CDs are Officially Over

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by Igottago

Isn't that the trick though? The reason there are great albums is because artists have successfully been able to create something that flows and fits so well, it has a massive impact if consumed as a larger piece of work.

Yeah, I even replied to him with such. I said it's what makes him unique. BT does a huge variety of electronic genres of music, and making it one cohesive unit is quite the challenge. I guess he feels his music is better served if he can make a real mix (I say real in that they flow together perfectly because they're a similar style) rather than adding interludes to fit key/bpm/beat changes.

[Knalus]

I just bought 4 CD's yesterday. I want to actually own the music, not just license it. I hate what licensing has done to intellectual property.

[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Yes, but the mechanical nature of vinyl means that the are a huge number of variables that conspire against it. Temperature, vibration, dirt, needle wear, needle wear on the record, inductive losses at the transducer (ie. where the mechanical movement of the needle is translated into electrical currents)

Just because the analog waveform is represented in an analog fashion on vinyl does not mean that you have more resolution than digitally sampled audio:



If you like the sound of vinyl, and many do, that's great. But it's not a superior format on technical merit. It's actually a lower sampling rate that is more subject to environmental factors when reading back the waveform, and with no error correction to top it all off.

I not going to say exactly what's wrong with those numbers (because I don't know, and I don't have time to look it up). But something seems drastically wrong with them to me.

If one PVC molecule cutting means a maximum of 11 bit comparative sound, Records couldn't possibly be more than 3 or 4 bit sound. Which for obvious reasons, wouldn't sound like anything. To get a maximum of 4 bit sound then, you would have to cut to 128 molecules resolution (which still seems really low to me)

[DownhillGoat]

Last CD I bought:

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

I not going to say exactly what's wrong with those numbers (because I don't know, and I don't have time to look it up). But something seems drastically wrong with them to me.

If one PVC molecule cutting means a maximum of 11 bit comparative sound, Records couldn't possibly be more than 3 or 4 bit sound. Which for obvious reasons, wouldn't sound like anything. To get a maximum of 4 bit sound then, you would have to cut to 128 molecules resolution (which still seems really low to me)

I think you are getting hung up on the physical characteristics. Music stored on a CD in the Red Book standard is encoded in LPCM. It's the bit and sample rate that is encoded and decoded in the digital standard that determines the audio quality.

I could record a bunch of music onto a CD in some other insanely high rate and high resolution lossless format rather than the one that was created in the 1970s for standard CD audio and achieve much higher results.

Vinyl being an analog waveform recorded and played by from physical media is what you hear is what you get (you can increase resolution by increasing the size of the record and reducing rotation speed). CD is not so. It's just data and it depends what data you record on it. It just so happens that Red Book audio is whatever it is (too lazy to remember/look up the details) and therefore has those physical characteristics on a standard CD but it is a decades old technology designed for old lasers and ancient DSPs and may not be optimal.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by troutman

When people say they haven't bought a CD in five years, what they are really saying is they haven't bought any music in five years. Many people pirate music with impunity.

They may also have simply made the digital switch, or now use those funds to purchase records.

For instance, I haven't bought a CD in a decade. I did however, use the money I would have spent on cds to buy records.

In my mind, I'd rather pay 5 dollars for Rust Never Sleeps on vinyl than 14.99 on CD, which is a real example from the last time I thought about buying a CD.

I've bought CDs at shows, but I don't qualify it the same way because these are generally not major releases. The last CD I bought at a show was Buck 65's rarities compilation (Pole Axed?) that didn't get major distribution. I also chose to buy Squares on Vinyl rather than CD.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by Barnes

I thought it would have been:

True Story:

I've actually seen Are We There Yet? I watched it on a flight from London to Vancouver.

It had French Subtitles and Italian Dubbing.

Somehow, I still understood the movie completely.

[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I think you are getting hung up on the physical characteristics. Music stored on a CD in the Red Book standard is encoded in LPCM. It's the bit and sample rate that is encoded and decoded in the digital standard that determines the audio quality.

I could record a bunch of music onto a CD in some other insanely high rate and high resolution lossless format rather than the one that was created in the 1970s for standard CD audio and achieve much higher results.

Vinyl being an analog waveform recorded and played by from physical media is what you hear is what you get (you can increase resolution by increasing the size of the record and reducing rotation speed). CD is not so. It's just data and it depends what data you record on it.

I'm not really concerned about the quality of CD audio. It's pretty good quality, though I can see why some people might prefer analog. I was just comparing digital recording to analog recording. As I said, Technically, records have the actual waveforms recorded onto them, which could theoretically mean that they would have the best quality. However, people don't have really expensive record players sitting around that you would need to really get the benefit out of that. Not to mention, again, that modern records would all have original material recorded digitally, so its obvious that with a digital to analog conversion to actually get the music onto the record, a little bit of quality would be lost.

In the real world, digital formats are better, but like I said, hard drive space is rediculously cheap now, why not give us 24 bit 96 khz audio (at minimum)? There's no way that anyone is going to tell the difference between that and an actual analog waveform. as for the 16 bit 44.1 khz audio of CDs, I think we can all hear that the sound could be better.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

Vinyl being an analog waveform recorded and played by from physical media is what you hear is what you get

Except that this isn't really true. At the molecular level, it's still stepped or notched as individual or groups of molecules are cut out of the groove to encode the signal.

[DownhillGoat]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

In the real world, digital formats are better, but like I said, hard drive space is rediculously cheap now,

Taking a wild guess you haven't been hard drive shopping in the last 2 months.

[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by kunkstyle

Taking a wild guess you haven't been hard drive shopping in the last 2 months.

have prices of hard drives gone up 1000% in the last 2 months?

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by troutman

When people say they haven't bought a CD in five years, what they are really saying is they haven't bought any music in five years. Many people pirate music with impunity.

I had a big gap between my last CD purchase and my current ongoing spree of digital music purchasing.

The music industry left some of us feeling like we had nowhere to go. My car, for instance, doesn't play CDs. It plays MP3s on SD cards. For years, if I bought a song off of iTunes I would have to find some sort of software to strip the DRM off of, which Apple was constantly updating iTunes to block the interfacing of such 3rd party applications.

Basically I would buy music and not even be able to listen to it in my own vehicle. That is garbage.

Now that they've come to their senses, absolutely I buy my music. It's gotten even easier lately with wireless synching, and if you buy something on one Apple device it goes to all of your other devices.

I will happily pay Apple $25 a year to legitimize my Mp3s acquired from alternative sources when the service is offered for iCloud in the near future.

If the music industry didn't have their heads up their asses for the 10 years between my last CD purchase and now they would have seen a lot more of my money.

I never had a problem paying for what I listen to. I had a problem not being able to listen to what I paid for.

[afc wimbledon]

Koetsu Coralstone retails for 15,000 new, hand made in coral, for them its a decent mid range cartridge .




Of course you have to add a turntable and tone arm to it.

[DownhillGoat]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

have prices of hard drives gone up 1000% in the last 2 months?

About 200% and climbing.

[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by kunkstyle

About 200% and climbing.

And hard drives today still store 100 times as much as hard rives of ten years ago, for roughly the same price.

Back then, there was reason to record and store in 16 bit max. One CD worth of recorded tracks could take up a whole hard drive, easily.

[DownhillGoat]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

And hard drives today still store 100 times as much as hard rives of ten years ago, for roughly the same price.

True. Wrong thread I guess, but it's RGMG at the moment.

[jayswin]

Originally Posted by Cowperson

Adele last month, one of the few CD purchases I make in a year. Mostly I listen to AM radio when I drive around. I have a Mozart CD in a player in my home office right now.

I've never downloaded any music in my life. Don't really know how that works. Never cared.

When I'm out running for a few hours at a time on lonely country roads, I prefer hearing the rustle of the wind through the grass ..... or maybe the practical aspect of hearing vehicles coming up behind me. That was true in the cassette era too.

Cowperson

lol, is this for real?

[Hanna Sniper]

Originally Posted by zamler

I get the sarcasm, but there is a 4.1 unofficial mix of DSOTM (DVD-audio format) that is absolutely brilliant, there is no need for a higher sampling rate it's about as good as it will get considering the age of the source.

No sarcasm, if any then it's directed at myself. I can't help buying the album on every format it comes out on. I just picked up the boxset that came out last month. plus I own most of all the live recordings of the full album as well.

[troutman]

This New York Times article was written 5 years ago:

The Graying of the Record Store

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/fa...pagewanted=all

On a recent Monday, six people — soon enough four, then two — were browsing the bins of compact discs at Norman’s Sound and Vision, a music store on Cooper Square in Manhattan, around 6 p.m., a time that once constituted the daily rush hour. A decade ago, the number of shoppers might have been 20 or 30, said Norman Isaacs, the owner. Six people? He would have had that many working in the store.

“I used to make more in a day than I probably make in a week now,” said the shaven-headed Mr. Isaacs, 59, whose largely empty aisles brimming with punk, jazz, Latin music, and lots and lots of classic rock have left him, many afternoons, looking like a rock ’n’ roll version of the Maytag repairman. Just as troubling to Mr. Isaacs is the age of his clientele.

“It’s much grayer,” he said mournfully.

The bite that downloading has taken out of CD sales is well known — the compact disc market fell about 25 percent between 1999 and 2005, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade organization. What that precipitous drop indicated by the figures doesn’t reveal is that this trend is turning many record stores into haunts for the gray-ponytail set. This is especially true of big-city stores that stock a wider range of music than the blockbuster acts.

“We don’t see the kids anymore,” said Thom Spennato, who owns Sound Track, a cozy store on busy Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “That 12-to-15-year-old market, that’s what’s missing the last couple of years.”

Without that generation of buyers, the future looks bleak. “My landlord asked me if I wanted another 10-year lease, and I said no,” Mr. Spennato said. “I have four years left, then I’m out.”

Since late 2003, about 900 independent record stores have closed nationwide, leaving about 2,700, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a marketing research company in Studio City, Calif. In 2004, Tower Records, one of the nation’s largest chains, filed for bankruptcy protection.

[opendoor]

I think the decline of music sales is also made more pronounced by the fact that the '90s saw a huge jump in sales from CDs. The number of albums sold in 1994 was double what were sold in 1984. If you look at a longer historical context, music sales in the mid 2000s actually weren't out of the ordinary at all. The number of albums bought in 2005 or 2006 is actually pretty similar to the number of albums that were bought every year in the '70s and '80s.

It's gone down since then, but even under the best of circumstances sales would've gone down from their 1990s peak. Also coupled with that decline in album sales is a massive return to the sale of singles. Here are a couple of charts based on RIAA numbers: