I often wonder who the idiot was that engineered the jewel case. Someone needs to award that feller with the stupidest engineering trophy and then make him balance thirty of them in his sweaty hands for 20 minutes.
I’m probably not complaining about anything that every modern user of audio CD’s is painfully aware. How many times have you bumped a table and had a cascade of jewel cases fly to the floor? Or tried carrying a handful to the car and have them land on the concrete driveway?
The design is almost sadistic in nature. Super glossy, slick plastic. On the inside you have that worthless round thing that’s supposed to hold the cd in place. 75% of the time some of the prongs are already broken when I bring the cd home from the store. The brand new CD is sliding around in the case collecting scratches. Don’t even get me started on that cheap ass hinge. At least two in ten jewel cases in my audio cd collection have a broken hinge. This is a deeply flawed piece of engineering.
As consumers why didn’t we raise hell about these worthless jewel cases back in 1988? Were we that mesmerized by the shiny cd disk that replaced our records? We just meekly accepted the fact that every day of lives at least one would hit the floor? Oh look at the shiny cd and it’s shiny case. Little did we know how quickly that shiny piece of plastic collected scratches and cracks.
Ok, granted mp3’s have reduced how much we have to carry these cursed things. But, from 1988-2000 most of us were carrying Audio CD’s back and forth to our cars almost every day. They slid around the car seat, went under the car seat, I remember even having one get under my brake pedal a few times. :smack:
The sad thing is, it would have taken almost zero effort to* fix the jewel case.* All it needed was a rough edge. You’ve seen that plastic with the tiny dots and ridges? Put that on the edges of the jewel case and poof the sliding is almost eliminated. Better yet, include some sort of locking edge that lets them stack without falling down when the table is bumped.
<deep breath> By now, you probably know I just picked up 30 cd jewel cases off the floor. Four cracked and needing replacing. Thanks to a hip bump while vacuuming.
If it weren’t for the album art and lyrics booklet, I’d buy ten CD zip up wallets and put the audio cd’s in them. I hate losing my album art. A few more hip bumps to the table and I may just do that. Scan the album art and take a sledgehammer to every one of those cursed jewel cases.
Perhaps it is time to put up another shelf. right now the shelves are full of audio cd’s, dvd’s etc. The overflow gets stacked on the end of the table. Perhaps, not the safest or best option.
I have to say it’s been years since I messed with a CD. I ripped all my stuff to MP3 and loaded it into my HTPC. XBMC analyzed the MP3s and automagically downloaded artist and album info including album art.
Once the MP3 bitrate is at least 192 VBR I can’t hear the difference to the original CD anyway, so I haven’t had a reason to touch a CD. Also upgraded my the head unit in my car to one that has a USB plug, so no more CDs in the car either.
Dear guy who just picked up thirty CD jewel Cases off the floor.
I am an 11 year old girl and all my friends have started puberty but OMG mine wont start! You know about jewel cases so my question is this: when replacing the carbuerator in a Dodge Charger with a big block 440, can I use a Holly 850? Also, why are there so many children starving in the world?
Can’t say that I was ever annoyed by jewel cases, but I guess that’s largely because I stopped using them when they might have become annoying.
Back when I regularly used commercial CDs, they were in an assortment of nice orderly racks.
Once the shift went to mainly home-burned CDs, I found that it was impractical to put them in jewel cases and maintain the rack system, because I couldn’t easily put enough information on the spine. They went into wallets, and the wallets went on the shelf. I use paper sleeves if an individual disc needs to go somewhere. I think this will get me through to the end of the optical disc era without any needless frustration.
I think that’s what I’m going to do after I finish ripping everything. One dvd data disk would hold scans of Every Audio disk liner that I own. maybe throw the original paper in an accordion file.
the tall cd wallets hold two cd’s per page. About 30 or 40 cd’s per wallet. 15 wallets would hold all my music and protect it a lot better than the jewel cases.
I can’t quite bring myself to sell off the originals and totally trust the rips. Never can tell what technology will bring in 5 or 10 years. There may be a new super disk format that hold a terabyte or more. Plus there may even be a newer, better audio format than Flac. In that case, reripping may be an option. Keeping the originals around makes sense if I can do it compactly and easily.
And why is it a “Jewel Case” anyway? Who thought that up? What was wrong with CD Case or Disc Case? Isn’t Jewel Case a little presumptuous?
My LPs came in a Jacket. My cassettes came in a Box. My VHS tapes came in a Slip Cover. My Eight Tracks came basically naked, and we’d throw them into the back seat, and they were just fine.
My wife just reminded me that the younger dopers probably don’t have a clue what this thread is about. Or why jewel cases can be a problem. I forgot there’s youngsters out there that literally grew up with IPods. You have no idea the fun you missed out on. Nothing like having 15 or so CD’s in the car, sliding all over the place. Unless you had a car with a single cd player it’s had to relate. Life got easier by 1995 when the cd Changer cartridges came out. You could put 5 cd’s in those things.
I started with records and 8 track. Never liked cassette very much and refused to buy music on cassette. I’d buy records and then record them to cassette for the car. Got excited in 1986 at this strange new optical format called CD. WTF Are they I asked. By 1990 I had a couple hundred of them. Mostly replacing my Albums. Today I have about 500 Audio CD’s. Actually that’s not too many for a lifetime. I’ve heard of IPods with over a thousand albums on them.
I think it’s mostly because of the slight resemblance to an actual jewelery case, particularly in that it is designed to minimize surface friction (and resulting scratches) when it’s removed. The center hub acts as a stand-off and holds the data area of the disc delicately away from the case. Not exactly a velvet lining, but it serves the same purpose.
However, the good people at Phillips assert that it is so-called because the designer (Peter Doodson) specified that the reinforcing ribs on the top and bottom of the case should be polished so that they “pick up the light and shine,” giving the case a “high-tech” look. I am unconvinced, though – isn’t this feature virtually identical with most tape cassette cases?
Engineers who realized that (contrary to all the press about the media’s durability) CDs are even more scratch-prone than vinyl, and that protective inner inserts are impractical at that scale, because they quickly develop abrading creases.
During the product development phase, they did package them like tiny record albums - and they became spectacularly unplayable long before an LP would become to crackly to enjoy.
My collection keeps growing. I recently started listening to jazz and easy listening orchestra music from the 1950’s and early 60’s. I’ve bought 15 or so CD’s from Amazon in the past 6 months.
I’m not willing to mess with ITunes and their rights management. I want a real CD that I can rip myself. I’ll probably be buying CD’s for quite some time. But, my new stuff will be ripped within days of buying it and then put away in storage. My days of actually playing and listening to Audio CD’s are way behind me. I’ll probably unhook my old Denon Cd Changer pretty soon. I haven’t turned it on more than three or four times in the past year.
right now the shelves are full of audio cd’s, dvd’s etc. The overflow gets stacked on the end of the table. Perhaps, not the safest or best option.