The Death of the CD?

[mathias broucek]

. . . and in real terms so inexpensive.
When I started collecting recordings (LPs) they cost up to ten times what it cost me to go to a concert. Nowadays I could buy at least 5 CDs for the price of a concert ticket and often more.
We are truly blessed.

Couldn't agree more. It's hard to see how prices can decline further from where they are now either in terms of bumper boxes for £1 or £2 per disc or from silly £0.01 + P&P Marketplace offers.

However I guess we are benefiting now from too many recordings having been made in the past. As the number of high volume new studio recordings declines, the availability of proper classical material on the high street hits rock bottom and as fewer and fewer people listen to classical music at all, I wonder where we will end up? Any economists on here that fancy taking a view?

[DublinJimbo]

I have often brought a cd home from the shop to find one of the little teeth has broken off and is rattling around inside.

Often? Of my 1500-odd CDs, I'd say perhaps twenty had this problem. It certainly isn't a deal killer for the format.

Unfortunately for everyone here, i cant say enough about my love for the vinyl lp. This love is magnified as i sit back and watch people of all generations being herded through one format-change after another, each one heralding a new 'golden dawn', while vinyl prices sink lower and my library grows bigger..

Good for you and your love for vinyl and LPs. Personally, I don't for a minute regret getting rid of all mine. Now I'm free of all the anti-static cloths, the stylus cleaning, the disc wiping, and the oh-so-careful slipping out of the disc from the inner sleeve which was such a feature of my vinyl days. Now I'm free of the precision positioning of the stylus so as to lower it onto the clear bit that indicated the gaps between tracks. And, most importantly, now I'm free of the clicks and the plinks and the plonks which plagued the listening experience.

That said, there's no doubt that CDs have their limitations also, and that's why I've so enthusiastically embraced the whole download thing, to the extent that my d/l collection now outnumbers my collection of physical CDs. The advantages of downloads are many, not least the greatly enhanced ability to find individual pieces of music, or compositions by a particular composer, or performances by particular conductors or soloists or chamber groups or whatever, or music of different types, whether chamber of vocal or song or orchestral. Just as the CD freed me from my vinyl days of plinks and plonks and scratches, so my download collection has freed me from the hassle of constantly buying or building extra shelf space and has eliminated the memory games which regularly thwart my efforts to locate a specific CD or a specific performance which I might fancy listening to.

Obviously the old adage of horses for courses applies, and I am well aware that many people resist the move to downloads because they prefer having a physical object and being provided with a printed booklet (even the minuscule ones which come with CDs). My pointing out the advantages I've outlined earlier and the fact that downloads are increasingly accompanied with booklets in digital form still fails to convince these CD diehards. So why don't we all simply agree to go our own ways and adopt whatever approach suits each of us best. As I say, despite being an enthusiastic advocate of downloads, I still buy the occasional CD (usually in the case of vocal music when the download doesn't come with a digital booklet, or when the physical product is available at a lower price than the equivalent CD-quality download), and will continue to do so as circumstances dictate. I'm happy with this compromise, and I would hope that others would similarly show a bit of flexibility. As to the actual topic of this thread ('Is CD dead?'), I'd say most definitely not. The 'majors' may possibly be making end-of-the-era noises, but whatever they do will in no way affect the increasing number of independent labels (whose Classical output tends to be of much greater interest these days anyway).

[french frank]

Please note: I have merged Is CD dead? from Platform 3 with this one.

[mathias broucek]

Please note: I have merged Is CD dead? from Platform 3 with this one.

Thanks Frank. Appreciate what you do here.

[jayne lee wilson]

This reads a bit like an inverted Brennan advert...

I will never leave analogue/vinyl. It turns on instantly. You can see it with your eyes, and feel it with your fingers as well as your (ears/mind/soul). You can repair it rather than replace it. You can adjust more than one setting at any one time. You can read the cover like a newspaper, a good book, or an ancient manuscript, which can contain in-depth artworks.

The first thing that goes wrong with a cd is the central clip on the jewel-case breaks off, then the disc is loose, then it gets scratched, then you realise they are not indestructable, then you resign to paying another £5/£15/£25 on new copy, then you realise later re-issues have been redesigned and are not as good, etc.

We talk now of digital resolution finally comparing to analogue; imagine how good analogue would be if we had continued to innovate in that field. Digital attempts to represent the music, but its just a sample - broken down into code. Analogue is the music.

[charles t]

I've still to buy a personal CD player (see my posting on that Death CD thread!) but is it worth it if they are going to stop these things?

3VS: A little while back, my Sony CD player went the way of all (non)flesh. Attempting to find a sonically sound replacement (excluding the Chinese-Made-For-Walmart variety) was arduous.

If you ever decide to purchase a player, try to find the Bose player...(manufactured around 2002, or so.)

Mine is model PM-1 (Made in China!).

[jayne lee wilson]

Yes, but the numbers can't tell us why so many intelligent music lovers keep (annoyingly!) insisting that higher-res digital just sounds better... my earlier quote "not everything we hear can be measured, not everything we measure can be heard" - came IIRC from Bob Katz, a very distinguished remastering engineer. No-one would seriously claim to hear like a bat or a cat, but what we can hear seems to be affected by higher frequencies. When I fitted Townshend supertweeters to my Harbeth C7s most of the musical frequency range was audibly improved...

I find myself caught between accepting the common sense of measurable techniques, and finding incredible the idea that all the anecdotal reports of the audible superiority of hi-res digital are a sort of mass self-delusion - the latter seems as far-fetched as any other accusation made against close listeners...

I suspect quite a bit of the problem is that 192k samples/sec (which is what is meant 192kHz signals)+ 24 bit samples is totally wasted on the human ear - hower it is a better choice for the mixing and filtering process before the final production (quite well explained in the article I referenced) - if you try to do any sharp cut off filters digitally then you need much more headroom in the bits otherwise you run into representation problems (eg if you use 8 bits/sample this handles -128 to + 127 but if you need to represent +129 then you have run out of bits - one approach is to convert to floating point but easier to use more bits and handle in integer format - many of the early digital processing systems did not have the computing power of today's computers and several shortcuts were taken - I suspect it is the presence of these shortcuts and the artifacts they imposed that could be heard in some of the early CDs - even today I suspect some of the filtering software may still have some problems that could be fixed by better mathematics in their algorithms

[old khayyam]

Yes, but the numbers can't tell us why so many intelligent music lovers keep (annoyingly!) insisting that higher-res digital just sounds better... my earlier quote "not everything we hear can be measured, not everything we measure can be heard" - came IIRC from Bob Katz, a very distinguished remastering engineer. No-one would seriously claim to hear like a bat or a cat, but what we can hear seems to be affected by higher frequencies. When I fitted Townshend supertweeters to my Harbeth C7s most of the musical frequency range was audibly improved...

I find myself caught between accepting the common sense of measurable techniques, and finding incredible the idea that all the anecdotal reports of the audible superiority of hi-res digital are a sort of mass self-delusion - the latter seems as far-fetched as any other accusation made against close listeners...

I agree with most of that and it constitutes part of my overall view. This does, however, present us with the danger of the topic becoming wider than any thread can accomodate, ie, the argument that 'if something cannot be quantified, it doesnt exist'; which expands into 'the search for proof of the existence of the human spirit'..

[Frances_iom]

..When I fitted Townshend supertweeters to my Harbeth C7s most of the musical frequency range was audibly improved...
.

there could be many reasons - eg a better match between your speakers and the driving amplifier - as my referenced article pointed out perfect blind testing is very diificult but whereas having spent much money on a system I suspect most if not all will claim it sounds better even though such results seem extremely difficult to reproduce in blind tests

[Frances_iom]

Is that for sine waves or does it also work for musical notes with higher frequency harmonics?

might I suggest a primer on the work of Mssr Fourier - tho I guess being now well over 200 years it might it might have been ignored in modern science and maths.

The key problem lies in the filtering of the sampled signal - the smaller the diiference between the upper frequency of interest and the haf sampling frequency the more difficult it is to realise the filter - some of the differences between CDs might well be audible diffences in the effect of this filter (eg simpler + cheaper to start frequency roll off at a lower freqency thus removing some of the top).

[MrGongGong]

might I suggest a primer on the work of Mssr Fourier - tho I guess being now well over 200 years it might it might have been ignored in modern science and maths.

The key problem lies in the filtering of the sampled signal - the smaller the diiference between the upper frequency of interest and the haf sampling frequency the more difficult it is to realise the filter - some of the differences between CDs might well be audible diffences in the effect of this filter (eg simpler + cheaper to start frequency roll off at a lower freqency thus removing some of the top).

FFT filters work for me on a daily basis !
nice to see old Nyquist getting a mention without whom none of this would be possible !
now who is going to write the book on how the low pass filter shaped music in the 20th Century (really I do mean it ) ?

[rauschwerk]

Prof. Peter Fellgett, co-inventor of Ambisonics, wrote an article in Wireless World in the 1980s demonstrating that the change from analogue to digital audio meant swapping one set of imperfections for another. The companies who developed CD did themselves a great disservice by claiming that the new medium gave "perfect sound forever." It was a commercial development and therefore had to be brought to market within a certain time so that money could be recouped and the product improved (by which I mean the hardware and software in recorders and players).

I am happy to accept that some can hear better sound with sampling rates over 44.1k per second and more than 16 bits per sample. But the fate of the super audio CD suggests that not enough care about it to cause it to supersede 'bog standard' CD.

[MrGongGong]

One thing that has struck me is that for most people the attraction of CD has nothing at all to do with sound quality, actually for most people low bitrate mp3s are perfectly acceptable ! What people like about the CD as opposed to cassette or lp is the ease of access to tracks and portability, sound quality (which for most of us here ? is very important indeed ) comes way down the list of priorities. I noticed when teenagers started getting MP3 players that they were always trying to cram as much music onto them as possible but using lower and lower bitrates so that , to my ears, the music sounded like it was recorded in a washing machine but perfectly OK for them ! I think that there is a large amount of psychoacoustics going on here , just as when people are playing their R&B tracks on their phone on the bus (what Ian MacMillan calls "Sodcasting" ) I think they can hear the bass even though it's not physically there ! (like the fundamental tone of some bells or resultant bass organ stops )...... if you have conditioned yourself to hear something then given the right stimulus with a bit missing you will fill in the missing bit

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I'm puzzled by those who "knock" the quality of early CDs. The first one I bought - Dutoit's Daphnis & Chloe - sounded ravishing on its first appearance, and still does today. It's true that there were some DG recordings that sounded agressive and strident, such as Bernstein's Franck D minor Symphony, but that had nothing to do with the medium, just DG's poor digital recording set-up in those days.

[cloughie]

I'm puzzled by those who "knock" the quality of early CDs. The first one I bought - Dutoit's Daphnis & Chloe - sounded ravishing on its first appearance, and still does today. It's true that there were some DG recordings that sounded agressive and strident, such as Bernstein's Franck D minor Symphony, but that had nothing to do with the medium, just DG's poor digital recording set-up in those days.

The Dutoit D&C had excellent sound. It had however one shortcoming in common with a few other early CDs of long works it was unbanded. Later reissues rectified this.