What's the deal with CD?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m a person who opposes pointless progress. I think inventions and new technology should be created out of a genuine need. Inventions and technology created for other reasons must have a hell of a good application, or they’re useless.

I think CD falls into the latter category.

People, it’s albums! We’ve had them since the 19th century! It’s not revolutionary! We’ve had eight-tracks for decades and turntables for more years than I can count. It’s nothing new. What does CD give us that we didn’t have already?

Usually, the answer is sound quality. Well, to quote a neophile I know, “you don’t know how bad quality your old sound system had until you hear a new one”. If I don’t know, it doesn’t hurt me. I don’t think anybody sat in front of their record player and said “God I wish the sound had higher fidelity”.

And then we have the entire cult around it. CD clubs, CD magazines, CD, CD, CD. All for a form of entertainment that’s been around for decades and decades. It’s nothing new. It’s nothing special. Why the obsession? Player pianos didn’t have this kind of obsession when they came.

Because people fall for this and so happily pump their money into other people’s pockets for the privilege of being able to do something they could already do much cheaper, I am going to have to get a CD player sooner or later and buy a bunch of CD albums just to be able to hear the records I already own. One day my turntable will die and there will be no more LPs to buy and no-one to repair my old one, and there goes my record collection. I’m pissed.

Even here, where the average intelligence is presumably considerably higher than that of Joe Heatseeker, CDs are mentioned in every other Cafe Society thread. “I wonder when they’ll release the complete Phantom Menace soundtrack CD.” “I bought the new Foo Fighters CD.” By the way, why bother mentioning the “CD” part?

So, CD lovers, what’s the deal? Seriously.

-CoffeeGuy

2

Well, don’t they hold more sound than a tape or record? And records can’t be played in cars. Since it’s digital, it’s more compatible wit future tech.

Sorry, that’s the best I can do. I’m not really familiar with tapes or records. The only tape I ever had was the Lion King sound track, and the only records I’ve ever played was my dad’s old 78’s as I put them onto CD.

3

I realize this is a parody of the DVD thread, but are you seriously asking these questions as well? If so, I’ll bite.

CD is a great medium because it offers most of the advantages of various kinds of analog media without many of their drawbacks. For example, you can play a cassette in you car, but not an album. You can skip instantly from one song to another with an album, but not a cassette. CDs can do both. They’re smaller and cheaper to produce than other media, which should lead to price breaks, but doesn’t. Even now, over 25 years after CD technology was first developed, cassettes still cost less. But that’s just the record companies ripping people off. It’s not the fault of the media itself.

CDs last longer than magnetic media. If I want to back up one of my CDs, I can burn a full 80 minute disc in about 2.5 minutes (52x burners rule!). Dubbing a cassette takes much longer on consumer model tape decks, plus you have to deal with some quality loss. Not so with a CD copy. Plus, you can play them in your computer, and they can even have extra PC-only content on the discs. Try that with an 8-track.

Another great thing is that, with digital, backwards compatability is possible. The new SACDs (Super Audio CD) require a special player to hear multichannel sound, but will play regular two-channel music in a normal CD player.

That’s not to say that CDs are perfect. They do scratch, but not as easily as albums. Cassettes can hold more music than CDs, but the time I would waste fast forwarding and rewinding cassettes more than makes up for that difference.

4

The primary reason that CD’s exist in the first place is that they have the ability to switch from the opening track of an album to the closing track instantaneously (or nearly so.)

They hold up better then vinyl does, and the sound quality is sharper and clearer without all of the scritchy-scratchy noise that you get with vinyl and the tape hiss you get with tapes…

Storage is much easier with CD’s then with vinyl.

As far as replacing your entire record collection with CD’s that isn’t neccessary or possible, for a couple of reasons:

  1. Many, many, many albums that were on vinyl will never be released on CD, simply because the low demand and expected sales figures won’t outweigh the costs of remastering and re-packaging the vinyl and old tapes.

  2. There are many more compilations/greatest hits/best of/box sets, which contain the hits and many of the essential songs.

5

I think the reproduceability (if that’s the right word) of CDs is a big advantage. You couldn’t copy one LP to another, and with tapes, you had to deal with quality loss, which got pretty bad if 1) you copied a copy, or a copy of a copy, etc., 2) if you copied an older tape, which was already in less than peak condition, and the lifespan of a tape was much more finite.

Portability is something we’re taking for granted now, I think. Records were big, and a portable record player, had SONY or someone invented one, would’ve been amusingly huge. I wander around with a couple dozen CDs in my backpack and it makes no difference - and if I had one of those carrying cases, it’d be even less. You’d probably need a car, or several patient friends, to carry that many records around. And if all of the CDs I owned were replaced by records, many people I know (myself especially) wouldn’t be able to enter their dorm rooms, or indeed houses.

6

Aren’t parodies meant to go in the pit?

7

You fool! If it were not for the creation of CD’s and their mystical rainbowy reflective powers, Zombar The Devourerer (yes, there’s an extra -er) would have invaded our solar system and munched on our planet to sustain his own near-omnipotent strength! Not even the combined might of the Spiffy Six would have thwarted this foe… were it not for… the CD!!

How’s THAT for “need”?

8

Everyone has pretty much summed up the advantages of CDs, but there seems to be a lot of LP-bashing going on. Yes, a worn/scratched/dirty/dusty record will hiss and pop, but in good condition the sound quality is as good as CDs, if not better. In my experience, (involving a very nice CD player and 25 year old middle of the line record player) CDs seem to have slightly wider range of sound they can produce, and slightly clearer sound, but LPs have a fuller, richer sound to them, or at least to what sound they have.

Also, there are some albums that just don’t seem right playing on CD. Anything of Creedence’s for instance, or Zeppellin, or “Paranoid”