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Why are CDs the current hot topic?

bolero said:
They recovered from Napster & have done an end run: now we pay in perpetuity to stream.

Own nothing and be happy
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I've stayed well out of that to date but now I'm retired and have less money to buy CDs (even at the still low prices) I am toying with the idea of getting something to stream with.

I will try to resist :)
 
GChief said:
Why :dunno:you can to do it all. Just becasue someone streams does not mean they cannot own physical media :thumbsup:
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Of course. I just think streaming is bad from a sociological point of view and it was better in the old days when we had to expend some effort to get new music.

As per the 'Starship Troopers' maxim - 'Something given has no value!'

You probably think I'm being silly, and you're probably right. :)
 
You can own digital files, too. When you like something enough that you want to keep it, you have the option of buying it. Then it won't disappear from your library, and you can also download a DRM-free copy of it and store it elsewhere. I've done this.
 
I’ve been streaming for a few years and well into it being free as I’ve sold enough media, CDs and LPs, to cover it for the rest of my life. I pay Quboz annually around $130 and it easily saves me multiples of that in forgone purchasing.

It’s marvelous for auditioning recordings and sounds great, and marvelous for the high priced completionist box set record companies bombard us with in a last ditch effort to bleed boomers retirement funds. Just the other day I was in a bookstore thumbing through some new vinyl and ran across new Stones and Allman Brothers live recordings. I streamed them on Quboz and was put off by the quality of both as the Allmans sounded thin and hollow and the Stones was too dominant in the vocals over instruments. Decent material, but certainly not must have. $60+ saved right there!

I’m looking forward to the day I have my collection whittled down to about 4 feet of records or less and no CDs leaving me about 1000# less media to deal with
 
GChief said:
Of course I think that is silly. But that is only because I can't wrap my brain cell around how music geeks willingly limit their access to music.

One of the cool things about this hobby, do it however you want :thumbsup:
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I know. I do use Youtube to check stuff out so I'm already cheating a bit.

I still think it devalues the experience a bit. We paid the music more attention back in the day.

When I was a teenager if I, or someone I knew, bought a new album it was a big event. We'd go round to listen to it. You'd give him a blank tape and say 'tape it for me' -because there'd be no chance of borrowing it off him as he'd probably want to listen to it twenty times in the first week - if it was any good.

And he'd take the tape and then point to a pile of half a dozen blank tapes people had already given him and say 'Sorry mate I'm afraid there's a bit of a queue.'
 
Mart Mccall said:
We paid the music more attention back in the day.
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IMO that's a generalized broad-brush stroke that does not apply to all. :dunno:Almost a "damn kids and their new way of doing ..." statement.

As someone that streams the majority of time my attention and those with me is the same no matter the media source. Just like the olden days.

But hey it's an interweb forum, people not doing it still have an opinion about it :thumbsup:
 
GChief said:
l. :dunno:Almost a "damn kids and their new way of doing ..." statement.
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No that's not what I was driving at.

Really, once you're older and have money the problem is almost the same with physical media. Too much, too soon, too often. At least there's still some restraints since you have to order it and wait or physically travel to a store.

When acquiring new music did not happen often or easily/instantly, we listened to the same albums a lot more and got to know them intimately.

I think that was better even if it was constrained. The constraint wasn't actually a bad thing - or it was at least a double-edged sword.
 
Mart Mccall said:
No that's not what I was driving at.

Really, once you're older and have money the problem is almost the same with physical media. Too much, too soon, too often. At least there's still some restraints since you have to order it and wait or physically travel to a store.

When acquiring new music did not happen often or easily/instantly, we listened to the same albums a lot more and got to know them intimately.

I think that was better even if it was constrained. The constraint wasn't actually a bad thing - or it was at least a double-edged sword.
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To each their own, i am not young and remember the "good ole' days" very well. We just see it differently.
 
Mart Mccall said:
It's just not possible to make a good, cheap tape deck, there's too much mechanical engineering involved and that can't be done at low cost.
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Yes, there were lots of those cheap, bottom end decks around back in the day - most of them have become junk by today, but that's why I said "middle of the line" which were machines in which real effort was made to build better quality into them without still being the most expensive top of the line decks. As someone who regularly listens to well produced CDs on a nice, quality stereo system, I am certain that I would be able to tell if my cassette deck was playing back music that sounded inferior and less enjoyable but that was simply not the case at all. As I said before, it sounds great!
 
Mart Mccall, I did all of the above: dubbed off CDs, LPs, other cassettes. Early CD-Rs were $25 and contained real gold. But when a 50-pack dropped to $20, well, goodbye my cassette deck. And then BBS/Napster/Edonkey/etc, and then I got my MP3-player and goodbye my CD player. Multimedia PC was not just a marketing term, it was a real thing.

Most of the stuff I collect I have as files, ranging from 320 kbps to lossless FLAC. Some of the stuff I am really partial to I have on CDs just because I like a pretty physical copy. This is irrational, after all it is just a distribution media invented at a time when one CD held more data than 30 HDDs, but I like my location tokens and time markers as anyone else.

Mart Mccall said:
Of course. I just think streaming is bad from a sociological point of view and it was better in the old days when we had to expend some effort to get new music.
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By some effort you mean following paid advice of an FM DJ? Meh.

Streaming gives access to the long tail, you no longer have to listen to the same music that everyone else listens to. No more Top Whatever, as long as you have an On Demand service, not pre-programmed "radio" playlists.

The sociological issues have started from the Walkman, which made music personal. Streaming made music unique and infinitely customizable. First Walkmans had two headphone outputs. It was quickly realized that given a choice, people want to listen to their own music.
 
intro6 said:
As someone who regularly listens to well produced CDs on a nice, quality stereo system, I am certain that I would be able to tell if my cassette deck was playing back music that sounded inferior and less enjoyable but that was simply not the case at all. As I said before, it sounds great!
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This just means that your quality threshold is lower than what a half-decent cassette deck can deliver.

After I paid $250 to repair my two-head mid-range Kenwood deck and after I found a cable that does not introduce weird distortion I experienced with other cables (I'd always laughed at "good cables" argument) I am quite pleased with it. My portable CD player I bought for $20 on eBay plays better. My phone plays no worse than the CD player and has access to tens of millions of songs.

The cassette deck is just for silly nostalgic fun and occasional digitizing of custom mixtapes. I do my critical, sub-critical and casual listening on my phone.
 
Late Boomer said:
This just means that your quality threshold is lower than what a half-decent cassette deck can deliver.
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Well, if that is true, so be it. :dunno: All I really care about are my ears, not anyone else's. Still, I have heard over time plenty of stuff which is lower grade quality, whether it be from the audio equipment or the way it's been recorded and/or mastered, so I can certainly discern differences in sound quality, and that is what led me to pursue higher quality audio in the first place.

Late Boomer said:
The cassette deck is just for silly nostalgic fun
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It may have somewhat of a nostalgic element and it's definitely fun, but it's certainly not silly to me.
 
Hajidub said:
Not trying to start a war, but cassettes on a professionally restored Nakamichi are definitely not lo-fi. I sometimes purchase the vinyl reissue due to the OG tape being too expensive. Also it wasn't until I once obtained a nice CD player did I find out CD sound quality and mastering engineering actually made a big difference. BTW, that CD player **** the bed years ago so I'm constantly on the hunt for a great replacement.
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I was referring to modern pre-recorded cassettes. I agree that a quality cassette isn't lo-fi. I have a good amount of albums on cassette from the late 90s and early 00s, even they were starting to approach Type II quality even though they're Type I, but by that time it was obviously too late.
 
J. Rob said:
I was referring to modern pre-recorded cassettes. I agree that a quality cassette isn't lo-fi. I have a good amount of albums on cassette from the late 90s and early 00s, even they were starting to approach Type II quality even though they're Type I, but by that time it was obviously too late.
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There even were DDD cassettes. Then again, if the deck was not good enough or had no Dolby, the quality would suffer. So much unlike proper digital.

 
When you have access to everything you pick a song, and the service will pick similar songs for you that sounds the same.

In the old days we would hear songs on the radio and then go buy the album/tape/cd if we liked it and maybe a few more tapes from that artist. We would listen to reviews of people we trusted to find music we liked. Friends traded music around and we copied CD songs onto mix tapes we took with us on long drives. Music was interactive. There are also feelings associated with physic media. I still have a mix tape a girl I liked made me in the early 90's, same with a Krokus Headhunter tape a friend made me (who is no longer alive).
 
unknownk said:
We would listen to reviews of people we trusted to find music we liked. Friends traded music around and we copied CD songs onto mix tapes we took with us on long drives. Music was interactive.
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Do you read comments on YouTube? Lots of good discussion and recommendations there.
 
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