Is the CD Becoming Obsolete?

mrnomas writes "What's to blame for the declining CD sales? Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more 'safe' (read: crap) music while independent musicians are releasing online? Is it because iTunes is now the third largest music retailer in the country? Or is it just that CDs are becoming obsolete?" Quoting: "Forbes.com [ran] an article showing that CD sales are expected to be down 20% in 2008 (slightly higher than the 15% drop initially predicted). Why such a drop? What's truly happening is a gradual shift away from physical media to downloadable formats. What this indicates, so far, is that US sales of digital music will be growing at an estimated rate of 28% in 2008, however physical sales will drop even further, resulting in a net overall decline.""

Re:Not yet

[bheer]

Apart from home audio systems, a LOT of people listen to music on car stereos. And on good ones, CD quality really helps for some music -- for example, Shine On You Crazy Diamond sounds a lot better on CD than an MP3 burn.

That said, yeah, a lot of new music has been so overprocessed and made loud [performermag.com] that the they don't really benefit much from a CD. Still, people who listen to classical etc will be able to tell the difference.

Re:Not yet

[blhack]

Not only that, but the care that was taken to create the recordings of yesteryear is NOT taken today. Masters KNOW that people are going to be listening to their work primarily on headphones and very lo-fi (relative to what is required to actually hear the subtleties that audiophiles get addicted to) sound systems. Guess what retard emo-hippies, those new releases that you "buy only on vinyl" are no better sounding than the cd...why? Because the vinyl was MADE FROM THE CD YOU JACKASS. Its not like the old days where a record cutting facility will get a big 'ol tape from the mastering studio, and then there will be a guy sitting at the record cutting machine overseeing the process. They get the cd, they stick it in a machine, and away it goes. Out pops a vinyl.

Re:Not yet

[weteko]

You could, of course, download music compressed using FLAC. It being lossless and all.

Re:Not yet

[madbawa]

If a soldier gets an arm blown off in a battle, does that mean he has a higher chance of having kids with only one arm? Of course not.

Thats not what I meant. I meant that the age at which people (or should I say, children) are being exposed to music gadgets is decreasing and the trash that gets labeled as music is increasing. Thats why I am saying that deafness or hearing disability will set in at a lower age than was seen in the previous gen. Got it?

Re:And here is why you shouldn't:

[Planesdragon]

1) Aganist Copyright Law, you are not allowed to convert to other formats.

Wrong. Media-shifting a disk that doesn't remove DRM has long been recognized as Fair Use. If it wasn't, the iPod would never have been sold in the first place.

2) Aganist Copyright Law, you are not allowed to backup your music.

Also wrong. An actual backup is well within the realm of Fair Use. Buy your CD, copy it to a CD-R, and let the copy go to crap in your automobile.

3) Agreed. Shiny.

Meh.

Re:Not yet

[badasscat]

Guess what retard emo-hippies, those new releases that you "buy only on vinyl" are no better sounding than the cd...why? Because the vinyl was MADE FROM THE CD YOU JACKASS. Its not like the old days where a record cutting facility will get a big 'ol tape from the mastering studio, and then there will be a guy sitting at the record cutting machine overseeing the process.

No, instead they get a data DVD, or a hard drive, or just a big file that they download. The result is the same - they're using the master.

It sounds like you saw some TV show somewhere with a guy sitting at a vinyl pressing plant who puts an optical disc into a machine and you assumed it was an audio CD. It wasn't. Music today is recorded (usually at 192khz/24 or 32 bit) by computer onto hard drives, where it can then be mastered any number of ways, including onto tape but also onto any data storage medium you like.

Re:Not yet

[ozmanjusri]

If there is a drug that makes you deaf, please let me know what it is because I could really use it at work.

There's plenty of drugs that'll do that for you. You can Google "ototoxic drugs" or have a look at the list here:
http://www.asha.org/public/hearing/disorders/med_e ffects.htm [asha.org]

Loudness War

[joaod]

As far as i'm concerned, i seldom buy pop/rock CD's because of the quality of the sound. I don't know it this is the reason why people in general are abandoning CD's, but it's my own reason. As some ppl here said, CD's are being badly masterized resulting in hyper-compressed, clipped music with no dynamic range whatsoever. The great advantage of the CD medium is it's enormous dynamic range (90db,) compared to other mainstream mediums like the vinyl, but instead of taking advantage of this, sound engineers follow the trend and prefer to push things all way up. Well it happens that they can't do this compreesion mess in vinyl because the needle would jump off tracks, so, in many cases, we end up having much better quality sound on vinyl. When i really like an album but i hate the way it sounds, i'll end up buying the vinyl version. If there's no vinyl available i'll put in in a list for a future buy, when this loudness war will be over and i will have the chance to get a proper remastered CD version. Red Hot Chilli Peppers are a good example of this: they asked another sound engineer to remaster Stadium Arcadium in vinyl (unfortunately not on CD) and surely anyone can tell the diference from the bad, loud, and clipped sound (CD) and the a very well crafed masterization in the vinyl version. For a better explanation about this subject i recommend everyone to watch this video [youtube.com]. And talking about mp3, as CD's are kept to maximum average loudness we can less ear the subtilities of each instrument so there's no point in talking about quality and there isn't a great difference between a CD and a MP3. We are using very few of the extent capabilities of the CD medium with actual pop/rock rules of "hot" masterizing.

Re:Not yet

[Technician]

Ohhh. really. I have a pair of thousand dollar cables to sell you.....

Are you a Kimber cable rep? The silver low resistance cables rock!
http://www.elusivedisc.com/prodinfo.asp?number=AUD IAU24B1 [elusivedisc.com]

The link is for those who don't believe anyone would pay a grand for a patch cord.
It is real.

Are you honestly claiming...

[GrahamCox]

The digitization of the analog signal is what destroys information, resulting in distortion when the analog is reconstructed later.

Are you honestly claiming that you can hear frequencies higher than 22.050 kHz? Or noise components below -96dB? CDs may have poor sound in practice for all sorts of reasons, but the basic sampling of the analogue original is not one of them. Careless, thoughtless production and over-processing I can all too readily believe in, but not problems with the essential theory at the heart of it.

Digitization destroys information?

[Aehgts]

Yes they do not use lossy digital compression, but that's irrelevant. The digitization of the analog signal is what destroys information, resulting in distortion when the analog is reconstructed later.

Destroys information? What is it about a 44.1KHz sampling rate that can possibly destroy any of the waveform information that our ears can perceive? By the NyquistShannon sampling theorem this rate could allow for perfect reproduction of up to 22.05KHz. So, provided there's a decent low pass filter before the sampling takes place the ADC-DAC process itself shouldn't destroy any information.

Re:Not yet

[jack455]

Even if there were nothing else wrong with the format (that is hard to describe and justify), CDs do have inherent compromises in the choice of sampling and bit rate.

CDs are sampled 44,100 times per second. This means that nothing above half of that (22.05 kHz) should be reproduced. It's inaccurate noise that is not representing the music recorded. There was probably real musical information there, although most can't hear it.

The perfect solution is to throw away evrything above 22.05kHz and leave everything else untouched. However, the filters that are used can't do it. Steep filters that cut everything sharply "smear" the sound in a harsh way. They are only used by professionals for subwoofers where the notes are further apart and easier to deal with. A more gradual filter doesn't get rid of all the noise, gets rid of some of the music, and also degrades the sound to some degree.

Also, CD's 16 bits is a much lower number than what many musicians record in. I use 24 bit recording (as a hobbyist musician) and some even use 32 bits.

I would love to be able to give friends (when requested) the actual recording I made instead of having to create a lower quality CD or mp3 version that they can use more easily.
But I freely admit that CD or mp3 versions almost always sound very similar to the original. I use 320kbps usually.

***

As far as the whole LP debate, it has always seemed silly to me. I am an audiophile. I acknowledge that some records sound better than most CDs. But I insist that a master tape (reel to reel) sounds better still. CDs are more convenient and more durable. Plus if you record in CD format you can give out or sell the actual recording.

My 2 cents.

Re:Simple explanation: gifts

[TrinSF]

I'm sorry, that's tacky. What you're doing is giving a *used* CD as a gift -- used in the sense that you have first used it. That's fine in and of itself, but buying someone a gift so that you can benefit from it is, well, tacky. It's like buying your mom a frying pan so that she'll make you pancakes. It's like buying someone a sweater but wearing it holiday office party before you wrap it and put it under the tree.

If you want to do this, the proper way to do so is to give the person the (wrapped, unopened) CD as a gift, and then, some days later -- not when you give it, you dolt -- when the person says they enjoyed the CD, ask if they would lend it to you. Don't say, "...so that I can rip it, because I bought it for you thinking I'd be able to make a copy for myself..." because that's tacky, too.

They say it's the thought that counts, and your thought is "What's in this gift for me?"

Re:Not yet

[Filmcell-Keyrings]

Shortly after Bob Dylan had said that, he appeared (at least in the UK) on an advert for iTunes. So while compressed digital music isn't good enough for him, he'll take the money and run.

Re:what does Bob Dylan know?

[supersnail]

This "Bob Dylan hates digital" stuff is a very commion mis-quote.
Whate his Bobness was complaining about was the cheapo pc based mixing software and
associated hardware which young musicians were using instead of analog mixers tape decks etc.

And he definately had a point. A combination of low quality hardware, poor digitising algorithms
and sloppy mixing does produce audibly awful results compared with say an inexpensive 12 track mixer
and a good old tape recorder.

Re:22KHz

[Anonymous Coward]

1) A "22KHz" square wave or sawtooth wave will contain much higher-frequency components than a 22KHz sine wave: thus the Nyquist frequency for these waves is a lot higher than you seem to imply in your message.

2) Congratulations! You just missed the vitally important factor of 2! In order to be able to reconstruct a signal which is band-limited to 21.5 KHz, you'll need to sample at *twice* that frequency.

3) These sample rates are very high. when you find a human who can hear a 40KHz tone (let alone the 80KHz), you might have better luck convincing me that high sample rates are important. Until then, these tones can continue to be filtered out before sampling.

Re:Not yet

[Weedlekin]

"If you take a look at the waveforms of an album recorded 30 years ago, and compare it to something from a similar genre today, you'll spot the difference immediately. The loud recording results in the high and low bits of the waveform getting "squashed", resulting in a very obvious sort of distortion."

This is actually due to a specific type of compression that's deliberately applied to some modern recordings before they get to a CD master. Compression was also applied to analogue recordings because some sources (especially classical music) exceeded the signal to noise ratio of even the best vinyl playback equipment, so handling the loudest passages without clipping would have meant that the quiet parts disappeared below the noise of the playback medium without compression.

"Vinyl doesn't necessarily suffer from this problem as badly, as it is an analogue medium, and doesn't have strictly defined maximum or minimum amplitudes. "

The maximum and minimum amplitudes are defined by an analogue device's signal to noise ratio, which is around 55db for the best cartridges / laser vinyl players. CD audio on the other hand has a S/N ratio well in excess of 100db, i.e. 100,000 times as much dynamic range.

"All but the very first CDs have serious amplitude problems. One of the only CDs I can think of that was mastered at fairly low levels is 'Brothers in Arms' by Dire Straits"

As was the case with vinyl when it was the dominant format (which, given the fact that I was born in 1960, was a big part of my life for many years), how well recorded something is depends on the sort of music one listens to. Most vinyl pop and rock during the 1960s and 1970s was compressed to hell and had artificially enhanced stereo because it was intended to be played on cheap record players with auto-changers, spring-balanced tone arms, and 3 watt/channel amplifiers connected to 5 inch elliptical full-range speakers that were extremely close to each other. A small number of rock albums had superior recording quality, and therefore became "reference" pieces for hi-fi retailers (e.g. Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon), but most customer demos used classical pieces because they were the only ones that didn't sound worse on a high-end rig than a cheap one. Some expensive classical releases were advertised as being "direct cut", i.e. the signal from the microphones was mixed directly onto grooves instead of being recorded to tape first because audiophiles were willing to pay a lot more for something that had fewer "lossy" stages between musicians and them, and these were commonly used to demonstrate the benefits of extremely expensive component audio systems.

"Ironically, this is one of the primary reasons for the existence of the RIAA. They did a decent job for a while with vinyl, but never established any sort of standard for CDs."

They didn't do anything with vinyl beyond selecting an existing equalisation curve (RCA Victor's New Orthographic Curve) and making it a standard. It was jothing more than recording pre-emphasis / playback de-emphasis system that reduced surface noise and groove size, while making rumble more of a problem, but there was nothing in it to ensure that the initial recording being put on vinyl had decent audio quality, hence the fact that the vast majority of records sounded very bad indeed. R.I.A.A. had no role to play with CD audio parameters, because these had already been set by the Philips / Sony "redbook" standard, which all audio CD players implement (although most modern ones also implement certain newer standards too).

Re:22KHz

[Mprx]

The difference is only relevant to dolphins and dogs. To a human they will all sound identical. The first harmonic is at *double* the fundamental frequency, well beyond what any human can hear.

Re:I Still Buy CDs

[phrasebook]

I think he was trying to imply that he often buys CDs, so much so that he can't always remember how many or what they were - just a stack of 'em, like 5 or so.

If you had a sleazy friend he might say to you: "I had sex with like 5 women today!". Make of it what you will.

Re:Not yet

[Yinepuhotep]

Unfortunately, the CD versions of many albums I owned when I was younger are distinctly inferior. For example, Belafonte's Carnegie Hall concert, which maxed out two LPs, is now crammed onto two CDs, by chopping out large parts of the concert - not only the introductions and talks between songs, but even sections of the songs themselves. Anyone who has not heard Belafonte on LP is missing nearly an hour of music, because some genius decided that they could make more money releasing PIECES of the concert on two CDs than by making an audio DVD or making a boxed set that would contain the WHOLE concert.

Thanks to my experience with that, I will NEVER buy a CD remake of a live LP.

Re:Not yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a mastering studio, and it is acutally true that 99% of LP's are cut off 16-bit digital sources (CD-quality, very often directly from audio CD's). We don't have a lathe at my studio, so any albums I work on that are being released on vinyl are cut somewhere else. I recently had a client that wanted to send 24 bit, 88.2kHz (4x CD quality) sources out to get an LP cut. I called over a dozen cutting houses, and only two would accept anything but an audio CD or 16-bit DAT tape as a master, and that there would be additional charges if I sent the high def source for them to burn it to an audio CD. So yes, almost all LP masters these days are 16-bit CDs.

(BTW - if you need an LP cut, look up Paul Gold in Brooklyn. He is who we went with, and his work is excellent.)

The transition band isn't as big as you think

[tepples]

A 12Khz sound played on a digital system running @ [48 kHz] will be nice (at least, unless you suffer from presbyaccousia). A 12010 Hz sound on the same system may suffer some aliasing (a full wave doesn't quite exactly take 4 sample to produce and the maxima could be missed, giving some kind of beating in the sound).

The Nyquist theorem states that convolution of the sampled signal with the sinc function can recover this 12010 Hz tone exactly, including all maxima and minima. Perhaps what you are thinking about is that a sinc function has infinite support, a filter with infinite support needs a window in order to make it realizable, and a window introduces a transition band. Luckily, with digital resampling prior to the DAC, this transition band can be usefully confined to between 20000 and 24000 Hz.

Re:I Still Buy CDs

[xdc]

I bought around 5 CDs. In American slang, one common use of the word "like" is to qualify a statement as being an approximation, guess, or exaggerated perception. ("It's like a hundred degrees outside!" [Fahrenheit])