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Is the CD Becoming Obsolete?
mrnomas writes "What's to blame for the declining CD sales? Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more 'safe' (read: crap) music while independent musicians are releasing online? Is it because iTunes is now the third largest music retailer in the country? Or is it just that CDs are becoming obsolete?" Quoting: "Forbes.com [ran] an article showing that CD sales are expected to be down 20% in 2008 (slightly higher than the 15% drop initially predicted). Why such a drop? What's truly happening is a gradual shift away from physical media to downloadable formats. What this indicates, so far, is that US sales of digital music will be growing at an estimated rate of 28% in 2008, however physical sales will drop even further, resulting in a net overall decline.""
Apart from home audio systems, a LOT of people listen to music on car stereos. And on good ones, CD quality really helps for some music -- for example, Shine On You Crazy Diamond sounds a lot better on CD than an MP3 burn.
That said, yeah, a lot of new music has been so overprocessed and made loud that the they don't really benefit much from a CD. Still, people who listen to classical etc will be able to tell the difference.
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Guess what retard emo-hippies, those new releases that you "buy only on vinyl" are no better sounding than the cd...why? Because the vinyl was MADE FROM THE CD YOU JACKASS. Its not like the old days where a record cutting facility will get a big 'ol tape from the mastering studio, and then there will be a guy sitting at the record cutting machine overseeing the process.
No, instead they get a data DVD, or a hard drive, or just a big file that they download. The result is the same - they're using the master.
It sounds like you saw some TV show somewhere with a guy sitting at a vinyl pressing plant who puts an optical disc into a machine and you assumed it was an audio CD. It wasn't. Music today is recorded (usually at 192khz/24 or 32 bit) by computer onto hard drives, where it can then be mastered any number of ways, including onto tape but also onto any data storage medium you like.
As far as i'm concerned, i seldom buy pop/rock CD's because of the quality of the sound. I don't know it this is the reason why people in general are abandoning CD's, but it's my own reason. As some ppl here said, CD's are being badly masterized resulting in hyper-compressed, clipped music with no dynamic range whatsoever. The great advantage of the CD medium is it's enormous dynamic range (90db,) compared to other mainstream mediums like the vinyl, but instead of taking advantage of this, sound engineers follow the trend and prefer to push things all way up. Well it happens that they can't do this compreesion mess in vinyl because the needle would jump off tracks, so, in many cases, we end up having much better quality sound on vinyl. When i really like an album but i hate the way it sounds, i'll end up buying the vinyl version. If there's no vinyl available i'll put in in a list for a future buy, when this loudness war will be over and i will have the chance to get a proper remastered CD version. Red Hot Chilli Peppers are a good example of this: they asked another sound engineer to remaster Stadium Arcadium in vinyl (unfortunately not on CD) and surely anyone can tell the diference from the bad, loud, and clipped sound (CD) and the a very well crafed masterization in the vinyl version. For a better explanation about this subject i recommend everyone to watch this video. And talking about mp3, as CD's are kept to maximum average loudness we can less ear the subtilities of each instrument so there's no point in talking about quality and there isn't a great difference between a CD and a MP3. We are using very few of the extent capabilities of the CD medium with actual pop/rock rules of "hot" masterizing.
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The digitization of the analog signal is what destroys information, resulting in distortion when the analog is reconstructed later.
Are you honestly claiming that you can hear frequencies higher than 22.050 kHz? Or noise components below -96dB? CDs may have poor sound in practice for all sorts of reasons, but the basic sampling of the analogue original is not one of them. Careless, thoughtless production and over-processing I can all too readily believe in, but not problems with the essential theory at the heart of it.
I'm sorry, that's tacky. What you're doing is giving a *used* CD as a gift -- used in the sense that you have first used it. That's fine in and of itself, but buying someone a gift so that you can benefit from it is, well, tacky. It's like buying your mom a frying pan so that she'll make you pancakes. It's like buying someone a sweater but wearing it holiday office party before you wrap it and put it under the tree.
If you want to do this, the proper way to do so is to give the person the (wrapped, unopened) CD as a gift, and then, some days later -- not when you give it, you dolt -- when the person says they enjoyed the CD, ask if they would lend it to you. Don't say, "...so that I can rip it, because I bought it for you thinking I'd be able to make a copy for myself..." because that's tacky, too.
They say it's the thought that counts, and your thought is "What's in this gift for me?"
This "Bob Dylan hates digital" stuff is a very commion mis-quote.
Whate his Bobness was complaining about was the cheapo pc based mixing software and
associated hardware which young musicians were using instead of analog mixers tape decks etc.
And he definately had a point. A combination of low quality hardware, poor digitising algorithms
and sloppy mixing does produce audibly awful results compared with say an inexpensive 12 track mixer
and a good old tape recorder.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
"If you take a look at the waveforms of an album recorded 30 years ago, and compare it to something from a similar genre today, you'll spot the difference immediately. The loud recording results in the high and low bits of the waveform getting "squashed", resulting in a very obvious sort of distortion."
This is actually due to a specific type of compression that's deliberately applied to some modern recordings before they get to a CD master. Compression was also applied to analogue recordings because some sources (especially classical music) exceeded the signal to noise ratio of even the best vinyl playback equipment, so handling the loudest passages without clipping would have meant that the quiet parts disappeared below the noise of the playback medium without compression.
"Vinyl doesn't necessarily suffer from this problem as badly, as it is an analogue medium, and doesn't have strictly defined maximum or minimum amplitudes. "
The maximum and minimum amplitudes are defined by an analogue device's signal to noise ratio, which is around 55db for the best cartridges / laser vinyl players. CD audio on the other hand has a S/N ratio well in excess of 100db, i.e. 100,000 times as much dynamic range.
"All but the very first CDs have serious amplitude problems. One of the only CDs I can think of that was mastered at fairly low levels is 'Brothers in Arms' by Dire Straits"
As was the case with vinyl when it was the dominant format (which, given the fact that I was born in 1960, was a big part of my life for many years), how well recorded something is depends on the sort of music one listens to. Most vinyl pop and rock during the 1960s and 1970s was compressed to hell and had artificially enhanced stereo because it was intended to be played on cheap record players with auto-changers, spring-balanced tone arms, and 3 watt/channel amplifiers connected to 5 inch elliptical full-range speakers that were extremely close to each other. A small number of rock albums had superior recording quality, and therefore became "reference" pieces for hi-fi retailers (e.g. Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon), but most customer demos used classical pieces because they were the only ones that didn't sound worse on a high-end rig than a cheap one. Some expensive classical releases were advertised as being "direct cut", i.e. the signal from the microphones was mixed directly onto grooves instead of being recorded to tape first because audiophiles were willing to pay a lot more for something that had fewer "lossy" stages between musicians and them, and these were commonly used to demonstrate the benefits of extremely expensive component audio systems.
"Ironically, this is one of the primary reasons for the existence of the RIAA. They did a decent job for a while with vinyl, but never established any sort of standard for CDs."
They didn't do anything with vinyl beyond selecting an existing equalisation curve (RCA Victor's New Orthographic Curve) and making it a standard. It was jothing more than recording pre-emphasis / playback de-emphasis system that reduced surface noise and groove size, while making rumble more of a problem, but there was nothing in it to ensure that the initial recording being put on vinyl had decent audio quality, hence the fact that the vast majority of records sounded very bad indeed. R.I.A.A. had no role to play with CD audio parameters, because these had already been set by the Philips / Sony "redbook" standard, which all audio CD players implement (although most modern ones also implement certain newer standards too).
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I work in a mastering studio, and it is acutally true that 99% of LP's are cut off 16-bit digital sources (CD-quality, very often directly from audio CD's). We don't have a lathe at my studio, so any albums I work on that are being released on vinyl are cut somewhere else. I recently had a client that wanted to send 24 bit, 88.2kHz (4x CD quality) sources out to get an LP cut. I called over a dozen cutting houses, and only two would accept anything but an audio CD or 16-bit DAT tape as a master, and that there would be additional charges if I sent the high def source for them to burn it to an audio CD. So yes, almost all LP masters these days are 16-bit CDs.
(BTW - if you need an LP cut, look up Paul Gold in Brooklyn. He is who we went with, and his work is excellent.)