# Anybody else miss staring at a shelf of CD's? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 10, 2019, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008 "2019-09-10T21:08:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![racer72](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/racer72/32/3075_2.png) [@racer72](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/racer72)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/21 "2019-09-11T15:06:34Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > (I have a copy of the original _Sticky Fingers_ [with a working zipper](https://jamesostafford.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/rolling-stones-sticky-fingers-zipper-up.jpg).) I saw a copy of this still in the shrink wrap at a record store in Seattle. It’s an early version with the zipper fully zipped. Early buyers of this album when it was released were complaining that the zipper was damaging the vinyl, it was at the last track when fully zipped. The record company fixed this by shipping the albums with the zipper at half mast and rotating each 90 degrees from each other when boxed. I wore out my first copy, my second copy was played once to record it on a cassette tape. ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/22 "2019-09-11T15:42:37Z")
> [@madsircool](#): > > The quality of digital reproduction is poor. Digital music isnt the same as music on CD or vinyl. Take it from Neil Young, > > [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html) Which is funny, because Young’s entire catalog is available for streaming. > **[Neil Young Archives](https://neilyoungarchives.com/)** > > NYA contains the complete archives of Neil Young. The site is designed for a chronological exploration of artist output including music, books, films, & videos. Music is streamed in high-res with Xstream by NYA. A living document, NYA is always... ---
**Author:** ![burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/burpo_the_wonder_mutt/32/365_2.png) [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/burpo_the_wonder_mutt)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/23 "2019-09-11T15:51:46Z")
I miss going to the record store and heading straight to the “Import” section and seeing how many albums **Tangerine Dream** have recorded; it seemed like there were 2 or 3 new ones every week. 🙂 Plus, the Imports came in a plastic sleeve with stickers telling you how much it cost in foreign money. ---
**Author:** ![MoonMoon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moonmoon/32/2959_2.png) [@MoonMoon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MoonMoon)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/24 "2019-09-11T15:52:45Z")
Nope, not a bit. I hate “stuff” so I embraced streaming with a gleeful heart. ---
**Author:** ![Ashtura](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ashtura/32/2963_2.png) [@Ashtura](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ashtura)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/25 "2019-09-11T16:14:14Z")
Not really, to be honest. I do recall being very offended at the idea of not owning a physical copy of media. it’s _mine_ dammit! Convenience won out. I still have a bunch of disks in one of those binder things under my bed I think. Haven’t touched it in years and I might as well toss it, but there was a major investment in money there so it’s hard. ---
**Author:** ![burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/burpo_the_wonder_mutt/32/365_2.png) [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/burpo_the_wonder_mutt)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/26 "2019-09-11T16:18:43Z")
I’m a Luddite; some day every single one of you are going to lose every single bit of your digitized media, so you have to go out and buy it all again. All I have to worry about is finding an 8-track player in working condition. Hey, wait a minute… 😃 ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/27 "2019-09-11T17:45:59Z")
> [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](#): > > I’m a Luddite; some day every single one of you are going to lose every single bit of your digitized media, so you have to go out and buy it all again. All I have to worry about is finding an 8-track player in working condition. > > Hey, wait a minute… 😃 I still keep my CDs around for just such an emergency. I might have to have to rip it again, but you don’t have to buy what you still have. And it’s possible to back up your online purchases to CD. ---
**Author:** ![Dahnlor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dahnlor/32/533_2.png) [@Dahnlor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dahnlor)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/28 "2019-09-11T18:45:15Z")
> [@Arrendajo](#): > > The only thing I miss from the old days is album covers. As far as listening goes, I’m all digital. This is pretty much where I’m at. I started collecting LP records as a teenager back in the 1980s when CDs weren’t yet available in record stores. When CDs started to become common I held off because it was easier to appreciate the art on vinyl LP sleeves. I finally switched to CDs by the end of the ‘80s, partly because of their portability (a full moving box of LPs is friggin’ heavy!) and partly because LPs were rapidly disappearing from record stores, not to mention the equally sudden ubiquity of CD players. I was eventually gifted a [rotating CD tower](https://www.hammacher.com/product/space-saving-rotating-cd-dvd-tower?cm_cat=ProductSEM&cm_pla=AdWordsPLA&source=PRODSEM&gclid=CjwKCAjwtuLrBRAlEiwAPVcZBklICnK5AM3BW_hfP-wxgCi4pc4R-OPVXyHi-rY2Y-uIo5LjrUTkahoCRmEQAvD_BwE) that I used to store and display my CD collection, which today is completely full and no longer kept in a particularly visible location. My brother’s collection developed in a similar manner over the same years, but his was much more prolific than mine, and for a long time his CDs were kept in shelves mounted on his walls. However, the last time he moved (in 2013), he left most of his CDs in their moving boxes and didn’t make the extensive effort that would have been required to replicate the display. When my brother passed away last year, I inherited his collection, which by then filled 12 moving boxes (and a full moving box of CDs is friggin’ heavy!), and decided to free them from their boxes and display them on bookshelves that I had also inherited, resulting in a disorganized mess that is nothing like the glorious display that once adorned his walls. A fairly significant percentage of my collection is duplicated in his, but the task of sorting everything out has been daunting enough that I’ve been putting it off for over a year and counting. In the meantime, the ubiquity and convenience of digital media has all but ended any new CD purchases. In the last decade, I’ve probably bought less than 10 new CDs, while my digital collection has exploded, and those CDs that I did buy were immediately copied (I hate using the word “ripped”) to MP3 and played exclusively in that format. I recently read that sales of vinyl LPs have been making enough of a comeback that [they’re expected to outsell CDs](https://loudwire.com/vinyl-records-outsell-cds/) by the end of this year, at least in terms of revenue. I can understand this, since the analog experience of vinyl LPs is more organic and personal than CDs ever were, while the convenience factor of digital-only formats is far greater. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/29 "2019-09-11T19:08:46Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > Maybe because I haven’t listened to a CD in a long time, but I can’t tell the sound difference. I usually play my music on Bluetooth speakers, but even over earbuds, mp3s sound OK to me. Maybe it’s been awhile. The difference is strikingly obvious - it is one of the more dramatic differences in sound quality between any two mediums. MP3s, remember, exist for one reason; to make the sound file manageably small. In the early days of file sharing and portable digital music players, having the sound files as large as a .WAV file was just not practical; a four minute song is like 40MB in .WAV format, and no one was going to want a 256MB player that only held six songs. The MP3 made digital music practical in a time when transfer speeds were slow and mobile storage small. The tradeoff was sound quality. Today of course you could in theory transport your music in larger, higher quality formats, but that’s not the common standard. ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/30 "2019-09-11T19:31:30Z")
Your mileage definitely varies. Or maybe mine varies. I can detect no difference. I bought a new stereo for my car a few years ago. I didn’t buy it for the CD player. I never played even one CD in it. But it did have an input jack that I plugged my phone into. Sounded fantastic. ---
**Author:** ![madsircool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madsircool/32/3432_2.png) [@madsircool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madsircool)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/31 "2019-09-11T19:55:52Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > Your mileage definitely varies. Or maybe mine varies. I can detect no difference. I bought a new stereo for my car a few years ago. I didn’t buy it for the CD player. I never played even one CD in it. But it did have an input jack that I plugged my phone into. Sounded fantastic. From the linked NYT article above: > [@](#): > > The compressed, hollow sound of free streaming music was a big step down from the CD. “Huge step down from vinyl,” Young said. Each step eliminated levels of sonic detail and shading by squeezing down the amount of information contained in the package in which music was delivered. Or, as Young told me, you are left with “5 percent of the original music for your listening enjoyment.” > > Producers and engineers often responded to the smaller size and lower quality of these packages by using cheap engineering tricks, like making the softest parts of the song as loud as the loudest parts. This flattened out the sound of recordings and fooled listeners’ brains into ignoring the stuff that wasn’t there anymore, i.e., the resonant combinations of specific human beings producing different notes and sounds in specific spaces at sometimes ultraweird angles that the era of magnetic tape and vinyl had so successfully captured. ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/32 "2019-09-11T20:52:50Z")
> [@madsircool](#): > > From the linked NYT article above: I didn’t say there is no difference. I can’t hear the difference. If you can, listen to what you like and be happy with it and let others like me do the same. I don’t hear by reading newspaper articles. If my brain is fooling me, I don’t care and I’m fine with it. If there’s a trade-off, I’m willing to put up with it. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/33 "2019-09-11T21:00:31Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > I still keep my CDs around for just such an emergency. I might have to have to rip it again, but you don’t have to buy what you still have. And it’s possible to back up your online purchases to CD. I have a couple of shelves of double-depth-double-stacked CDs in cases for mostly this reason, though also a bit because it doesn’t feel like I own things if I don’t have the hardcopy. Plus I don’t like throwing stuff away, including the insert/cover art. I do have some stuff purely digital, but it’s stuff that I couldn’t get a hardcopy of at all. And despite double backups I expect it to vanish in the wind someday. > [@madsircool](#): > > The quality of digital reproduction is poor. Digital music isnt the same as music on CD or vinyl. Take it from Neil Young, > > [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html) Another advantage of keeping the CDs is that if I woke up one morning and started caring, I could re-rip them all in a less lossy format. I know there are better ones than mp3 out there. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/34 "2019-09-11T21:13:28Z")
Not missing looking at CD or cassette cases. A box of CDs was particular stupid since the orientation of the text on the hinge side was upside down! Find a CD you want to look at, pull it out, flip it around to see the cover. Plus the writing and such was too small and often far less than vinyl albums. Now, looking at vinyl albums is a very different experience. ---
**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/35 "2019-09-11T22:08:11Z")
> [@madsircool](#): > > The quality of digital reproduction is poor. Digital music isnt the same as music on CD or vinyl. Take it from Neil Young, Not if you do it yourself. I spent the first half of 2018 digitizing my music collection, which involved acquiring used copies of all the CDs for the songs in my digital collection. I used [Exact Audio Copy](http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) to make “perfect,” lossless copies of every CD into digital flac files. I still have that entire flac library (418 CDs, 146 gigs) but then manually converted each track I wanted in my active library into 320mbps mp3 files by hand using audacity, normalizing the volume for every track in the process. This means I did exactly one conversion per digital file, directly from the lossless flac into the highest quality mp3 file possible. (I also embedded 600x600 album cover art into the mp3s taken from [albumartexchange](https://albumartexchange.com/), which are quite nice.) My mp3 files are unusually large, but my music collection is small: 876 songs, totaling just a hair under 8 gigs. Those fit easily on a low profile flash drive, which plugs right into my car stereo, no fuss no muss. > [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](#): > > I’m a Luddite; some day every single one of you are going to lose every single bit of your digitized media, so you have to go out and buy it all again. Not me! In fairness, if I knew how much work it would end up being, I may not have started that project at all. But now with it all finished I’m quite pleased with it. When I started I only had fewer than 100 physical CDs, so it ended up being a process where I’d order a box of 10 used CDs for $15 (including shipping!) each week, processing those 10 then wait for the next box. That kept it from being too much at once. Mostly. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2019, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/36 "2019-09-11T22:19:17Z")
I have a wall of over 2,000 CDs right in front of me, that I can stare at whenever I please. Of course they’re all ripped onto my computer, with the best 2,000+ tracks on my phone. Even if my computer and phone crash, I still have the originals. And that’s not counting all the LPs I still have… and 78s. ---
**Author:** ![zbuzz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/e19b73/32.png) [@zbuzz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zbuzz)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2019, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/37 "2019-09-12T05:25:28Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > The difference is strikingly obvious - it is one of the more dramatic differences in sound quality between any two mediums. Maybe you have mutant ears, because this isn’t at all true. It’s virtually impossible for anyone to tell the difference between a song from a CD and that same song ripped at a decent bit rate to either MP3 or AAC. If you were a trained sound engineer (or a mutant) maybe, possibly, perhaps on a good day, you could. But either way, “one of the more dramatic differences” is pretty far-fetched. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2019, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/38 "2019-09-12T13:27:13Z")
> [@zbuzz](#): > > Maybe you have mutant ears, because this isn’t at all true. It’s virtually impossible for anyone to tell the difference between a song from a CD and that same song ripped at a decent bit rate to either MP3 or AAC. > > If you were a trained sound engineer (or a mutant) maybe, possibly, perhaps on a good day, you could. But either way, “one of the more dramatic differences” is pretty far-fetched. I can tell the difference, but I think it has more to do with the whole stack of equipment and not just the recording medium. In my college days, people played their CDs on a high quality component stereo system with large speaker towers and maybe even a subwoofer. A pair of airbuds playing streaming music simply can’t reproduce the range of sound. Then again, most people probably don’t expect it to. They expect their phone streaming Spotify over a Bluetooth headset to have an equivalent fidelity to maybe a Walkman playing a magnetic tape. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2019, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/39 "2019-09-12T13:56:44Z")
Well sure - on cheap earbuds, your sound quality is largely a function of the earbuds, not the source. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2019, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008/40 "2019-09-12T14:06:39Z")
> [@madsircool](#): > > The quality of digital reproduction is poor. Digital music isnt the same as music on CD or vinyl… Just to nitpick…much music is “poor” because it is often stored as MP3 or other highly compressed form. CD music IS digital, and can be extracted (to a WAV file) without compression if you must. If you do this, you can’t complain that it is poor unless you feel the original CD is also poor, because it’s the exact same, byte-for-byte, data. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-else-miss-staring-at-a-shelf-of-cds/840008.md?page=3)