I can't quite figure out why everyone hates CDs? I still like them, and they were/are a great format! I will take them over vinyl lps any day, no matter what some music snobs try to say. Vinyl sounds warmer? In what parallel universe? With snap, crackle and pop? No thank you!

I was a vinyl junkie, but the minute I bought my first CD in 1984 I was hooked! I loved the jewel box (and now the cool mini-lp sleeves), the booklets, and the disc itself.

Well, all I can say is that a ton of us here at IMWAN sure love 'em.

I'm a fan of hard drives with music files on them instead. One small (in physical size) drive can hold a lot more than several shelves full of CDs, and for me there is no real draw to keep buying them, much as I am a huge music fan.

Really interesting article. The theory is that noise actually makes records sound better.

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/bas/0408/

My understanding is that the problem with cd's is that the sampling rate was set too low to get all of the musical information. The sampling rate was originally set so that Beethoven's 9th would fit on 1 cd. Over the years, the tech folks have come up with a number of ways to compensate for the lower then optimal sampling rate.

But in a world where most folks think mp3's are good enough.....

I like CDs. But, as I've said here before, I clearly remember some of my old LPs sounding better/warmer than my CDs of the same titles.

I don't hate CDs--in fact, some of my best friends are CDs.

Some of mine are seedy, too.

If I hated CD's, I'd need to have my head examined. Well, come to think of it, I need to have my head examined anyway.

I don't hate CDs. I hate the fact that people are saying they won't exist in a few years.

I was playing the new vinyl Who compilation today. Brand new vinyl, relatively new stylus, Thorens turntable. Guess what? I couldn't get over the annoying (to me) surface noise. I then cleaned the brand new album in my VPI vacuum record cleaner and it still sounded no better.

I try to occasionally play a record or two for old times sake. I do like the experience of playing a record, looking at the large cover, etc - I just have to go back to CDs because of my HATRED of surface noise.

Downloads are not even in my equation.

Not to be too serious, (it is ICEWAN, after all) but it seems to me that most of the people who bitch about not liking CD's have nothing against the format, but the fact that their original formats - cassettes and vinyl - are no longer available, and they were made unavailable by both the the music industry and the electronics industry. This meant that people didn't have a choice - as their equipment or their copies wore out, they had to replace their collections with overpriced copies of music they've owned for years. They don't hate CD's, they hate what they represent.

I think that one of the big reasons why sales are down is that most listeners have finished converting their collections over, and the reason why people in the music industry want CD's to go away is so that they can do it all over again. It's especially important with the kids doing the downloading thing; it's the last chance for a revenue grab before the grave.

I like them; they're much easier to store and transport, play on the go, and don't have the environmental sensitivity of vinyl or cassettes. It's also just smarter to have a format where there is no physical contact between medium and reader. But, there are still hundreds of cassettes that I have not upgraded to CD, and am not likely to. I don't listen to them a lot (my tastes have shifted), but if I do, I still have a player. And for those that I have converted, I don't think the music industry has gotten that much from me; I'm good with second hand.

Jason

We share this hatred.

All my LPs sounded terrible. I was not good about keeping them clean and my family was no better. The LPs sit on the turntable and rust. People would take them off the turntable and just set them down, no sleeve, no jacket. They had fingerprints, dust and worse all over them. People would pick the needle up by hand and drop it or grind it down on the song they wanted. People would wipe off the vinyl with their shirts or paper towels. Somebody'd walk through the room and the needle would bounce across the surface like it was a seismograph. The LPs skipped like crazy.

So I love CDs. I understand that the digitizing process may not be up to a completely accurate representation of the analogue sound, but you have to listen a lot closer than I do to tell the difference. CDs sound fine to me.

i can't even imagine listening to a vinyl record anymore. the hiss, pops, ticks, skips, and needle noise are horrible.

vinyl is a fad right now among the young because it is so damn cheap to buy, all us old guys have traded it in and there is tons of it out there at rock bottom prices. been to a goodwill or mission store lately? a used neil young "harvest" CD for $8 - $10 or a vinyl copy for 50¢? when i was in college i'd had no choice.

as for the so-called 'audiophiles" who praise the assets of vinyl, my opinion is that they are full of shit and just don't want to liquidate their vinyl collections and buy them all over again on CD.

and if you really want your CD's to sound like vinyl, buy an equalizer, spend the time to re-EQ every CD you listen to and add more bass, and run a room vaporizor everytime you listen to a CD

renny with thoughts on a sunday morning

Great post Jason.

This is essentially the CDs problem. We (the collectors) own them all already. The back catalog of most of the major artists has been exhausted to death (see The Who).

The next generation download, they don't buy the physical product like we do or did.

Now that everyone can afford a computer and an IPOD, I don't see this stopping.
btw...in my house we own 3 laptops, 3 IPODs and 1 Zune.

23 years on, and I'm still replacing my vinyl with CD's! There's still some albums that have never been issued in the format, and at this point I doubt they ever will.


Jeff

While cd's have drastically closed the gap in the last 10 years, I do believe that WITH THE RIGHT PLAYBACK EQUIPMENT vinyl can sound better then cd's. Problem is it requires a substantial investment to really hear the difference; mass market turntables tend to suck.

By the time I was able to (temporarily) afford a good enough table to hear what I had been missing (Well Tempered Turntable) I'd already gotten rid of much of my vinyl. As I mentioned above, I really do hate surface noise & inner groove distortion. Another big gripe is that in the day of vinyl, quality among pressings really varied (USA MCA was the worst!), so it's somewhat of a wash for me.

Right now I own a Thorens table with a Blue Point going into a Acurus preamp, & it often sounds slightly better then my mid 90's cd front end (Esoteric transport/Illuminati cable/PS Audio DAC) at about 1/3 of the cost.

My point is, please don't diss vinyl until you've had the chance to hear it (& compare it to cd) in a truly high end system.

If mastered correctly, all CDs would sound better than vinyl.

Jeff raises a critical point here. If you divide the world into "replacers" like Jeff (and myself) and those who primarily buy new releases, I think you might find very different approaches to music acquisition. Before proceeding, I do recognize that almost no one is 100% in either camp -- there is the occasional new release that I buy, and there are "new" repackagings of older material that are not strictly speaking replacements, but my collecting is dominated by CDs that were at one point LPs.

Anyway, it seems like the people buying new music only (or new music primarily) care most about ease of use, portability, etc. and to a far lesser extent about sound quality or about the "record buying experience". These are the successors to the people who bought cassette tapes when that medium was at its height. Easy to stick in the car player or carry while jogging, and no worse sounding than the AM radio, they were clearly inferior to LPs as to sound quality and yet they sold like hotcakes.

Not that this makes me special in any way, but I never owned a cassette. I felt (and feel), like many on this Board, that this was a trade-off I was unwilling to make. And so the CD entered the world as a "miracle medium" - with a remarkable balance of ease of use and sound fidelity. While there were, and are, those who still believe that CD sound cannot match that of vinyl, most people could find very little fault with them. As they were just as easy to use as cassettes and sounded as good as LPs, it's no wonder they took the world by storm, and -- for a while -- "unified" the market.

But now we've entered an era where the market is fragmenting again. Downloads of MP3s are even easier than CDs (or cassettes), and the majority of the world seems inclined to gravitate in this direction. I suspect this will always be the case, and although I wish it were otherwise, I am not Quixotic enough to waste energy bemoaning the fact.

Those left behind will have CDs, just as those left way behind still have LPs. If I was right about most of us being "replacers", however, then -- as for Jeff -- the available "product" will grow more and more scant for us. I'd guess that 99.9% of what's ever going to be on CD is already there. If record companies didn't think they could sell enough CD units before, how could they possibly think so now?