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.""

Comments

Not yet

[Brad1138]

Until downloadable music isn't compressed, or they are able to compress without ANY loss, there will still be a need for CD's. I think the under 25 crowd doesn't care that much, you wouldn't notice the difference on an Ipod, but on a nice home system you do.

Re:Not yet

[bheer]

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.

Re:Not yet

[pushing-robot]

You realize, of course, that CDs are not magical entities, fanciful vessels which contain the entirety of a musical performance. They lose detail just like every other means of recording sound. If you can create an alternative means of encoding sound that takes less space and sounds equally good (in a double-blind test), then it's a better method for holding music. Granted, having some overhead is good for future editing or re-encoding, but we've come up with much better ways to store MORE useful information in LESS space than CDs use.

Re:Not yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Higher Bit Rate music sounds better on even poor quality sound systems. The problem is, is that most people who say they don't care just haven't heard their music in +384kbps and don't know what they're missing.

The music industry should realize the CD is a fading format. They need to start pushing 192khz audio dvds. They have almost the same manufacturing cost as CDs. And considering the number of homes that have surround sound system in the US, this is quality that could easily be appreciated.

(under 25 and appreciates good sound quality)

Re:Not yet

[wytcld]

Fully agree - but CD quality was never as good a vinyl through the right equipment. Bob Dylan had a lot to say about that a few months back. To his ears there just haven't been any CDs that have achieved what vinyl, with the right engineers handling the mix, used to.

There's a degree to which the psychoacoustic models that schemes like mp3 use actually clean up the noisy mess that all or most all CDs present. The way these schemes hollow out the back of the sound produces something clearer and more delicate - more like live music straight from the amps. Except it really sounds quite different from live music. Good vinyl, on the other hand, can be indistinguishable from live performance if your eyes are closed. CDs never had that. So it's easy to walk away from them. All the discussion of "lossless" misses the point that at the rates CDs are sampled there's already a high degree of loss. Music is inherently analog; digital has to get an order of magnitude better (at least) before it'll be so realistic that it's worth a premium.

Re:Not yet

[AeroIllini]

With more and more people listening to iPods and music on their mp3-phones or other tiny music gadgets, its no surprise that soon we'll have our next generation born partially deaf or with their ears insensitive to certain frequencies. That has nothing to do with the genetics of hearing. If a soldier gets an arm blown off in a battle, does that mean he has a higher chance of having kids with only one arm? Of course not.

Get-off-my-lawnism aside, I've found that most people who are satisfied with iPod quality music have either never been exposed to proper audio reproduction, or they just don't care that much. Not everyone wants a medium-rare filet; some people just want a cheeseburger.

Cheeseburgers and blown-off arms in the same post. Take that, mods!

Re:Not yet

[king-manic]

Fully agree - but CD quality was never as good a vinyl through the right equipment. Bob Dylan had a lot to say about that a few months back. To his ears there just haven't been any CDs that have achieved what vinyl, with the right engineers handling the mix, used to.

Ohhh. really. I have a pair of thousand dollar cables to sell you.....

Realistically most ears can't hear the distinction between new vinyl and a CD / MP3. I can't tell reasonable bitrate Mp3, CD, or vinyl. They simply are good enough for most.

Re:Not yet

[MillionthMonkey]

First of all you're starting with a weak argument: "what does Bob Dylan know about what music sounds like" is not the sort of position I would prefer to defend. And also lots of us use drugs and are not deaf. So there is that. If there is a drug that makes you deaf, please let me know what it is because I could really use it at work. But this is just too funny:

furthur more, on a technical level cd's use a lossless uncompressed format which should be a perfect reproduction of what was mixed.

Yes they do not use lossy digital compression, but that's irrelevant. The digitization of the analog signal is what destroys information, resulting in distortion when the analog is reconstructed later.

Re:Not yet

[badasscat]

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.

Re:Not yet

[badasscat]

Also, I sample tons of music, and often find that I only like 2 or 3 songs from an album. In other words, I would be fine if the rest of the ablum were deleted off my hard drive.

This is always one of the big arguments people come up with against the CD, and there is such an obvious retort to it that I just don't understand why you guys don't see it:

You need to start listening to some better artists. Good bands don't put out albums with only 2 or 3 good songs on them.

And yes, that means those 2 or 3 songs you like probably aren't very good either.

Re:Not yet

[Dephex Twin]

"what does Bob Dylan know about what music sounds like" is not the sort of position I would prefer to defend.

If you take a look at Bob Dylan these days and claim that he appears physically to be anywhere close to where he was in his prime, you're just not being honest with yourself. I would say the OP makes a very valid point in suggesting that Bob Dylan's finer hearing ability is worth questioning. This is stuff that is hard for even a young person to hear clearly, and the guy has been out there for 40 years.

If there is a drug that makes you deaf, please let me know what it is because I could really use it at work.

Inhalants cause hearing loss, just so you know.

Yes they do not use lossy digital compression, but that's irrelevant. The digitization of the analog signal is what destroys information, resulting in distortion when the analog is reconstructed later.

This I agree with.

Re:Not yet

[MillionthMonkey]

Inhalants cause hearing loss, just so you know.

I was just noticing the other day, it gets really quiet around here after I blow the dust out of my keyboard with that canned air stuff.

Re:Not yet

[rtb61]

Speaking of oldies, in both music and people terms, a big reason for declining sales is because us oldies already own all the cds we are interested in, basically from the time period in our youth when we had the greatest exposure to music. In terms of recent music, why would we bother to buy crap remixes of what we already have.

This is a time related phenomena, and is bound to the survival rate of cds vs earlier media formats. Forget the BS coming out of the RIAA or the publishers they just don't want to admit to falling sales as a result of the market channel basically being flooded out and older ages groups dropping out of the buying market.

Re:Not yet

[croddy]

Concert hall systems actually tend to be among the most troublesome. The example you were looking for was "studio reference system".

Re:Not yet

[WasterDave]

No, you're missing the point.

Vinyl mixed by the right engineers and played on the right (and not totally ludicrously expensive) kit sounds a whole shitload more like live music than CD's do. This may be because CD's lose resolution as sounds get quieter, or because they lose resolution as sounds get higher frequencies, or because there is no headroom whatsoever, or because producers these days drop shitloads of compressor on and lose dynamic range ... while simultaneously stopping me from turning the volume UP to where it BELONGS!! I don't know why it is, but it is.

Blues albums suffer the most. Something that is supposed to be played by four depressed men in a nasty looking bar in Louisiana comes out sounding like it's been played on general midi.

Like it or not, something has been lost from music. The good news is that it's still there in live gigs and with totally rampant piracy (if we're honest) and thieving bastard record industry executives it seems that the only hope for the bands themselves is to play live more often. Hurrah!

Dave

Re:Not yet

[Weedlekin]

"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).

Re:Not yet

[Dogtanian]

First of all you're starting with a weak argument: "what does Bob Dylan know about what music sounds like" is not the sort of position I would prefer to defend. Someone called Chefelf wrote an interesting blog entry called Bob Dylan can go to hell. With a title like that, you know it's not going to be a "Dylan is God, Maaaaaaan" fest, but in case you think I (or he/she/it) is trolling, here is the part that applies to what we were discussing. It sums up Dylan's hypocritical attitude towards digital music. (Read the article to see it properly in context).

[Dylan says that] CDs apparently have no stature, but the iPod does, particularly when Apple is giving him a sizeable check to perform a yawn-inducing "blues" track from his shitty new album which he is also able to shamelessly plug at the same tune. Or

Bob Dylan: "CDs are small. There's no stature to it."
Translation: It is the size of CDs that affect sound. Records are bigger. Bigger is better. That's just common sense. The replies are certainly worth reading too; it's not an all-out attack on Dylan- he has his defenders, but having read them all, I'm not convinced that Dylan's attitudes are worthy of attention any more than any other angry old man's.

And the guy was *never* technically brilliant. Quite the opposite. It's somewhat strange to be lectured on issues like sound quality by a guy whose sound was.... rough. I don't deny the guy's influence, and he's undeniably recorded some important stuff, but that doesn't make him God, or even stop him being a Grumpy Old Man.

Re:Not yet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Speaking for myself

[Whuffo]

My CD purchasing is zero these days - until the music industry quits harassing their customers and treating the performers as slaves they're not getting a dime from me.

Maybe others feel the same way?

It's the bands

[OECD]

Personally, I find myself more interested in bands that put their music out on the net and/or sell CD-Rs themselves. (Nerdcore, Wizard Rock, etc.) I can't remember the last time I bought music from someone who the RIAA 'represents.'

This seems to parallel the increasing niche-ification of magazines and their cannibalization by the web. Not at all suprising, really.

A Silly Thing About Vinyl

[tjstork]

All the miniaturization is nice, but one thing that has been missing from the music industry since the 1980s is the physical size of the record. A record album was a fairly large thing, and, covers were small posters in their own right. Nowadays, you get a little picture in a plastic case with the CD, which is nice and transportable, for sure, but it is not as effective as a total package visually as a big record used to be.

I still buy CDs, and here is why

[Anonymous Coward]

1. It's a high-quality, DRM-free copy of the music which I can convert into FLAC and other digital formats I choose. (Yes, there are exceptions, but it's much better than most online stores).

2. I have a semi-permanent copy which I can re-rip as many times as I want.

3. Shiny.

Not Just Away From CDs

[FreezerJam]

...but away from albums, too.

People are finally able to buy singles again. How much of this drop is due simply to people only buying the two good tracks from an album and leaving the other eight behind?

Re:Not Just Away From CDs

[suv4x4]

People are finally able to buy singles again. How much of this drop is due simply to people only buying the two good tracks from an album and leaving the other eight behind?

Agreed, the irony of this is their own marketing tactics have made this possible. It's not as much the rest of the tracks are crap, but they're just not marketed, if you don't listen to them enough, you don't like them, and think they're worse, and hence not buy 'em.

And hence the "one good single and the rest is filler" talk.

To confirm this, just try to listen to a new "super album" without ever hearing the marketed single (hard, I admit). You'll never guess which is the song marketed on 80% of the albums. It's actually often decided post factum after the album has been recorded.

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.

Exactly right, and this is why I'm pissing my pants laughing here watching the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray race. They seem to genuiely don't understand, that whoever wins, they both lose in the end. Just consider the amoutn of money spent on technology, production and marketing on those duds. That's funny, right.

Re:Not Just Away From CDs

[moosesocks]

I wouldn't say that the music has changed at all. Some musicians work best in the medium of the album (Pink Floyd, The Beatles, etc..), whereas some musicians work best in the context of individual songs (one-hit-wonders, and 90% of the "top 40" artists).

I would say that (for the past few years at least), good solid albums have stuck out more in my mind than individual singles have. This is especially true among independent artists.

A few somewhat recent albums that I've enjoyed as a whole (in no particular order)

• The Crane Wife by The Decemberists
  
• Boxer by The National
  
• Plans by Death Cab For Cutie
  
• Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer by Of Montreal
  
• The Magic Position by Patrick Wolf
  
• Funeral by The Arcade Fire
  
• Cassadaga by Bright Eyes
  
• "Cross" by Justice
  
• A Weekend in the City by Bloc Party
  
• Illinois by Sufjan Stevens
  
• Armchair Apocrypha by Andrew Bird
  
• Like the Linen by Thao Nugyen
  
• In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel (10 years old, but arguably one of the most influential albums of those 10 years)
  

and the list goes on.... There have been quite a few high-profile "popular" albums released by popular artists such as Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Justin Timberlake, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, all of which are very much intended to be played as an entire album.

At a show I recently went to, I bought the band's CD on a whim because I enjoyed the show. As the guy handed it to me (he was the band's bassist), he encouraged me to copy it, share it, email it, or "do whatever you want to get the word out." The side you don't hear is that most small artists owe much their very existence to the internet.

So, no. The album is far from dead. Even though popular music has almost completely gone to shit in the US, the independent music scene is arguably the best it's ever been.

I hope not...

[spoco2]

At least, I hope a physical medium for purchasing and keeping your music is not on the way out.

I hate downloaded music, I hate having nothing but some files and a printed out cover to show for my money (or no cover etc. if I'm not going to back them up individually).

I love having shelves of cds, with their cover art, their liner notes etc. I love the hard, physical format of them.

I'm forever worried that I'll lose or misplace, erase or whatever the tracks I've legally downloaded...

I want physical music delivery to remain dammit!

None of the Above

[bill_mcgonigle]

People don't have a fixed budget for CD's and now they're hoarding it now because the music sucks - they have a certain amount of disposable income that they allot to entertainment, and they're not spending it on CD's as much as they used to. DVD sales only peaked last year - does it surprise the heck out of everybody that just as DVD players became affordable CD sales started to tank? People are also buying hi-def screens and home theaters in record numbers. Back in 1986 lots of people weren't used to buying VHS tapes, and they still bought records and then CD's and spent time sitting around listening to music. Most people don't do this anymore, they watch movies or premium cable or shows on their DVR's.

RIAA, meet MPAA. Sony, Universal, Warner - you're competing with yourselves.

Classic responses

[Gothmolly]

1) the Indie Douchebag. This Slashdotter will claim he only buys from 'local' or 'indie' bands, namely, his friends' garage band.

2) the Audiophile Loudmouth. This one buys 24k gold plated CDs, listened to on a 20bit DAC feeding monster-cabled speakers that he bought at Best Buy.

3) the Pirate. You all suck, Gnutella FTW!

Face it, none of the dorkwads on here, myself included, is representative of the mouthbreathers at Walmart whose choices power the economy.

was the movie Memento based on all of you?

[nomadic]

Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more 'safe' (read: crap) music

Where on earth did so many people on slashdot get the bizarre misapprehension that pop, lowest-common-denominator music is somehow more prevalent now than it's been in the past? It's always been there, at least since the 50's, and if you weren't conscious during the 80's and 90's, I assure you that the majority of music released during the decades was "safe" bubble gum pop. Think back, do you remember that music? No? Of course you don't, it was immensely forgettable and put out for a quick buck.

And I know that 10 years from now the same people who try to paint this phenomenon as new will be repeating the same mantra again and again, "remember back in the early 2000s when music was good, before they started releasing commercialized garbage?".

Re:I miss vinyl

[xs650]

No worry, there will always be a market for vinyl.

It's not just music competition

[EmbeddedJanitor]

CD, and all music sales, must compete against all other discretionary/disposable income (depending which definition you choose to use). Ten years back there were far fewer ways to blow your money.

Of course, the 1960s, 70s and 80s had decade-defining music. There's no such music for the 2000's. Not really that much worth buying.

Re:I miss vinyl

[the_other_one]

Wow, talk about market penetration!

Simple explanation: gifts

[goombah99]

First I agree, music quality has nothing to do with it. That accounts for a negligible market size. The real reason is gifts. How many CDs did you used to buy and how many did you used to give as gifts. I'd wager about 10% of the CDs you bought was the number you gave as gifts at christmas or other times. Possibly more. Nowadays I still give CDs as gifts. But I don't buy two of it. I buy one, make a copy for myself, and give the original media as the gift. The original media is a much better gift than a burned CD or a pile of itunes gift certificates. It's not like the days of audi tapes where a Mix CD took time and effort and could only be made one at a time. THere the mix tapes were more valuable than the original media. With Cds its the reverse. I have no problems owning a copy but I prefer to give the original as a gift. It's the tangible media that is satsifying to the recpient. I'd say that could easily account for 15% of the market.

Re:Simple explanation: gifts

[ewhac]

Nowadays I still give CDs as gifts. But I don't buy two of it. I buy one, make a copy for myself, and give the original media as the gift.

Ardent readers of my writings (both of you) will know that I am no great friend of existing copyright laws, that copying is an inevitability of advancing technology, and believe the regime should re-engineered and replaced with a system that preserves reputations rather than proscribes copying and/or who can manufacture things.

...But even so, I still think what you're doing is really, really cheesy.

Schwab

Re:Simple explanation: gifts

[TrinSF]

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?"

I Still Buy CDs

[xdc]

Amen to no compression / lossless compression. I just bought like 5 CDs today. Not only is sound quality a huge factor, but I perceive some benefit to owning tangible, non-DRMed media rather than something that's filling up a hard drive which can go bad, or home-burned CD-Rs collecting dust in a closet. If I want to make car listening copies or custom compilations, I can rip the CDs onto the computer. From there I can also copy to an iPod-type device. But I don't have to. For my money I already have a plastic disc with printed liner notes which I don't need to fool around with if all I want is a quick listen.

With downloaded music, not only is the audio lossy, but then I also have to spend my precious time producing archival or car listening CD-Rs on my own separately-purchased, questionably-durable media, labeled with a Sharpie or some mediocre inkjet-printed sticker.

And what about rare music? When some remix/promo single or obscure album/12" is long out of print and not carried by places like the iTunes Store, and the torrents have all died down, I may still be able to track down an authentic, full-quality release at a used/collectible shop. I doubt I could be so lucky with old download-only releases, where any company hosting them would likely be sued out of business.

Re:And here is why you shouldn't:

[Planesdragon]

1) Aganist Copyright Law, you are not allowed to convert to other formats. Wrong. Media-shifting a disk that doesn't remove DRM has long been recognized as Fair Use. If it wasn't, the iPod would never have been sold in the first place.

2) Aganist Copyright Law, you are not allowed to backup your music. Also wrong. An actual backup is well within the realm of Fair Use. Buy your CD, copy it to a CD-R, and let the copy go to crap in your automobile.

3) Agreed. Shiny. Meh.

Top 5 reasons why I like CDs

[core_dump_0]

1. (99% of the time) No DRM
2. Better quality sound than lossy formats like MP3
3. Album art
4. Out of print, import, and rare CDs (which most of my CD purchases are) may become collector's items down the road
5. Convenient backup if you lose the ripped FLACs

what does Bob Dylan know?

[weighn]

"what does Bob Dylan know about what music sounds like" is not the sort of position I would prefer to defend. Allow me. Bob Dylan is 66 years old. Rather than the gp stating in the terms that you use to paraphrase, the intent was that Dylan's perception of sound may have changed. Being a lifelong career musician he would have a higher internal sense of psychoacoustics than the average Joe. Perhaps his power of recall is also advanced. The thing is, his hearing will no doubt have changed quite a deal over the past 40 years. In his mind, he may be recalling the aural sense he experienced from those old recordings, but this can't be stacked against hearing modern recordings on cds with his no doubt degraded hearing. Just a thought.

Re:what does Bob Dylan know?

[supersnail]

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.

Hmmm, move up market... nah...

[alexhmit01]

Moving to better audio would have been one approach... Movie industry figured that one out. However, they are so scared of their own shadow that the idea of a better product scares them. They are more interested in trying to preserve the status quo and release best-of CDs to milk cash.

SA-CD or DVD-A could have been their salvation, but that would have required pushing the format (all new releases in SA-CD/CD Hybrid discs, so you can use your old CD player and play the material). Houses have LOTS of CD players, 2 cars, home stereo, maybe the master bedroom and a teenagers room. Nobody is putting SA-CD players EVERYWHERE, but they might have bought 1-2 of them if all new CDs supported the new format.

Teenagers like to listen to music... SA-CD boomboxes would have helped make that a reality. But they decided that hey, let's try to collect $30 a SA-CD, and crushed the market. If they had moved up market, and included AAC/WMA/MP3 files ON THE DISC, people might have traded the MP3s online (but they can do that now with a simple CD purchase) and preserved/grew the market.

However, they decided to focus on "plugging the analog hole" and "preventing piracy," making the formats more complicated, players more expensive, and didn't release Hybrids... who the hell was going to buy a SA-CD that they couldn't play in their car. I remember my dad diligents copying every new CD, that went in the stereo case, to a cassette deck for the car for a while... that's unnecessary when Hybrid tech exists, and impossible when you don't make it easy to copy the new SA-CD to CD.

The desire to listen to music on the iPod in no way endangered CD sales inherently, but that would have required more effort to release good CDs, not overcompress the music by making everything LOUD, and encouraged better quality hardware... companies like Sony that do hardware and software could have raised the bar with inexpensive SA-CD bedroom stereos that sounded okay...

However, CDs sound better on a decent system than MP3s, and SA-CDs no doubt sound better, but the refusal to support SA-CD killed it. Digital audio is damned convenient, busy moving my old CD-Jukebox (400 disc, takes forever to change CDs if you want to mix up tracks) to a lossless media server, but there was no reason for the studios not to make that a reality, other than laziness and a fear of change.

Alex

CDs are not obsolete

[SpryGuy]

Who are these idiots who only buy downloaded tracks? I cannot fathom that.

I want to OWN my music. I want it to be uncompressed, un-DRMed, and I don't want to have to pay for it all again should my MP3 player die, or my hard disk bite the big one. If I change MP3 player brands, I want my music to be compatable, and to not have to rebuy it.

CDs are great. They play everywhere. There's a CD player in my car. My car does not have an MP3 player that I can "sync" with my music library, nor does it have a way to connect my MP3 player to my Car's audio system.

The notion that CDs are becoming obsolete is absurd.

I don't pay a cent for any downloadable music that isn't the free and open and universal MP3, and even then I burn it to a CD so I can play it anywhere I want.

Besides, when you download, you don't get anything PHYSICAL. You don't get liner notes, lyrics, artwork, or even "track order". Music and albums are so much more than just collections of "singles". You lose all that on many MP3 players that you have to go out of your way to get the tracks to play in "album/CD order". And it's ridiculous to pay the same for a 20 second "interlude" track as you do for a 15 minute opus track (whether classic, pop, or rock). And finally, being forced to buy the whole CD to get a single song I liked has opened up my eyes and my tastes to lots of music I never, ever, would have heard on the radio. Generally my favorite tracks are not the singles.

So no, CDs are not obsolete. Not by a long shot.

Are you honestly claiming...

[GrahamCox]

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.

Re:Are you honestly claiming...

[MillionthMonkey]

Actually what I think most people are really objecting to is the way that record companies pump up the volume and saturate the band. Everything sounds like a car commercial the way they use it.

Re:Are you honestly claiming...

[austexmonkey]

> Are you honestly claiming that you can hear frequencies higher than 22.050 kHz?

Its possible. Are you completely sure that the grandparent poster isn't a cat?

"Mixed by the right engineers" is the key

[billstewart]

The big issue isn't whether it's CD vs. vinyl - it's how the sound gets mixed and warped and produced. Digital gives you more tools to adjust that, which not only means that good sound guys can do good things with it, but band sound guys can do bad things to it. These days just about the only people producing vinyl are going for the audiophile market (ahem.. snobs... ahem.. :-) which wants the sound to get managed in ways that sound better than the sound that gets produced for the Britney Spears Clone market. In the early days of rock&roll, nobody had a clue how to engineer the sound - the vinyl from those days is often produced just as badly as bad CDs today, with worse equipment and badly placed mikes.

Aliasing

[DrYak]

These sample rates are very high. when you find a human who can hear a 40KHz tone (let alone the 80KHz), you might have better luck convincing me that high sample rates are important. Until then, these tones can continue to be filtered out before sampling.

The point of using 96Khz or 192Khz isn't to have a higher max freq (due to Nyquist), but having a better resolution in the audible range to avoid aliasing. A 12Khz sound played on a digital system running @ 48Hz will be nice (at least, unless you suffer from presbyaccousia). A 12010 Hz sound on the same system may suffer some aliasing (a full wave doesn't quite exactly take 4 sample to produce and the maxima could be missed, giving some kind of beating in the sound). On a 192Khz system, sound in the 12Khz range all take some 16 samples and even if they aren't quite exactly aligned with the sample rate, there's much less risk of distorting the waveform.

Nyquist theorem gives us information about the highest frequency that *could* be recorder/reproduced using a given sample frequency, *if all condition are optimal*. It does not guarantee us that all sound will be perfectly reproduced up to this frequency. In fact, the recording of a N/2 sound on a N frequency sample could also completly fail if, by chance, the dephasing was such that the sampler did measure at the exact moment when the source cross (either rising or falling) the 0. What the proponent of 96 or 192Khz are saying is, if the sampling frequency is an order of magnitute high (say N * 16 for the sampler) this is much less likely to happen, and you *mostly* have optimal conditions for *any* sound up to your target frequency, even if the sound has funny dephasing.

People don't care about sound quality

[tentimestwenty]

People don't care about sound quality. Now that they've seen that they can put their whole music collection on a little box the size of a deck of cards, the only thing 99% of people care about is size. Take it from someone who owns a high end stereo store. The number one request I get is for "wireless speakers." This is followed closely by "a tiny amplifier." People just want invisible music. They're not listening seriously, it's all for background. And now that they can download anything they want, why the hell would they buy space-taking CDs? The CD is dead. Ironically, the only people who do care about quality have gone back to vinyl, largely because the CD selection locally is dwindling to the same size.