You Should Listen to CDs

[babylonsister]

Last edited Sat Dec 25, 2021, 10:39 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.wired.com/story/you-should-listen-to-cds/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Gilad Edelman
Gear
12.23.2021 07:00 AM
You Should Listen to CDs
If vinyl is for hipsters and streaming is for everyone else, maybe the forgotten format is for you.

snip//

This is not a nostalgia play. Vinyl has the nostalgia market cornered. But if you look past the visual aesthetics, you’ll admit that CDs accomplish the essential function of turntables, vis-a-vis streaming, without the hassle. That is, they allow you to build a library.

Since beginning my experiment, I find myself listening to full albums over and over and coming to appreciate tracks that I would skip if I were listening on my phone. Some of the albums I bought from the discount bin didn’t do much for me at first. I might not have given them a second listen on Spotify. But since they’re in my apartment, in a stack next to the boombox, I listen anyway. Most turn out to contain at least a few gems. The Neville Brothers album Yellow Moon, for example, includes some cringey quasi-rap and ponderous ballads, but also some absolute bangers of late-’80s funky swampy soul. Such are the unexpected joys this experiment has brought to my life.

(CDs also sound better than all but the most mint-condition records. Anyone who insists otherwise is probably rich enough to spend $45K on monoblock amplifiers and diamond-tipped styluses—or is just full of it.)

Note that I’m not predicting that CDs are poised for a comeback. To the contrary, the final pillar of my argument depends on that not being the case. Perhaps the best thing about CDs is that they have gotten ridiculously affordable. Thank you, supply and demand. At the used music stores where I live, almost all the CDs are $5 or less. Even new CDs are far cheaper than they were two decades ago. You could pay $35 to own the new Adele album on vinyl—or $9.97 to have it on CD, with money left over to buy two or three more albums.

So let the masses stay hooked on streaming while the hipsters spin their overpriced records. The CD is dead; long live the CD.

[RandySF]

1. They were a pain in the ass to store.

[Eko]

2. I think records sound better than CD's.

There is much better sound separation with records and the mid range sounds more organic to me.

[regnaD kciN]

4. Whatever you may think about "organic" anything...

Your first claim is provably false, as LPs, due to their technology, have far less channel separation than any digital form.

https://classicalcandor.blogspot.com/2019/07/on-considering-vinyl-revival.html

[Eko]

7. That article didnt say anything about sound seperation.

And I give you this to ponder.
Joseph Byrd , musician-composer-producer/emeritus professor (1960-present)

Analog music has an infinity of frequencies (sounds). There are 100 frequencies in the octave between 1Hz and 100 Hz, but 1,000 frequencies in the octave between 1KHz and 2KHz. Each subsequent octave doubles the number of frequencies. By the time you get to 10–20KZ, you’ve used up a vast amount of memory. And digital memory is not infinite, the way analog is.

Then there are the overtones for each instrument. An average example of overtones for any instrument has at least 32 overtones:

And each overtone has its own loudness, which creates the distinctive color or timbre. Now multiply all that data by the number of instruments or voices.

That is simply too much information for a CD to hold for an entire ensemble. So the trick is to “approximate” the higher overtones, i.e., instead of 18,277 Hz, it defaults to 18,300. This is good enough to trick the ear under some circumstances, but it has the effect of removing certain information, or “fudging” it. Imagine the effect of a full orchestra. In effect, up to 30% of the subtle partials that define the tone of the instrument or voice are lost. The “separation” of which you speak is contained in the highest partials.

On the Ry Cooder JAZZ album, we used 2-inch audio tape and boosted the high end of each instrument. The result was that the instruments were not only clearer, you could virtually “see” where they were placed in the room. The album won awards from two audio engineering magazines.


For me personally I am a recording engineer that has done multiple albums, a performing musician for,,,,, 33 years, wow, that long? I went to music school and sell recording and musical instruments as my profession quite a few of them for the price of nice cars. My audio setup for surfing the internet and watching shows is much nicer than most peoples recording studios. Does any of that make me right? No, but I know what I am talking about at least.

Lastly, there was no where in the article that showed my claim was provably false, no where in that article said anything about sound separation let alone channel separation which a totally different thing. So not only was what you claimed not there, what I actually claimed is not provably false there either. Of course sound is subjective, but since my living is selling things that make sounds, record it and reproduce it and I have been doing this for about 25 years its possible I may be correct.

[Fiendish Thingy]

9. Meaningless to anyone using a proletariat sound system.

Your ears tell you what sounds good, not statistics.

As a professional, I’m sure you’re well acquainted with the techniques required to make music sound pleasing from earbuds to car systems to audiophile setups.

[Eko]

11. What? a proletariat sound system?

Sorry, no idea what that is.
Yes, I know how to mix for multiple speakers. Still no idea on what you are really talking about.

[Fiendish Thingy]

12. I mean a low cost, non-audiophile sound system that most people can afford

IMO, on such a system, CD’s sound as good, if not better, than vinyl.

To my ears.

[highplainsdem]

13. Re CDs vs vinyl:

There are times I thought I could hear the difference, with the CD sounding more sterile. But vinyl LPs get damaged too quickly. (For that matter, I've seen younger relatives make quick work of CDs, too, unfortunately.)

I like the comparison producer Perry Margouleff made here:

https://www.goldminemag.com/articles/rock-roller-paul-rodgers-takes-turn-soul-man

PM: Anything recorded digitally is like watching a ballet under a strobe light. You are only seeing the ballerina when the lights are on. Whatever the sample rate, there is still information that you’re not getting, because the lights go on and off. With analog, it is continuous. You get all of the information. Humans are very sensitive to this, even though they don’t know it. It is like eating at a good restaurant, and then you want to go back and visit it again. When you listen to a good record in the vinyl world, something happens to you and it imprints on you and you can’t wait to hear it again. It becomes part of your repertoire, and you keep coming back to it.

Since you're a recording engineer, Eko, I was wondering what you thought of what Tony Visconti said here:

https://www.psaudio.com/copper/article/tony-visconti-part-2/

What I like to do is record on analog multi-track tape, do all the right things like gently saturate the tape and as soon as a take is agreed upon as a master, it goes right into Pro Tools at a high sampling rate. I typically record at 96 kHz, 32-bit floating. That is so close to the sound of analog tape and it perfectly preserves the gently saturated sound you get from tape.

[Eko]

14. Ive done the same thing.

Record to tape then transfer it to pro tools and I definitely think it sounds better. It is a huge pain in the butt though. Even that though is just one part of what we are talking about. That is the recording of the audio not the play back. A record is the play back and creates the sounds via analogue vibrations and that's where I agree with Paul Rodgers. Thanks for your comment highplainsdem, appreciate the conversation.
Eko

[babylonsister]

5. From the article, and posting

in case anyone doesn't read it. And ftr, I got rid of my albums decades ago. Too much to lug around.

Indeed, the immediate, frictionless availability of something else keeps me from spending as much time as I otherwise would even with music I really love. In the pre-streaming era, I’d buy an album and listen to it over and over. With Spotify, I often discover a new artist, get really excited about them, and three months later forget about their existence entirely. If it doesn’t occupy space on your wall, it may not occupy space in your mind.

There is an obvious antidote to this condition, one that perhaps has already occurred to you: the vinyl record. Many thousands of words have been written about vinyl’s comeback. There’s a natural symmetry to it. Where streaming turns songs into something ephemeral and interchangeable, a record is very much a thing. It’s big. You can hold it in your hands and admire the artwork on the sleeve. If the problem with Spotify is the lack of friction, well, vinyl records are about as frictiony as you can get. They literally require friction to function.

Another way of putting the above is that records are a colossal pain in the ass. I had a turntable for the past decade. As I got ready to move across the country this summer, thinking hard about what was worth shipping or squeezing into my little car, I realized I hardly ever listened to my records. It’s just too much work. Records get dirty; you have to clean them. Ditto the stylus. Records are huge, and shockingly heavy; it’s hard to find room to store and display them. They’re expensive. Halfway through an album, you have to get up to turn it over. And then you have to get up again when the record ends, unless you want to wear down the needle. As WIRED senior editor—and self-flagellating owner of some 1,300 LPs—Michael Calore puts it, vinyl is “an unwieldy music playback format that sounds worse every single time you listen to it.”

[Runningdawg]

3. Long Live CDs!!

We drive a 18 year old SUV, it's so dependable we will drive it into the dirt. The receiver stopped working years ago, but the 5 disc CD changer works like the day it rolled off the factory floor. We live close to a store that cells new vinyl and old CD's. Last week I bought most of the Avenged Sevenfold catalog for less than $20.
Not to mention back in the day, I went crazy buying up Mason and Type O Negative bootlegs. You won't hear that on Pandora or Spotify. I'm NOT giving those up!!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

6. I love CDs.

And listen to them a lot.

One huge down side to vinyl records is that get things like skips. Which can't be gotten rid of. So unless you weirdly think that's a charming aspect to an album, stick with CDs.

[Fiendish Thingy]

8. I have thousands of CD's and only maybe 200 LP's, all vintage, not new

New Vinyl LP’s by current artists are almost always recorded, mixed and mastered digitally, then transferred to the analog medium of vinyl.

I can see how, on a high end audiophile system vintage vinyl that was recorded on tape could sound superior (if the disc was in mint condition), but when I compare the two formats on my middle of the road system, CD is clearly superior to my ears.

I have ripped about 10,000 songs from CD to my iPhone, which I use to listen via Bluetooth when driving.

CD’s also have a wider range and number of titles available compared to vinyl or streaming.

[wackadoo wabbit]

10. My late husband had literally thousands and thousands of CDs . . .

(this is not an exaggeration), but the majority of them were lost (stolen?) when I had to move after his death. I still have a couple of bookcases full of them, but many of my favorites (like virtually all of the Bach) went missing.

I, too, love CDs. I want to own, not just rent, my music. I honestly don't understand why people are content with renting music and books these days, especially since the actual owner (Amazon, e.g.) can reclaim the item at any time. I guess this proves I'm old.