Informal poll: Do you still listen to vinyl records?

[guitar man]

54. CD is a decent audio medium

They've been around for 30 years as a commercial audio medium and there are reasons for that, one of which you mentioned above. Manufactured CDs can take a lot of abuse and keep playing pretty reliably. CDRs not as much but that's a different animal.

A well recorded, mixed and mastered CD delivers pretty good audio quality IMO. I think a lot of the bad rap CDs get from some quarters is not as much a weakness in the media itself, but what's been done to it for the sake of making the music on it "louder". The "loudness war" as some call it has produces some CDs that sound really harsh, grating and just generally bad because they've been hit so hard with compression and limiting to drive up the volume that there's nothing left but shredded bits. each record label wants their kids to be the loudest on the block so they pound the mastering engineers until they get what they want . Metallica's "Death Magnetic" is often touted to be the loudest cd produced to date and as a result, it sounds like shit

These practices have driven modern CDs so far above proper gain staging it's just ridiculous. That's not the case with vinyl records. A record can only be driven so loud before the needle will jump out of the groove ajnd go skipping across the record. That being the case, LPs aren't mastered for just sheer loudness like many CDs and of late have been a welcome relief to my ears