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Happy 29th birthday, Compact Disc!!

I still think that CDs are by far the best physical media available. Sure, with today's tech there is even better, like the SACD and those of course can even be made to play as CDs on machines that don't have SACD capability. SACDs, or anything else, never really became a standard though and I would say that even if it's technically better that the old CD standard, that it's difficult to actually hear the improvement that one gets with that, and with a well recorded, well mastered CD on a great system is really difficult to better with anything else.
 
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RunOutGroove said:
I still think that CDs are by far the best physical media available.
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I agree about CDs. They are really the best all-around physical media out there for many reasons (which I won't rehash here). The problem with SACDs and any other later music physical media formats is that they never really took off in a big way like CDs did, and therefore their availability is much more limited and subsequently more expensive as well. CDs have been produced in vast quantities worldwide for decades now and are still being widely produced. They're everywhere in huge numbers and will continue to remain so for many decades to come. This means there will remain significant demand to play them for a long time to come too. This could be met by the great many used, still-functional CD players out there, but also from newly manufactured ones as well, and that's not even including all of the computer CD drives for which there will, in addition, continue to be a demand to play those old CD-ROMs out there, which also happen to contain so many of those classic computer games beloved by game aficionados. So anyway, CDs may be down over the past few decades, (but which I think will plateau at some point) but they're definitely not out.
 
intro6 said:
I agree about CDs. They are really the best all-around physical media out there for many reasons (which I won't rehash here). The problem with SACDs and any other later music physical media formats is that they never really took off in a big way like CDs did, and therefore their availability is much more limited and subsequently more expensive as well. CDs have been produced in vast quantities worldwide for decades now and are still being widely produced. They're everywhere in huge numbers and will continue to remain so for many decades to come. This means there will remain significant demand to play them for a long time to come too. This could be met by the great many used, still-functional CD players out there, but also from newly manufactured ones as well, and that's not even including all of the computer CD drives for which there will, in addition, continue to be a demand to play those old CD-ROMs out there, which also happen to contain so many of those classic computer games beloved by game aficionados. So anyway, CDs may be down over the past few decades, (but which I think will plateau at some point) but they're definitely not out.
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No doubt they are successful because they are a commonly adopted format, compact, durable, cheap to produce, but also capable of great sound. I feel like the Redbook standard that was created so many years ago still holds up and that there still isn't really anything available that sounds dramatically better. I figure that to these ears anyway, until they create some new tech that has some kind of big jump in sound quality, that CDs are nearly as good as you can get given the right playback equipment. SACDs and reel to reel are arguably better from a sound quality standpoint, but I don't believe that they are so much further ahead that most folks would even notice that big a difference...
 
Yes. IMO the Redbook standard was sound and covered what was needed audio-wise, even though certain people here disagree with that assessment. However, that opinion is in the extreme minority when compared to the overall general population who did wholeheartedly accept it. My CDs in general have such excellent sound that it's really hard to imagine that they could be any better. Any "improvement" would be so incrementally tiny as to be practically inaudible. That's because the CD albums I've bought have pretty much been recorded and mastered well. That's the key difference. I know this is the case because I also ended up getting a small number of CDs which weren't, that had issues such as the "loudness" thing, and there's quite a noticeable difference. Believe it or not, one album I got were both ways on the same album! The first four or five tracks had the "loudness" issue going on (presumably for radio) while the rest of the album's songs didn't and were much better because of it.
 
intro6 said:
Yes. IMO the Redbook standard was sound and covered what was needed audio-wise, even though certain people here disagree with that assessment. However, that opinion is in the extreme minority when compared to the overall general population who did wholeheartedly accept it. My CDs in general have such excellent sound that it's really hard to imagine that they could be any better. Any "improvement" would be so incrementally tiny as to be practically inaudible. That's because the CD albums I've bought have pretty much been recorded and mastered well. That's the key difference. I know this is the case because I also ended up getting a small number of CDs which weren't, that had issues such as the "loudness" thing, and there's quite a noticeable difference. Believe it or not, one album I got were both ways on the same album! The first four or five tracks had the "loudness" issue going on (presumably for radio) while the rest of the album's songs didn't and were much better because of it.
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Yeah, lots of folks don't seem to understand that the whole "loudness" thing has nothing to do fundamentally with the digital medium or CD more specifically, but is simply a kind of fashion trend for how music should be presented. Lots of folks don't seem to understand, much less to care about what decent fidelity music sounds like. They'll swear that vinyl sounds superior, but then I'll hear an LP playing at their house on some super cheap system with a plastic turtable and a dull stylus, which sounds all scratchy and flat. If they had spent the money on CDs instead of LPs, they likely would have enough left over for a much better sounding system that plays CDs... I say this too as someone who has a large LP collection that I continue to add to, but I'm under no allusion that it's a superior format. Both formats sound very good on my system and I'm impressed by just how good vinyl can sound being that it's such an old format. I still believe that digital has the edge, because all else being equal (which I don't even think that it is, but for purposes of this argument...),with digital there isn't any issue with dust, scratches, poor pressings, worn styluses or any of that...
 
I always thought the recording industry was/is a rip off. You pay royalties to play what was recorded, on the media it was distributed on. You pay an extra amount for the media that it was recorded on. If the media deteriorates or gets damaged, lost etc. and you need a new copy, you have to pay the royalties again.
I think that it should be treated like software, where you get a license to use it and the media is free to use if you have the paid for license to use it. I know that’s the way it should be in a perfect world.
The CD is a very reliable medium were as a vinyl LP deteriorates after ever play.
 
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