Your forum? Well of course. I’ve been here since 2004 and I don’t think I have ever seen it as your forum, but now I know better.,
The irony is that mastering engineers were given unprecedented control over what they produced, no longer restricted by the limitations of Vinyl; but instead of flourishing and bringing us a new dawn, they lost the plot and destroyed a lot of music along the way. It's like they got drunk on the options and mastered through the resulting hangover. Still, it's not all lost. Tonight I played both the Vinyl of Tom Waits Heartattack and Vine, and the CD. On my system (YMMV) the CD sounds better. So there are instances. It's just that they're too few.
I’m a vinyl guy, but when buying live albums I still go to cd because of the continuity, not having to stop my home concert experience every 20 minutes to turn the other side. Just got the new Tom Petty live set on cd. So, in some ways the original promise IS kept.
One missed opportunity was forcing stereo onto the CD. First, it created the absurdity of having to master mono recordings onto two tracks. A mono flag that the equipment could have recognized would have allowed mono recordings to be stored on a single track, eliminating the necessity to "match" two tracks and allowing a longer duration since mono tracks would have taken up half as much storage. An entirely mono CD could have run 148 minutes initially and 160 minutes later on. Compilations that contained both mono and stereo tracks could have run longer than eighty minutes. On a more esoteric level, the CD could have allowed for multichannel recordings, even if there was no intention to roll that out initially. I know that Quadraphonic left a bad taste in the mouths of both record labels and equipment manufacturers. However, just allowing for the possibility in the spec would have meant that the capability could have been included in high end players as the format became more common. Then, you could have had artists produce new music in that form while older Quad recordings could have been dusted off and remastered for CD. So long people understood that Quad CDs could only allow 37 minutes and six-channel only 24 minutes. Of course, this would have created the absurdity of some old 70's Quad albums needing a separate disc per side, but by 1990, some might have actually bought those. Obviously, SACDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays solved all of the above with better fidelity and longer running times, but none of them have become the standard for music consumption. Not that big of a deal for multichannel music since that is a niche market anyway. Not including a mono flag in the original CD redbook standard, however, was definitely the result of mental flatulence.
As a guess, I would say that your CD player's laser read mechanism is no longer up to spec (i.e. it's dying).
If it's the only web community you spend the most time with, don't you consider it somewhat "your" forum? Like "your" parking place, or "your breakfast" when the waitress serves it? I know my wife refers to it as "my" forum.
I have a couple of Mozart operas on CD that take up 3 discs each, and the breaks don't coordinate with the acts of the operas. EDIT: ... and it's Ludwig van.
The only reason they couldn't get as much of that as they wanted on vinyl was because the medium could not support it. But they did push it to, and beyond the limit, as my experience working record stores can attest.
Have you met my Ignore file? Maybe the last time you were a member hear under another name, perhaps...?
My age bracket puts me in a unique position of being pretty objective about this. To wit: - When I was a wee tyke in Canada, there were only vinyl albums (I had a few; my older sister and my parents many, and I even got to spin a few 78 rpms that my Grandparents had) - My hockey-hair cousin had 8-tracks, and I played with those a few times (this was in the early 80s) - When I was in elementary and junior high school, it was mostly cassettes - When I was in junior high to high school, it switched to all CDs - When I hit my early/mid-20s, everyone was downloading So, I went through everything, basically in real-time, while still in my 20s. My conclusion: CDs were and are by far the best format for music consumption.
Pure, Perfect Sound, Forever. Hardly. Having said that I have to say I was very, very enthusiastic about CDs and bought my first Sony player in ... forgot if it was 1985 or 1986. By that point in time quality control for records seemed like a long-forgotten thing. Getting a format that solved the pops and ticks problems associated with records was an extremely welcome development. Unfortunately, my friends and I got spoiled with some early SH remasters and somehow got the idea all CDs were going to sound like that, be sourced from 'the original master tapes' , etc., etc. So, lived up to the ideal? Nope, IMO. I actually got really tired of CD by the mid-nineties and started migrating back to vinyl records. I'll take the opportunity to introduce a Beatles theme here. I got tired of Revolver. At first I thought I'd finally begun to outgrow my liking for the Beatles. Then I thought, wait a minute -- I've always loved the hell out of this album. It's still a great album. Must be something else. Then, while in a music shop I saw a still sealed West Germany copy of the stereo version of A Hard Day's Night up on the wall display. Man, I wanted that. I began to recall how good my UK Beatles sounded (that I'd sold off during the vinyl purges of the '80s and '90s). That started me down the road. I can't remember when or if I've ever had my breath taken away listening to a CD. Maybe. But certainly an exceedingly rare occurrence. But having said that I just upgraded my CD/SACD player and am enjoying the hell out of it. My whole collection sounds new. So while I'm a big vinyl record fan, I enjoy my CDs a lot too and many of them sound wonderful. Some perhaps even approaching breath-taking, depending on volume level and level of inebriation. And since so many people have gone toward streaming, CDs seem to be on sale. I picked about 20 used bargains over the past month or so. So, no, they haven't lived up to that initial hype, but nothing ever does. You have evaluate things on their own merits, not the hype and advertising. In that light, I like my CDs just fine.
If they want it to sound like a concert hall, why record in a studio? Most concert halls are bad for recording anyway even with great gear, which halls do they mean? Concert hall sound is a dumb goal for any format, studio sound is way better.