Which physical format will be playable the longest?

According to that chart, SSDs last longer than HDDs… even when used regularly…
That can’t be right or have things changed in the past 10 years?

 

Vinyl and shellac will last the longest if treated with respect. Any single unit of digital format is prone to digital failure; it works fine one second, then the next second, it just stops, often with no possibility of recovery. Analog formats are often still playable but with some sort of damage artifacts.

 

Apparently, I'm ahead of the game when it it comes to their "Regular Use" numbers. Although I really do need to get some VHS cassettes digitized.

 

Not the only peculiar data in that table.

 

The lifespan of digital storage media is less of a limitation than the long term availability of drives able to read them. Optical discs will outlast manufacturers' continued production of optical drives.

 

LP discs will be playable for more years than any digital disc will be. CD will be supported longer than DVD or Blu-Ray will be in terms of digital disc formats.

 

Yup. I switched over to CD almost immediately upon them being launched ….. perfect sound forever after all! That makes a bunch of mine 40 years old. Haven’t had one rot yet. There are plenty I don’t play, but not because they won’t play. Why did I buy the greatest hits of the Little River Band?

 

Well........
I bought mine cause it was $1.
Can't say I've played it yet.

 

I've been buying more CDs than vinyl because CDs tend to be much cheaper, but they aren't exactly cheap. Depends what you are buying. I just got a couple of INXS titles for $3.99 at my local used CD store, but I also picked up a used David Crosby CD at the same store that was $10.99.

I am still buying some SACDs, which aren't cheap, and brand new CDs tend to cost $10 or more. So it all adds up. But, new vinyl is $20+, and probably most of it is $30 and up, so CDs are still the better value. I just kind of go album by album and decide which format I want that album on and what I am comfortable spending. I don't have a One-Step yet, but I'd like one eventually. Folk Singer might be the title I pull the trigger on.

So while CD is overall a much better value, I was thinking about this topic recently in light of my Denon CD player failing and Denon saying, sorry, we can't fix it. So it's now a door stop. What happens if my Rega fails? Or my 10 year old Oppo? Do I replace those, with machines that are either a) old, b) not being produced any more, c) about to stop being produced, and/or d) cannot be repaired if they fail? And do I keep putting money into a format that is basically in the process of failing?

I could instead by records that, while they cost more, they a) hold their value better, and b) will remain playable, because record players are much simpler devices, and c) have a brighter looking future.

I guess the worst case scenario is that I can rip all my CDs (as long as I have a working CD drive on my PC), and then move to a streaming solution. So I wouldn't lose all the music. But this does have me wondering if buying CDs is really the smart move at this point. It sort of feels like throwing money away, and all I'm going to be left with is a bunch of worthless discs. I sometimes see people talking of a CD resurgence, which is nonsense. There won't be a meaningful CD resurgence like there has been with vinyl, and for CDs to "come back" as some folks say (in response to a slight uptick in sales) they first have to go away, which they haven't.

 

True story ….. years ago I had my car broken into in NYC. Dug the CD player out of the days, took my roller blades (yes, a long time ago) and all my CDs ….. EXCEPT the greatest hits of the LRB. That one they left on the passenger side seat.

 

Patience! Patience! If you've got 20 years to spare, you'll experience the resurgence of cd's!

 

Hypothetical experiment.Take any album of your choice. Buy one copy new in vinyl format.Buy another copy new in CD format.Play both sporadically for 50 years.Treat both normally without kid gloves.Store in a house without perfect humidity or perfect temperature ..Which format is more likely to still play perfectly after 50 years?

 

Well, ideally CDs will hold around this level of volume indefinitely. Maybe they have found some sort of a base that will allow for new pressings and good quality players to still be made in low quantities. But I'm afraid this format will eventually die and everyone who was buying CDs will feel like a chump if the amount of functional players dwindles to nearly nothing. That will probably take a long time though. Nothing to worry about now I suppose, but it has me thinking of how wise it is to continue to sink money into this format going forward.

And thoughts of a meaningful resurgence, IMO, are wishful thinking. CDs haven't all but disappeared like vinyl did, and they don't have the collectability factor vinyl has, nor the same kind of playing experience, so the two situations to me are apples and oranges.

 

I was at a meeting between NARA and the White House in 2016 planning the transfer of WHCA’s 60TB video archive under the Presidential Records Act. Options on the table were Blu-Ray (which they used for working storage already) and the raw and finished video on RAID storage. This is the first time I’ve heard that NARA considers consumer media suited to archiving.

 

20 yrs from now, same thread, same forum, we'll talk again !

 

It's hard to be certain between DVD and Bluray. The odds are that these formats will have about the same lifespan since bluray players play DVDs just fine. But neither of these are niche formats as are the other two. And niche formats are likely to die-off faster than are widely popular formats.

If I had to bet though, DVDs will only look worse and worse on future hardware. This is because hardware manufacturers will put less and less effort into upscaling DVDs to make these look decent on high-res monitors as the overall consumer interest in playing DVDs continues to fade.

 

Vinyl records have been around since the late 1940s, about 75 years ago. Right now I'm listening to a record pressed in 1972 (50 years old!) on a turntable manufactured in 1964. It's not playing "perfectly" but it is perfectly acceptable.

When the CD format reaches 75 years old in the mid-2050s, the discs will likely still play perfectly, but only if you can find a functioning CD player. Otherwise they won't play at all. That's why I rip all my CDs to digital files, which I can transfer to any new digital media that comes along.

 

What's your logic about that? I can see that specialist firms would like to continue making CD-only players BUT maybe just Blu-ray mechs are available in that distant future?

My feeling is small firms cannot tool up CD laser and sled assemblies etc the way they can with vinyl parts, that everyone depends on big makers for that stuff. Am I wrong? It's not my area of expertise.

 

Regardless of handling, I'm afraid there simply won't be CD players, unless I'm wrong that the sled basics have become easy to tool up. I know there are some real cheap boom box transports, however my impression is these need big resources to design and produce. I hope that I am mistaken!

 

Well SSDs don't have moving parts. Their lifetime constraint was the number of read/write cycles-maybe that has been engineered around???
EDIT: per this, seems the lifespan is pretty long depending on the exact technology, and maybe longer than the associated electronics
SSD life span: How long does a solid-state drive last?

 

There will be audiophile market CD players longer than most. HDMI is a big issue for 2 channel audiophiles, many of who don't want an AVR for that. HDMI only Blu-Ray players won't be an option for them.

 

M-disc DVD and Blu-Ray uses a non-dye optical layer, claiming near-permanent recording. Like all optical, the drives and media are now "get them while you can"



(I cross-flashed my M-Disc drive to another model since I'd never use the media)

 

Which ever format wins out in the end, the biggest problem you'll surely face is having a player that still works to play them...

 

MFSL gold cd's.

 

I remember that heat was also a big issue back when the first few generations of NVME SSDs were released.
Some NVME SSDs had heatspreaders to ensure cooling would be sufficient when the M.2 slot was crammed right next to the GPU.
But that was about 8 to 10 years ago…
Maybe things have changed a lot?