Am I the only one who still plays CDs?

[curtvaughan]

And as xenopeek mentioned above, there really is a resurgence of LP turntables coming to the fore. Not only that, but they're considerably cheaper than they were back in the day (40+ years ago). High quality Marantz turntables, with all sorts of tonearm counterbalances to secure the tonearm with as little force as possible, to avoid wear on the vinyl, went for upwards of $400 and more - and those were 1960s/70s dollars. I just bought a digitizing LP turntable, to which I referred above, for about $100 - probably not on the level of the old Marantz line, at least mechanically, but very adept at playing an LP for a couple of times to get it digitized. Kind of neat, and I'm able to revive some of my old albums dating back to the 60s!

[curtvaughan]

...
When CDs first came out, they sounded grainy to me, like somebody had broke the music up into small chunks and just gave you the chunks. Which is, in fact, exactly the situation. ...

This has all to do with the quality of the D/A converter, which in the beginning was mediocre at its best. And still most DAC's are pretty average. You need a really good DAC to explore the full potential of a Red Book CD.

Anyway I have ripped all my CD's with Exact Audio Copy and stream them via a Hi-End DAC. It's more convenient and sounds much better.
In the car I have copies of CD's to listen to. The car is no good environment for serious music listening, due to the noise level.

I have an LG V20 phone that I bought for two reasons about 18 months ago: it had a replaceable battery, and it had a great 4-channel DAC. If you attach a primo set of headphones or speakers to the 3.5 jack, the sound is superb. When CD's first started to supplant LP's, back in the 80's, the digital sound was generally inferior to the older mature LP technology in being true to the recorded sound, primarily due to the inferior sampling rate of the digital files relative to their analog original recordings. As you intimate, both A/D and D/A conversion is far superior now to its 30 year old antecedents. Cheers, more beers, better audio!

[jimbobs]

What about cassette tape? I've still got tapes from the pre-CD days that I very occasionally play. But, having been around for the introduction of CD's, I will stick with that medium for sound quality. Nothing else comes close. As for vinyl, I still have a turntable and records but still find it as much a pain in the a.. as it always was: delicate, prone to dust and crackles, etc.

At my age, my ears are pretty much shot and I have tinnitus in both ears so sound quality is not a great concern any longer

[jimallyn]

What about cassette tape?

I have about 600 cassettes, and still listen to them now and then. I just finished listening to a bootleg cassette of The Cure playing at The I Beam in 1981. Not the best sound quality, but tolerable.

[jimbobs]

I have about 600 cassettes, and still listen to them now and then. I just finished listening to a bootleg cassette of The Cure playing at The I Beam in 1981. Not the best sound quality, but tolerable.

Yes. Most of mine date back to the late 70's, early 80's as well.

I used to belong to a record lending library which allowed members to borrow 2 LP's for a week. Many members copied LP's they liked to cassette tape. This seemed to be considered "OK" at the time and copyright was never mentioned. In fact, the library itself was complicit as they sold good quality cassette at a discount. There was endless debate about which tape was best.

Ah memories!

[BG405]

I'm wondering about the longevity of writable CD media. I have some old stock and those disks are not working so well in the recorder, a Philips CDR 870. Hopefully commercially produced CDs won't suffer from "laser rot" (a term used at first for the faulty batch(es) of laser discs from Image Entertainment).

I'm actually thinking that cassette tape might even outlast some home-made CD recordings. Good quality VHS cassettes are still perfectly useable around 25 years on, but some of my video DVDs are unreadable so I'm expecting the worst for some of my audio CD recordings too. TDK optical media seems reliable enough, for now anyway.

Before the advent of recordable CD (I was an early adopter), when recording on e.g. TDK MA and bias & levels set up properly, the recording was practically indistinguishable from the source, be it CD or vinyl. Having a 3-head cassette deck meant live monitoring was possible, switching between source and the recording just laid down. Maxell made pretty good ferric tapes, I found the sound to be smoother and more consistent than some other ferric tape, but metal particle tape was by far the best. I wonder if these are still available? Haven't made a cassette recording for quite a while, shame not to use the deck. It'd also be nice to get some tape so I can try out the Akai 4000DB open reel tape recorder I was given a while back ...

Not too OT I hope!

[jimbobs]

My car has a cassette deck and a CD player. CD-R playback is unreliable while cassette deck replaying almost 50 year old cassettes is just fine. I should visit the basement and dig out some of the old cassettes.

[KBD47]

The only place I use CDs is in my old 2002 Grand Prix as that is the only way besides the radio to hear music in it. I used to buy digital music and burn it to a disc, but haven't done that in awhile and my last CD burner in a laptop was replaced by a second hard drive so not likely I will even buy anymore CDs. I have a Plex server with all my music on it to stream on various devices, and frequently use Pandora radio. My days of using CDs are just about over.

[jimbobs]

...
When CDs first came out, they sounded grainy to me, like somebody had broke the music up into small chunks and just gave you the chunks. Which is, in fact, exactly the situation. ...

This has all to do with the quality of the D/A converter, which in the beginning was mediocre at its best. And still most DAC's are pretty average. You need a really good DAC to explore the full potential of a Red Book CD.
...

The first CD's I bought were classical and the quality of those early recordings was astonishing - to my ear, at least! The CD player I used was by Mitsubishi and it was pretty expensive at the time. I seem to recollect reading an article that said early CD's were very good but standards dropped significantly as CD's became mainstream. Apparently, this was so that recording studios could avoid the need to upgrade their equipment and facilities.

[vansloneker]

Yes, there was something special about those first issued CD's. Can't remember right now, maybe something about the pressing or the material.

[BG405]

The first CD's I bought were classical and the quality of those early recordings was astonishing - to my ear, at least!

Some of the first CDs I bought were also classical, primarily to avoid wearing out my records! Probably the best example is Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, with the St Louis orchestra released on RCA Red Label (IIRC). Awesome sound quality and this one deserves another play, soon. An excuse to move the trolley from in front of the CD racks.

I wasn't too impressed with some of the non-classical recordings though, for example several of the tracks on "Queen - Greatest Hits II" are truncated to fit them on the CD. Luckily the vinyl release wasn't butchered in this way.

[jimallyn]

There was endless debate about which tape was best.

TDK SA-X or Maxell UD-XLII. I still have a number of high quality shells loaded with SA-X in various lengths. Besides using them for normal stereo recordings, I also used them with my Tascam 688 8 channels on cassette, which makes excellent quality recordings.

[jimallyn]

when recording on e.g. TDK MA and bias & levels set up properly, the recording was practically indistinguishable from the source, be it CD or vinyl.

TDK used to record CDs onto their SA-X cassettes, then go to the music/gear shows that always had a bunch of "golden ears" types on hand and play them with a switch to go back and forth between the CD and the tape. Then they challenged the golden ears to identify which was the CD and which was the cassette tape. Practically nobody could do better than chance at saying which was which.

[anjomor]

I still do listen to music via CD, but I choose to burn music from my PC instead of buying a copy.

[jimbobs]

TDK used to record CDs onto their SA-X cassettes, then go to the music/gear shows that always had a bunch of "golden ears" types on hand and play them with a switch to go back and forth between the CD and the tape. Then they challenged the golden ears to identify which was the CD and which was the cassette tape. Practically nobody could do better than chance at saying which was which.

I've seen a few blind listening tests over the years and the only source that was easily identifiable was vinyl. I suspect that was simply because of it's negative characteristics rather than positive

[Bolle1961]

I believe in supporting what you like, whether it's FOSS projects or bands. So over the years, I've collected a decent library of music CDs. I usually just buy cheap used ones on smile.amazon.com but I just think it's more cool to have the CD. Plus I appreciate the better sound quality of a CD over mp3s. I know you can rip lossless audio files, but I just prefer kicking it old skool

So who else still plays CDs? Or do you play vinyl? That's even more cool old skool

I still play CD's and not only that, I still use my classic Bang & Olufsen CD X player
https://www.beoworld.org/prod_details.asp?pid=936

[lsemmens]

Speaking of reel to reel tapes, I knew people back in the day that used to buy old computer archival tapes (1") and cut them down to make the 1/4" tape for a conventional r-r deck. All up the cost was less than the price of one 1/4"tape and a bit of time.

[MintBean]

All my music is stored electronically these days. I don't see the point of storing and searching through CDs. That said, I do buy music on CD to rip as it's often the cheapest or only way of getting hold of an album in lossless format.

[otacon14112]

If I knew about R2R, I would have made that an option in the poll. I guess I'm just too young to know about them, which feels good to say

[Arch_Enemy]

No. I still use a DVD/CD external drive on my iMac desktop, mainly for my wife, who likes MacOS and the convenience of easy music/video conversion between iTunes and optical media. I just recently attached a USB turntable to the Mac so she could easily create CD's from LPs for use in her car. I'm old enough to have a huge library of vinyl LPs no longer in print, so this thing (the LP turntable) is a godsend for digitizing LP tracks. This would have been much more difficult to implement with Linux - that's not the fault of Linux, but the fault of needed software drivers for this sort of hardware not being available on the Linux platform. Hopefully, in another few years, that will change. I absolutely no longer need CD/DVD players for my Linux laptops, as there is plenty of digitized music available via streaming or MP whatever files.

Ex wife kept all my records...