9 ms·
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
by microtonal 10mo ago
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
- stefanfisk 10mo agoBut sadly often horrible mastering.
- jonhohle 10mo agoThat’s not the mediums fault. I’m sure during the 70s and 80s there were equally horrible vinyl masterings.
- greekrich92 10mo agoI have a record collection and a cd collection. It was not the same. So many CDs of older music sound bad on CD. Recordings made during the CD era sound fine though, but I'm not an audiophile. Maybe the "loudness wars" are a complaint for some.
- hunter2_ 10mo agoThe loudness war (in the usual sense of the phrase) on CDs was to not seem weak against other releases. The loudness war (if I may use that phrase very liberally now) on analog media is to not seem weak against hiss and surface noise. The desire to compress and limit dynamic range does exist for both, but for these different reasons. However, a huge difference is that on CDs you're up against a fixed maximum (0 dBFS) so all peaks are equal, which is fatiguing; on vinyl you're up against the adjacent groove, so your maximum amplitude any given moment depends on the amplitude of things in the recent past and near future! Ways to optimize for this are prevalent, amazingly, and the result is less fatiguing.
- antod 10mo agoThere was a stretch of time between when specific mastering for CDs started and before the loudness war kicked in. Plenty of time for good recordings to happen.
- Nav_Panel 10mo agoIt is partly the medium's fault. A lot of the sins of CD/digital mastering wont fly on vinyl because there's physical constraints around what you can literally press into the record groove.
- detourdog 10mo agoThe mastering problems the early CDs suffered from was the move to analog to digital.
- mrob 10mo agoClassical labels were recording digitally even before CD players existed, to avoid the generation loss of recording to tape before transferring to vinyl. These recordings were later released on CD and mostly sound great. Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms (1985 release, first CD to sell over a million copies) also sounds great, and IMO better than most modern releases. Some early CDs were recorded using pre-emphasis, similar to the RIAA equalization used with vinyl records. CDs using this have a flag set in the metadata to tell the player to apply a matching de-emphasis filter. I sometimes see people blaming digital production for early CDs sounding "thin". I think it's more likely they heard rips of CDs using pre-emphasis that didn't have the proper de-emphasis applied. An average CD from the 80s sounds better than an average CD from any other era, because it pre-dates the loudness war, and because it's intended to be played on a good home stereo (which if you were buying CDs back then you could probably afford).
- detourdog 10mo agoI was thinking about back catalogs, not necessarily new recordings. Things recorded pre-1980.
- redwall_hp 10mo agoAll vinyl mastering is comparably horrible. Everything gets high-passed to hell because sub bass makes the needle jump. There's also a noise floor that limits your dynamics.
- detourdog 10mo agoIntrospect my favorite music media was cassette tape. I found them more robust and repairable then CDs.
- chrisweekly 10mo agoHuh? IME cassette tapes often begin to stretch after fewer than a hundred plays, which permanently ruins them.
- detourdog 10mo agoNever noticed that. My experience was that CDs were far from indestructible.
- zoklet-enjoyer 10mo agoI still have a working copy of AC/DC's Back in Black from 1996. I have older tapes that work fine too, but not sure how much they've been played since they're mostly from thrift stores.
- browningstreet 10mo agoNever. Now we have tiny music (digital), and big music (LPs), so no need for medium music (CDs).
- numpad0 10mo agoThey don't, because just about anything available is better than CDs. Vinyl craze is actually not about "warmth", just genuinely more data.
- mrob 10mo agoThe only additional data that (some) vinyl has over CDs is inaudible ultrasound. Ultrasound is intentionally omitted from CDs because they're intended for humans to listen to. In all audible aspects a correctly mastered CD release is closer to the original sound than any vinyl. And if you really want ultrasound (perhaps your dog enjoys it), you can get digital releases at higher sample rates.
- bpev 10mo agoIt's not really about the data on the vinyl, and not really about sounding closer to the original. The vinyl flavor comes from the equipment. It's an analog device interacting with the real world, so the process of getting the sound from the vinyl to the speakers introduces a different sound. And some music sounds more pleasing with that process. Could you achieve something similar by using the digital release and running it through a filter? Probably. But it definitely does impart a sound difference. Since CDs are digital sound, there's not really the same reason reason to use CDs over a digital release. edit: fwiw, I don't agree with the parent talking about more data, either. Since pretty much all the music these days is digital pretty much right through the entire recording process, I don't think this is all that relevant. I guess maybe sometimes they might use a different master for vinyl though? But regardless; if you're looking for "more data", you're not going to use either a CD or a vinyl.
- xboxnolifes 10mo agoIf it is to happen, CDs and CD packaging would need a rebranding. Part of vinyl popularity is the large sleeve surface that provides a large canvas for a piece of art. Another part is that you get a physically large analogue object that, while previously would be cumbersome, has become interesting in a heavily digital age.
- bryanlarsen 10mo agoAfaict this has already happened. Vinyl is about the big art, CDs are all about the pack ins. You get small books, pictures, stickers all packed into a cardboard box the size of a novel. Not jewel cases. At least for the K-pop artists my daughter listens to.
- piperswe 10mo agoThat is quite uncommon outside of the K-pop space - I buy a pretty large volume of new release CDs and don’t own a single one in the K-pop form factor
- roywiggins 10mo agoIn my experience your average indie CD these days comes in a cardboard sleeve or a digipak, which are slim and more resilient than jewel cases (which love to crack) but idk how to store them neatly, since the sizes vary in at least two dimensions. And they tend not to come with anything outside the disk, you're lucky if you get a booklet.
- criddell 10mo agoMy daughter is in to K-Pop and they do an excellent job on CD packaging. It's sometimes a very high quality photo book.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoI am the youngster in this case and I am going to tell you something but we really need to move off of spotify. I never really got onto spotify. I was always the youtube kind of guy, although I recently started listening to youtube music when I realized that my youtube feed was being impacted and youtube music's a better way to listen I guess We really need to get to pen-drives first before CD as well I guess. Like downloading songs from youtube to run them in pen-drive or just listen to locally would show us youngsters something I have been recently thinking of downloading all of my songs and uploading it to some vps so that I can listen to from anywhere. I feel like steps like these with media ownership would gradually help rediscovery of CD perhaps as well as we people would really love supporting the artists then as well and buying their CD might be the way if we end up downloading their musics. Pen-drives are ubiquotus as well so perhaps we might need the pen-drive era in between Also computers are absolutely removing the CD port. Even my desktop doesn't have it. I think it has the slot but I had my PC built in the store so they didnt really add it but literally no devices have CD except perhaps our car but I think even some new Cars might not have any CD's If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction and I would argue that Vinyl is much more so for the aesthetics itself as well which I feel like CD's aren't really that much for. So my point is, People aren't really using Vinyl for quality, they are using it for aesthetics. If CD's have a chance, they really need to get more on the ease of starting and pen-drives can help start the local-music movement.
- vr46 10mo agoCome and join the resurgent Minidisc movement!
- zoklet-enjoyer 10mo agoMD will always be the coolest format
- antod 10mo agoI'll have to pivot to DAT revival for max hipster cred.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo ago> Much less prone to degradation to vinyl huh... and I thought the vinyl craze happened because it's more durable out of ye old formats CDs are well known to oxydize in the span of decades of storage
- seg_lol 10mo agoPressed CDs do not fail in this way.
- bluGill 10mo agoPressed cds last well in general. Burned cds have a lot of issues. vinyl also wears out from using it, while cds are listen as much as you want with no issuse. I have ripped all my cds to flac on my NAS and put them on usb in whatever format as needed.
- topranks 10mo agoYou need to take care of them though. Scratched CDs don’t play good.
- Bratmon 10mo agoVinyl was infamous for degrading during use to the point where you could identify whether an album had been played more than a dozen times by the reduction in sound quality.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo agothis is perhaps a language barrier, but I'd call "measurement of getting worse during use" *durability*, while degradation is exactly about not-in-use deterioration...
- thaumasiotes 10mo agoRecords are also vastly inferior to CDs on that metric. They're not durable in any sense.
- kristopolous 10mo agoIt's about owning the physical object like a concert ticket stub only way more accessible. They already have the music on their phone they don't need to listen to it on a record
- rkuykendall-com 10mo agoI bought my kids all the songs on Tonie. Now I am buying them all the same songs on Yoto. I can't wait to just start burning CDs again.
- antod 10mo agoMy daughter (16) and her friends are. She's asked for specific CDs as presents, and is now the guardian of my brother and mine CD stashes dragged out of the wardrobes and attics. She'll trawl thrift shops for CDs too. New CDs in shops now are much much cheaper than they used to be as well. Giving up Spotify isn't on the cards yet though. I'll teach her how to rip songs next I reckon.
- Bayart 10mo agoCDs suffer from different forms of degradation. I wouldn't trust a 50 year old CD if there was one as I do a vinyl record I picked. Using the same master a CD would always sound better than a vinyl record, but I and many people would always take vinyl over a CD because of the praxis. Set and setting is important, in the end. Vinyl is more demanding in every aspects, it imposes more care and respect for what you're listening to.
- Symbiote 10mo agoThe oldest CDs are from 1982 (43 years old) and are still working perfectly fine. I don't have any that old, but I have some from the late 1980s which my dad bought. All still fine, my parents listen to them in the car.
- reaperducer 10mo agoI was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality. I think they are. There was an article in the newspaper in the last month or so saying that CD sales are on the rise, and mainstream pop stars are releasing their music on CDs again. As noted in another comment, I see CDs in music (and other) stores more and more where I live.