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Best Buy Stops Selling Music CDs (cbsnews.com)
Thelasko writes: Best Buy has stopped selling CDs at its stores as of Sunday, CBS Pittsburgh reports. The arrest of CD sales will happen nationwide. Due to digital streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and others, CD sales have been falling in recent years. Best Buy's CD sales have recently only brought in about $40 million annually.
When CDs were introduced, they were hailed as the ultimate audio format--and not without good reason. They're more durable than cassettes or LP records. They don't have DRM, region codes or ridiculous menus to wade through like DVDs. The audio quality is fantastic without lossy (or otherwise!) digital compression. They were hyped as having "digitally perfect" sound, and although that may not have been strictly technically true, the specifications are actually pretty close to the capabilities of the human ear. It was marketed as a serious audiophile format, and it lived up to that.
And now its name is mud, the CD an object of widespread scorn. How did it come to this? Why did this brilliant thing fall so far out of fashion?
I personally put a pretty good portion of blame on the crushing dynamic range compression that so many rock-and-pop CDs are afflicted with. It's infuriating when disc after disc after disc comes out ruined (deliberately, it seems?) with bad mastering. It's got to where I'm afraid to buy any CD pressed after about 2000 or so. I'd rather get the LP release if I can, just because they generally don't lay on the super-compression.
Tried CD's and Streaming. ..
Good enough only for stuffing something to listen to into a phone when on the go or while driving.
At home. not so good.
Rediscovered vinyl records.
Got an vintage amp and speakers from the early 70's with a turntable.
WoW.. what a difference!
That's how the music was intended to be heard, uncompressed..
Compressed sucks, Retro kicks ass !
If I get my hands on a well-mastered audio CD that sounds good, I'm happy to rip it to MP3 or (better) AAC/MP4 and add it to my iTunes library. Then it goes on my phone, and then I can play it in my car, everything. The digital compression is very good now, and any difference in sound quality is of no significant consequence to my less-than-perfect ears, even when I listen on high quality headphones.
The problem is, if I get my hands only a badly-mastered CD that sounds like garbage, there's nothing I can do to fix it. And if I go to buy the files online instead, from ITMS or Amazon, or if I stream it or whatever, in most cases the source of those files was the same badly-mastered CD. And the result is that the only way I can get a decent-sounding version of the recording, in many cases, is the buy the LP record, then needle-drop it and process that to AAC files, and then put those tracks into my iTunes library. And you know, that's absolutely bonkers. It's crazy that after all we've been through, and all the technology we have now, that I have to resort to this in order to get music that sounds OK.