Has the "death of the CD" changed your CD buying habits?

Yeah, I think that's probably right. The second part of that line of thought is that it is cheaper to just pay more to get a copy of that one or two CDs that you suddenly find a need to listen to 10 years from now than it is to get complete collections of artists that will sit around taking up your space and that you never end up really enjoying.

 

I don't need my data to last a thousand years. If I did, I would use stone tablets or similar. Long-lasting, and doesn't require electricity to use. I just need it to last as long as I do.

FLAC is open source, which is important in the long-term, and popular. Word and Excel have been around for almost 25 years now. MP3? Closing in on 20 years. I am not worried that these popular formats will die off anytime soon. The ones I'd be worried about are the ones that fall out of favor over time. But you can always convert them if you see that coming in advance.

And the data itself? Backups have kept me going. I have files that have outlived records I've owned, CD's and even furniture.

 

I bought the Dylan Mono set, brand new, on Amazon marketplace for $50.00 + $3.99 shipping a few weeks ago. I hope CDs keep "dying"...,

 

Yeah, my company was so hot on the idea of farming-out production services to our branch offices in India and Ecuador, "Look! It only costs us 1/3 the salary for a FTE!!!"

Except... oh my dear... it takes four times as long to get anything done and we end up in court fighting Omissions & Errors lawsuits when we attempt to implement the incompetent work of our overseas offices.

I haven't heard "boo" about globalization in three or four years now. Some hype turns out to be just that, hype.

[End of out-of-character jingoistic rant]

 

Good points. Data is what's important and that's what needs to be preserved. But the presentation layer can change radically. So one needs to look at what digital artifacts they own and then figure out what needs to be preserved.

Family videos and photos, for one. The major formats will likely stay with us for decades, but there's no guarantee. JPEG has been around a long time, but what about TS video files? Perhaps one day they will fall out of favor and might need to be converted. Similar issue with non-standard / non-supported document of spreadsheet files. And "the cloud" longevity is only as long as the company you've entrusted your data with. Local backups imo are less risky.

As far as music...ripping to FLAC, to me, is a good solution. And regular backups, and of course physical media is good as well but the con is the storage space for a large collection.

 

Sorry but I need to post this quote from novelist Cormac McCarthy again:

"Well, I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so..."

A hundred years from now, our ancestors may take a brief sample of the countless albums of our era and conclude that it's not worth the effort. There's just too much to sort through, and the overwhelming majority of it is not very good.

Do what you want with your CDs, books, DVDs, whatever. They're there for you. Our great great grandchildren will pick and choose what they like from their culture, as well as what interests them from past ages. It's always been that way.

 

I can only state what I have witnessed with my own eyes when seeing the prices HMV charge and comparing them to Amazon. It may differ from title to title. There maybe titles out there that are the same price on the high street as they are online, although I haven't seen any recently myself. Special promotions in high street record stores like HMV might bring down the price of certain titles and make them the same price as online stores, but this is usually only on selected titles (such as the Neil Young albums you mentioned).

 

The quote is very true

The quote is very true, collecting, saving things of value is a very personnel thing to do,some people want to hold it in their hands while other could careless where it comes from, all personnel and to each his own as they say.
For me , it's about controlling what I think is valuable to me and I would not want to be without.
We are in a world of massive ,constant cyber attacks, so no your back up is not as safe as my cd's or books.
If NASA,the White House,IRS, FBI, credit agencies, wall street, and let's not forget our super high tech drone that Iran hacked and flew to their land and then landed for there new research program can be hacked, these backup servers are not safe from attack.
I have a simple life , no national secrets to encrypt or backup , things I value are hear with me, I can lay my hands on them anytime I want them, yes I could have a fire, I also have good insurance and would re establish my items as soon as possible .
Retired with many good stereos great speakers and lot's of good music to listen too, what more do you need?
I did run into a girl buying cd's not long ago at a music store and we got to talking about owning the cd verses down loading, she surprised me, she could have been me with her answer about owning the cd, she said her and her friends all like owning their music to do with as they please.
She was 22 years old, head firmly attached, feet on the ground and knowledgeable.

 

Good point about insurance. But that won't help restore family photos, videos or any personal data. And some music collections could take a very long time to rebuild.

You can have local and off-site backups that are immune, or at least highly resistant, to your security concerns. I have my all my lossless backups off-site, for example. If my house burned down tomorrow, I'd lose some recent stuff I've done but most of my rips and needledrops would be OK.

 

If that is your preference then all good. We should enjoy music for what it is and how we like it. I go by my own ears and the science. It is a bit disingenuous to say hide behind the science when it is the science that gave us vinyl, CDs and all the equipment that goes with it. With the latter, the order is more like this:
1. "hi res"
2. CD
3. HI FI VCR
4. Vinyl
5. Cassette tape

A hi res release can easily be a 1:1 bit perfect copy of the master tape. A red book audio CD can be a nominally perfect copy of the master tape, bounded to the limits of human hearing. It is functionally impossible for vinyl or cassette tape to be a perfect copy of anything. There are many properly controlled (ie double blind to eliminate placebo or expectation bias, same mastering and level matching) listening tests spanning decades which show no difference between 1 and 2 and then that order.

Btw, the link below is an example of a proper controlled study by the peak audio science body published in a peer reviewed paper comparing hi res with CD. The study has been in the public for nearly 10 years and has yet to be refuted.
http://drewdaniels.com/audible.pdf

 

It's not dead. It just smells funny. Put it in the fridge and it'll be fine.

Seriously, they are still selling millions. That makes it a zombie as its walking dead.

 

I have also noticed the prices of many used CDs going up. Whereas a few years ago they were all cheap, there appears to be more discrimination on the more sought after CDs - no doubt thanks to forums such as this one.

For example, try finding an early black triangle DSOTM CD for less than $50. It wasn't that long ago that you could pick one up for a few dollars when available.

I really think that we are in a window of cheap CDs that won't last. Take advantage of it.

 

I have a walkin , fire proof safe for the, I don't want to loose it stuff, but you make a good point.

 

Just out of curiosity, what is your solution around brickwalling?

 

Probably to buy old used CD's or new product from only the so called "Audiophile" labels.

 

Wrote this somewhere else on the forum, but basically I have an Audacity chain (basically a series of commands) that does the following:

- Reduces the amplification by about -14db, to give the next commands some breathing room
- Clipfix, at about 96% although sometimes I have to tweak that, depending on the CD
- EQ. This is the real tricky part and probably still a work in progress, but essentially I took the spectrogram results from one of my needledrops to make a kind of "vinyl sound signature". Then I saved that setting and apply it to each file
- Re-amplify. Again, I may have to tweak this per album as I want it loud, but not clipped loud
- Output to MP3 V1. I use these lossy files for my day-to-day and portable use

It's not perfect, but it can work in the background which means I can let it run while I'm doing other things, and I can hear a noticeable difference. At least enough where it's not ear-bleeding anymore. And, as you would expect, the DR numbers are usually 3 or 4 values higher than the original CD.

 

Yes that is what I usually do. However a bit limited to newer material as many of them have brickwalled the digital version - ironically in some cases also when released on hi res. The vinyl version of new releases are generally not that great either, they don't sound anywhere near as good as many of the pre 1990s pressings.

 

Thanks. I presume it can be outputted to the original native 16bit without in-between losses?

 

I'm waiting for an 80-CD box of Grateful Dead to crush my porch in three weeks. The next Dylan Boot Series is allegedly '65/'66 in 2 and 5 or 6-CD format plus a rumored 18-CD box of something or other to possibly retain copyright on '66 material. Talk about a potential gold mine. Well, for me and those of us who care about that.

CDs of certain music may be dead, but there are many areas that are not only still well-represented on CD, they aren't actually well-represented enough. I like the physical media. Go do your own thing and don't worry about trends until such time as they infringe on your ability to obtain what you want. That's what I do.

 

Correct, I could output to losslees or uncompressed WAV / AIFF, if I wanted to.

 

An 80-CD box set? How do you even approach a huge set like that? Even at a pace of playing one CD a week, it would start to drive me crazy after the 6th or 7th disc. And they are probably 75 minute CDs. I could probably learn to speak Russian as a 2nd language in less time than it would take me to listen to and remember what was on each disc!

 

I strap on a piano movers harness, do a shot of Jameson, drag that bastard up the front steps, do another shot of Jameson, throw a ribeye in the frying pan, peel an ear of corn, dole out some potato salad (w/ egg, of course), and take my chances. This ain't rocket science, stout yeoman.

Oh, and to whittle it down, I'll focus on '67-'75. The rest is rather ancillary, but I couldn't miss out on the whole tamale. But for clarity, I was front row for the '83 show and the first set smoked.

 

That's the crazy thing. You get people talking about hi-res like Neil Young, but they don't actually address the real problem - mastering. And it's odd for Neil Young not to say anything about mastering when his own music generally has pretty high dynamic range.

 

Cd, SACD, DVD-A, Blu-ray-audio, HD-downloads and vinyl are just "containers".

I have equipment to playback all of them. I choose per individual title the best sounding container. I will not buy CD if download sounds better.