even encoder setting specific. They are never general rules.

werber 5y ago

My college boyfriend worked at a radio station and I ripped so many box sets during that time. Seeing the stax one reminded me of being a bit younger than I am these days

smackeyacky 5y ago
It's surprisingly affordable 2nd hand. Not to mention fantastic.

rp1 5y ago

Having a box set as a tiny relic of what you consumed is pretty cool. Not only are they attractive shelf pieces, there was something cathartic about ritualistically putting the Sopranos in the DVD player during a binge. So many things we consume now are ephemeral. Do you remember that movie you watched last week, or that article you read two days ago on HN? Probably not... But, we consume so much now that a physical relic for all our media would be impractical.

jmopp 5y ago
Tying into this: I really liked the concert DVD - especially around the gift-giving time of the year. I could get a DVD of my parents' favourite musicians for Christmas and I knew it would be a hit with them.
smackeyacky 5y ago
This is part of why vinyl is so appealing - storing them is tough but being able to pore over the artwork or using it as a display is the only advantage they have over CDs. The box sets of CDs make up for that display-ability and the booklets can be fantastic little history lessons.
deergomoo 5y ago
I still buy shows and movies I really like on Blu-Ray (though usually after a first watch on streaming services). For one, I’m betting that bit rot on the disk will take longer to happen than shenanigans with the streaming rights. For two, the video quality of most streaming services is god awful. The resolution is there but the bit rate absolutely isn’t. I watched Mr Robot on Prime Video recently and dark scenes (of which there are a lot) looked like a blocky watercolour mess.
- c120 5y ago
  Not only is the video quality awful, unless you're watching on a controlled device like and ipad or a TV with netflix included, the video and audio are also slightly out of sync. Another reason to own media is that companies like netflix can't change the playback experience. There's already annoying "skip intro" buttons, ads on the end credits and age and strobe warnings whenever you touch the pause button. These annoyances have the tendency to creep in and I would not be surprised if at some point they include unskippable ads and a permanent Netflix logo in one of the corners. Disney, who are the worst offernders here, already displays a Disney+ logo for the first and last 15 seoonds. Once the bluray and DVD market has died, streaming companies may get a lot braver with this kind of stuff. (Remember when you could watch TV without a channel logo and banners advertising other shows?) Oh and then there's the SJW patrol that gets streaming services to alter or cancel episodes of shows. So there's really a good argument for buying the stuff you really like and owning a copy.

jakecopp 5y ago

I for one think CDs will be the new vinyl! (in a few years, when everyone who's been collecting vinyl realises it sounds like rubbish [1][2] and they don't use it anymore - but still want the physical medium experience) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bMI2JB-vY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bMI2JB-vY [2]: https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/761231 https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/761231

taeric 5y ago
Hard to agree that vinyl sounds like rubbish. Though, easy to agree it is no better than cd. I suspect it is a bit of "buy in" with vinyl. Also, the art sleeves are nice.
- jakecopp 5y ago
  > Hard to agree that vinyl sounds like rubbish. Maybe I was too harsh - the warm, compressed sound isn't for me :) > Also, the art sleeves are nice. I do absolutely love the size of vinyl art sleeves - I've noticed some friends effectively buying vinyl to display rather than to listen to.
  - mcormier 5y ago
    Vinyl is going to sound as good as the money you put into it. The needle is important, but so is your phono preamp.
    - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
      Ill take my MP3 and FLAC thank you very much
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  > Hard to agree that vinyl sounds like rubbish. Well, the recent resurgence of vinyl has had a lot people buying substandard all-in-one-decks from online stores. For vinyl to sound good you need to invest a significant amount of money in equipment.

uhoh-itsmaciek 5y ago

I love having the context from a good set of liner notes. Session dates, musicians, back story. It anchors the music as work done by real people, and not just content to consume. I don't really care about the physical discs, but it seems like there's not a lot of options (at least in bluegrass): a lot of this content is just not available digitally. (And when it is, the liner notes are usually lost in the process.)

iggldiggl 5y ago
> And when it is, the liner notes are usually lost in the process. And sometimes the tracks themselves are inexplicably mangled: The digital versions (both streaming and for download) of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series inexplicably leave out the between-tracks material on the live albums even though those bits are definitively part of the charme and appeal of that material. Plus when ripping myself I get to choose how to handle that kind of gap material: Standard procedure seems to be to stick it onto the end of the preceeding track, whereas personally I've found that for live albums I tend to prefer having it combined with the following track.

thom 5y ago

I treasure few objects more than my Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy box set, like this one: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Douglas-Adams-Hitch-Hikers-Guide-to-the-Galaxy-Box-Set-6-x-CD-1988-Rare-/133928860631 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Douglas-Adams-Hitch-Hikers-Guide-... I don’t even have the ability to play it anymore, and I’ve no doubt the CDs are scratched and unlistenable. But I still consider it a beautiful object, and one that got me through various long dark teatimes of the soul.

smackeyacky 5y ago
I have the BBC tv series on laserdisc, perhaps not as good as the radio show but a great artifact anyway. You've reminded me to track down the radio serial.

aasasd 5y ago

Kinda expected to see some elaborate packaging, in the spirit of Les Joyaux De La Princesse, or something like that. https://www.discogs.com/release/200521-Exposition-Internationale-Arts-Et-Techniques-Paris-1937/images https://www.discogs.com/release/200521-Exposition-Internatio... https://www.discogs.com/release/578626-Die-Wei%C3%9Fe-Rose/images https://www.discogs.com/release/578626-Die-Wei%C3%9Fe-Rose/i... https://www.discogs.com/release/726505-1940-1944/images https://www.discogs.com/release/726505-1940-1944/images https://www.discogs.com/release/198981-Aux-Petits-Enfants-De-France/images https://www.discogs.com/release/198981-Aux-Petits-Enfants-De... I thought boxsets are usually in large part decorative items, owing to the limited but quite paying demand and the physicality of the goods.

l72 5y ago

I suppose it depends on the genre of music that you listen to, but I tend to avoid box sets or collections for the same reason that I avoid streaming, shuffle, and playlists. Often times, the artist put tremendous thought into the album as a whole and how the songs transition and fit together to create the desired atmosphere. Breaking that up feels like taking random chapters of an author's books and recompiling them.

inpdx 5y ago

As someone who bought his first CD in 1985, no. CDs never had charm. Nerd allure at first? Sure. But they were a means to an end. Lossless streaming solves that problem better and less wastefully. Streaming and vinyl are here to stay.

randomhodler84 5y ago

More plastic garbage in your life, eventually to fill a landfill until the end of the Earth. Stop buying music on physical media. It hasn’t needed to be this way for decades.