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.""

Not yet

[Brad1138]

Until downloadable music isn't compressed, or they are able to compress without ANY loss, there will still be a need for CD's. I think the under 25 crowd doesn't care that much, you wouldn't notice the difference on an Ipod, but on a nice home system you do.

Duh... peak limiting

[Anonymous Coward]

Peak limiting, also called Dynamic Range Compression. If you know what this is, then you understand why CD sales have been dropping.

It's the bands

[OECD]

Personally, I find myself more interested in bands that put their music out on the net and/or sell CD-Rs themselves. (Nerdcore, Wizard Rock, etc.) I can't remember the last time I bought music from someone who the RIAA 'represents.'

This seems to parallel the increasing niche-ification of magazines and their cannibalization by the web. Not at all suprising, really.

inevitable

[wizardforce]

Cds did a lot better when people didnt have as much access to online sources of music and when 56k was the rule not the exception. Now that any library, office and a large number of homes have high speed of some sort and more tech savvy people than ever it is no surprise that people are less willing to shell out 15 to 20 dollars on a cd that has a lot of music they didnt personally choose to have. People can go online, download the songs they want and do whatever they want [especially on p22p where DRM just doesnt have a foothold] with their music.

A Silly Thing About Vinyl

[tjstork]

All the miniaturization is nice, but one thing that has been missing from the music industry since the 1980s is the physical size of the record. A record album was a fairly large thing, and, covers were small posters in their own right. Nowadays, you get a little picture in a plastic case with the CD, which is nice and transportable, for sure, but it is not as effective as a total package visually as a big record used to be.

Re:Not yet

[madbawa]

With more and more people listening to iPods and music on their mp3-phones or other tiny music gadgets, its no surprise that soon we'll have our next generation born partially deaf or with their ears insensitive to certain frequencies. That is to say, the ears will have a narrower frequency response band. I know many people who are already partially deaf due to listening on their iPods 24x7. People listen to music even in the noisiest conditions of construction work or a traffic snarl. This causes the volume on their headsets to be much louder than recommended. The damage to their ear drums is irreparable.

So, my point here is that the quality of audio will not matter anymore about 5-10 years down the line. Also, one point I forgot to mention, the music churned out nowadays is also more like noise rather than music. But then thats off-topic.

Re:Not yet

[pushing-robot]

You realize, of course, that CDs are not magical entities, fanciful vessels which contain the entirety of a musical performance. They lose detail just like every other means of recording sound. If you can create an alternative means of encoding sound that takes less space and sounds equally good (in a double-blind test), then it's a better method for holding music. Granted, having some overhead is good for future editing or re-encoding, but we've come up with much better ways to store MORE useful information in LESS space than CDs use.

Not Just Away From CDs

[FreezerJam]

...but away from albums, too.

People are finally able to buy singles again. How much of this drop is due simply to people only buying the two good tracks from an album and leaving the other eight behind?

Re:Not yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only the under 25 crowd, but the good majority of people don't care. The majority of people do not have a high enough quality system in their homes that it will really make a difference between compressed and uncompressed songs. Even if the sound system is good enough, many people simply cannot tell the difference, especially if the music is compressed at a higher bitrate/better format than the "standard" 128 kbps MP3. And if it doesn't actually sound any different, why bother?

Re:Not yet

[bladesjester]

Add to that the fact that some of us actually like the physical media and the artwork that comes with it.

The other thing is that, with most people just snagging a song or two from an album because they heard it on the radio, they will never really know if they like the rest of the band's work. I've bought cds for one or two songs and ended up liking the rest of the album.

I'm just kind of tired of the teenage crowd constantly crowing that the CD doesn't matter. Heck, I'm only in my 20's and I see the benefit to CDs, but that may also be the occasional DJ in me.

I won't buy downloadable music...

[stubear]

...until it's uncompressed CD quality audio, I don't care if it's protected by DRM to disallow sharing, as long as I can rip the files to AAC, WMA, or whatever other format I choose and copy them to digital audio players I have authorized for my personal use. Until then I'll only buy CDs.

None of the Above

[bill_mcgonigle]

People don't have a fixed budget for CD's and now they're hoarding it now because the music sucks - they have a certain amount of disposable income that they allot to entertainment, and they're not spending it on CD's as much as they used to. DVD sales only peaked last year - does it surprise the heck out of everybody that just as DVD players became affordable CD sales started to tank? People are also buying hi-def screens and home theaters in record numbers. Back in 1986 lots of people weren't used to buying VHS tapes, and they still bought records and then CD's and spent time sitting around listening to music. Most people don't do this anymore, they watch movies or premium cable or shows on their DVR's.

RIAA, meet MPAA. Sony, Universal, Warner - you're competing with yourselves.

Shopping for CDs is shopping blind.

[damacus]

Buying music without being able to sample each track is a hard sell these days. People are now used to being able to take an albeit brief listen to nearly every track on a CD before making a decision to buy. You can do that of course on either online CD purchase sites like Amazon, or iTunes. One of those will give you the music immediately, and generally for less than a new CD.

Buying music at a Brick & Mortar is buying blind. Usually they only have a small selection available on preview machines.. if they have one. "Gee, I hope the other tracks on this thing don't suck," is not a good thing to have going through customers' heads when they're shopping.

The last time I bought music CD at a store was fathers day, when I just wanted to get my dad some CDs that I knew were really good compilations. That's about the only use I have for B&M.

FWIW, I generally buy my music using amazon's marketplace. Better quality, I can rip my purchase legally to my specification, and it's dirt cheap.

Re:Speaking for myself

[mashade]

I haven't bought a CD in months, and have instead spent time rediscovering the music I already have. It takes a lot of time to rip a large collection to a digital format, and so you tend to be a bit more invested in it.

With a large collection, it's also easy to find tracks that you haven't heard in a long time, and you're more likely to stumble upon tracks you've never heard.

Just my two cents.

Classic responses

[Gothmolly]

1) the Indie Douchebag. This Slashdotter will claim he only buys from 'local' or 'indie' bands, namely, his friends' garage band.

2) the Audiophile Loudmouth. This one buys 24k gold plated CDs, listened to on a 20bit DAC feeding monster-cabled speakers that he bought at Best Buy.

3) the Pirate. You all suck, Gnutella FTW!

Face it, none of the dorkwads on here, myself included, is representative of the mouthbreathers at Walmart whose choices power the economy.

was the movie Memento based on all of you?

[nomadic]

Is it that manufacturers are putting out more and more 'safe' (read: crap) music

Where on earth did so many people on slashdot get the bizarre misapprehension that pop, lowest-common-denominator music is somehow more prevalent now than it's been in the past? It's always been there, at least since the 50's, and if you weren't conscious during the 80's and 90's, I assure you that the majority of music released during the decades was "safe" bubble gum pop. Think back, do you remember that music? No? Of course you don't, it was immensely forgettable and put out for a quick buck.

And I know that 10 years from now the same people who try to paint this phenomenon as new will be repeating the same mantra again and again, "remember back in the early 2000s when music was good, before they started releasing commercialized garbage?".

Re:Not yet

[wytcld]

Fully agree - but CD quality was never as good a vinyl through the right equipment. Bob Dylan had a lot to say about that a few months back. To his ears there just haven't been any CDs that have achieved what vinyl, with the right engineers handling the mix, used to.

There's a degree to which the psychoacoustic models that schemes like mp3 use actually clean up the noisy mess that all or most all CDs present. The way these schemes hollow out the back of the sound produces something clearer and more delicate - more like live music straight from the amps. Except it really sounds quite different from live music. Good vinyl, on the other hand, can be indistinguishable from live performance if your eyes are closed. CDs never had that. So it's easy to walk away from them. All the discussion of "lossless" misses the point that at the rates CDs are sampled there's already a high degree of loss. Music is inherently analog; digital has to get an order of magnitude better (at least) before it'll be so realistic that it's worth a premium.

Re:Not yet

[timmarhy]

i don't believe for a second that someone like bob dylan who has been exposed to a million billion decibles over the last 30 years, not to mention all the drugs, still has enough hearing left to tell.

furthur more, on a technical level cd's use a lossless uncompressed format which should be a perfect reproduction of what was mixed. not to say that standards in mixing and recording aren't down, but don't try knock the technology that's used ok?

Re:Not Just Away From CDs

[suv4x4]

People are finally able to buy singles again. How much of this drop is due simply to people only buying the two good tracks from an album and leaving the other eight behind?

Agreed, the irony of this is their own marketing tactics have made this possible. It's not as much the rest of the tracks are crap, but they're just not marketed, if you don't listen to them enough, you don't like them, and think they're worse, and hence not buy 'em.

And hence the "one good single and the rest is filler" talk.

To confirm this, just try to listen to a new "super album" without ever hearing the marketed single (hard, I admit). You'll never guess which is the song marketed on 80% of the albums. It's actually often decided post factum after the album has been recorded.

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.

Exactly right, and this is why I'm pissing my pants laughing here watching the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray race. They seem to genuiely don't understand, that whoever wins, they both lose in the end. Just consider the amoutn of money spent on technology, production and marketing on those duds. That's funny, right.

Re:Speaking for myself

[fretlessjazz]

I think many people make the mistake of always associating CDs with Major Labels. There are thousands of non-major labels who do not choke their musicians by collecting disproportionately large fees from CD sales. My question to you is this: if major labels ceased to exist, and The Artist collected a legitimate proportion of the profits, would you really start buying CDs again? Or has it become easier to dismiss the medium as irrelevant? It worries me that the physical transfer of music in tangible form is declining. The art that goes into album design and track arrangement is very important to the message that the artist is attempting to convene. Removing this "wrapper" is like not watching the opening montage to a movie. The songs then become sugar packets that you empty into your iced tea.

Not obsolete. Too #!@$# expensive.

[SCHecklerX]

Sell for $5-$10. Music sales will go way up. "piracy" will still be around, but more people who like what they download will actually go out and buy the CD and encode themselves. Compressed music should really just be an advertisement for the real product. While at it, get rid of the stupid DRM schemes, ok?

Kind of offtopic....

WTF don't companies who make boomboxes that can read mp3 CDs put DVD drives in instead? It sure would be nice to have a 4GB fully integrated solution for weekend camping. Oh well. I'll just stick to the sansa with a boomtube, I guess.

Why CDs are good

[geophile]

I listen to MP3s exclusively, but buy only CDs because:

• CDs are higher quality than MP3s.
• They serve as another layer of backups.
• I can rip them to whatever level of quality I want and get DRM-free music.
• Buying individual tracks, I'd miss some great music. CDs are full of unappreciated gems. There's often a lot of filler, of course, but the obscure tracks make it worthwhile.

It's not just music competition

[EmbeddedJanitor]

CD, and all music sales, must compete against all other discretionary/disposable income (depending which definition you choose to use). Ten years back there were far fewer ways to blow your money.

Of course, the 1960s, 70s and 80s had decade-defining music. There's no such music for the 2000's. Not really that much worth buying.

Simple explanation: gifts

[goombah99]

First I agree, music quality has nothing to do with it. That accounts for a negligible market size. The real reason is gifts. How many CDs did you used to buy and how many did you used to give as gifts. I'd wager about 10% of the CDs you bought was the number you gave as gifts at christmas or other times. Possibly more. Nowadays I still give CDs as gifts. But I don't buy two of it. I buy one, make a copy for myself, and give the original media as the gift. The original media is a much better gift than a burned CD or a pile of itunes gift certificates. It's not like the days of audi tapes where a Mix CD took time and effort and could only be made one at a time. THere the mix tapes were more valuable than the original media. With Cds its the reverse. I have no problems owning a copy but I prefer to give the original as a gift. It's the tangible media that is satsifying to the recpient. I'd say that could easily account for 15% of the market.

I Still Buy CDs

[xdc]

Amen to no compression / lossless compression. I just bought like 5 CDs today. Not only is sound quality a huge factor, but I perceive some benefit to owning tangible, non-DRMed media rather than something that's filling up a hard drive which can go bad, or home-burned CD-Rs collecting dust in a closet. If I want to make car listening copies or custom compilations, I can rip the CDs onto the computer. From there I can also copy to an iPod-type device. But I don't have to. For my money I already have a plastic disc with printed liner notes which I don't need to fool around with if all I want is a quick listen.

With downloaded music, not only is the audio lossy, but then I also have to spend my precious time producing archival or car listening CD-Rs on my own separately-purchased, questionably-durable media, labeled with a Sharpie or some mediocre inkjet-printed sticker.

And what about rare music? When some remix/promo single or obscure album/12" is long out of print and not carried by places like the iTunes Store, and the torrents have all died down, I may still be able to track down an authentic, full-quality release at a used/collectible shop. I doubt I could be so lucky with old download-only releases, where any company hosting them would likely be sued out of business.

Re:Not yet

[AeroIllini]

With more and more people listening to iPods and music on their mp3-phones or other tiny music gadgets, its no surprise that soon we'll have our next generation born partially deaf or with their ears insensitive to certain frequencies.

That has nothing to do with the genetics of hearing. 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.

Get-off-my-lawnism aside, I've found that most people who are satisfied with iPod quality music have either never been exposed to proper audio reproduction, or they just don't care that much. Not everyone wants a medium-rare filet; some people just want a cheeseburger.

Cheeseburgers and blown-off arms in the same post. Take that, mods!

Re:Not yet

[MillionthMonkey]

First of all you're starting with a weak argument: "what does Bob Dylan know about what music sounds like" is not the sort of position I would prefer to defend. And also lots of us use drugs and are not deaf. So there is that. If there is a drug that makes you deaf, please let me know what it is because I could really use it at work. But this is just too funny:

furthur more, on a technical level cd's use a lossless uncompressed format which should be a perfect reproduction of what was mixed.

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.

Top 5 reasons why I like CDs

[core_dump_0]

1. (99% of the time) No DRM
2. Better quality sound than lossy formats like MP3
3. Album art
4. Out of print, import, and rare CDs (which most of my CD purchases are) may become collector's items down the road
5. Convenient backup if you lose the ripped FLACs

Need storage-independent format

[Tablizer]

I've said this before and I'll say it again. We need a format that does not depend on the storage technology used. The pen-drive (aka flash drive) is perhaps the closest we have to such because the computer only cares about the interface, not the storage surface. Time to dump disks altogether for anything we want to last. (Pen-drive storage bits as they currently are may not last, but at least the interface is the same such that if they come up with a longer-lasting storage method inside, it would still work in old pen-drive slots.) In software-engineering speak, we need to separate the interface from the implementation.

Re:Not yet

[badasscat]

Also, I sample tons of music, and often find that I only like 2 or 3 songs from an album. In other words, I would be fine if the rest of the ablum were deleted off my hard drive.

This is always one of the big arguments people come up with against the CD, and there is such an obvious retort to it that I just don't understand why you guys don't see it:

You need to start listening to some better artists. Good bands don't put out albums with only 2 or 3 good songs on them.

And yes, that means those 2 or 3 songs you like probably aren't very good either.

Re:Not yet

[Dephex Twin]

"what does Bob Dylan know about what music sounds like" is not the sort of position I would prefer to defend.

If you take a look at Bob Dylan these days and claim that he appears physically to be anywhere close to where he was in his prime, you're just not being honest with yourself. I would say the OP makes a very valid point in suggesting that Bob Dylan's finer hearing ability is worth questioning. This is stuff that is hard for even a young person to hear clearly, and the guy has been out there for 40 years.

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

Inhalants cause hearing loss, just so you know.

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.

This I agree with.

Thats a neat trick

[patio11]

You managed to say "Its the piracy, stupid" without getting modded down. That takes some serious skill on Slashdot. And yes, "Its the piracy, stupid".

The average customer doesn't give a toot about "do whatever they want with their music", since what they want to do with their music is "play it", and DRM typically permits that. The average customer does not care that they cannot play music imported from Japan's Sony store on their Linux box, chiefly because the average customer is buying made-in-the-USA bubblegum pop to play on their Windows machine, iPod, or CD player. If you're the average customer, you could grow old and die without DRM ever inconveniencing you enough to notice. (No, the average customer does not care that if their Windows box dies and their iPod dies then they lose access to their music library. The average customer does not *have* a music library -- they have a selection of CDs they are listening to right now. Many of them are in the wrong CD cases, liner notes have been lost, and some are bare on the dresser. Not having access to that selection in 6 months doesn't concern them, because they will be listening to new CDs in 6 months, because to the average customer music is an experience like seeing a movie in theatres and half of the fun is that it is new.)

The flexibility of buying only the tracks you like is a great feature of iTunes, but nobody is filling up those 4 GB iPods* at ~25 cents per MB. The iPod is a cultural phenomenon, selling 100 million units worldwide. The iTunes store has sold about 300 million *songs*, and it is joined at the hip. Three songs per machine -- if one buyer buys a 12 song album, on average three buyers buy nothing. Are these three songs per machine causing the decline in CD sales? They must have been darn good songs!

No, really: its the piracy, stupid.

Re:Not yet

[joystickgenie]

because yah know, the average end user for music own their own concert hall system.

Re:Not yet

[FlyingGuy]

Pure and simple, you don't know your subject matter.

You really need to do the math, to understand why CD based music does not accurately represent what was played in the studio, or captured at a concert.

In the standard reproduction formats, the frequency bandwidth is 20hz to 20khz.

To reproduce that sine wave after it has been digitized is a herculean task. Consider a tone that rings at 10khz, it has a periodicity .1 millisecond. To accurately digitize and then reproduce that sine wave perfectly, in 1/10th of a millisecond it needs to be sampled several thousand times. Remember, digital is either on or off, but a sine wave is an analog curve and to properly record that curve digitally it takes a huge number of data points. Consider the fact that 20hz has a periodicity of 50ms and 20khz has a periodicity of .05 milliseconds. Now as we know everything is a trade off right? To sample the low end of the spectrum at a rate fast enough to accurately sample the high end of the spectrum would grossly over sample and this is why digital bass reproduction tends to be muddy.

All sorts of algorithms have been created to compensate and interpolate the loss at the high end of the spectrum in the trade off sample rate, but interpolation will never be as accurate as the real thing in analog.

Think before you speak.

Re:Simple explanation: gifts

[ewhac]

Nowadays I still give CDs as gifts. But I don't buy two of it. I buy one, make a copy for myself, and give the original media as the gift.

Ardent readers of my writings (both of you) will know that I am no great friend of existing copyright laws, that copying is an inevitability of advancing technology, and believe the regime should re-engineered and replaced with a system that preserves reputations rather than proscribes copying and/or who can manufacture things.

...But even so, I still think what you're doing is really, really cheesy.

Schwab

track arrangement

[r00t]

That sounds like a playlist to me. I think we could share these on the internet. We wouldn't be limited to 74 minutes. We wouldn't be limited to one single band.

Say, aren't people doing this right now?

what does Bob Dylan know?

[weighn]

"what does Bob Dylan know about what music sounds like" is not the sort of position I would prefer to defend.

Allow me. Bob Dylan is 66 years old. Rather than the gp stating in the terms that you use to paraphrase, the intent was that Dylan's perception of sound may have changed. Being a lifelong career musician he would have a higher internal sense of psychoacoustics than the average Joe. Perhaps his power of recall is also advanced. The thing is, his hearing will no doubt have changed quite a deal over the past 40 years. In his mind, he may be recalling the aural sense he experienced from those old recordings, but this can't be stacked against hearing modern recordings on cds with his no doubt degraded hearing. Just a thought.

Hmmm, move up market... nah...

[alexhmit01]

Moving to better audio would have been one approach... Movie industry figured that one out. However, they are so scared of their own shadow that the idea of a better product scares them. They are more interested in trying to preserve the status quo and release best-of CDs to milk cash.

SA-CD or DVD-A could have been their salvation, but that would have required pushing the format (all new releases in SA-CD/CD Hybrid discs, so you can use your old CD player and play the material). Houses have LOTS of CD players, 2 cars, home stereo, maybe the master bedroom and a teenagers room. Nobody is putting SA-CD players EVERYWHERE, but they might have bought 1-2 of them if all new CDs supported the new format.

Teenagers like to listen to music... SA-CD boomboxes would have helped make that a reality. But they decided that hey, let's try to collect $30 a SA-CD, and crushed the market. If they had moved up market, and included AAC/WMA/MP3 files ON THE DISC, people might have traded the MP3s online (but they can do that now with a simple CD purchase) and preserved/grew the market.

However, they decided to focus on "plugging the analog hole" and "preventing piracy," making the formats more complicated, players more expensive, and didn't release Hybrids... who the hell was going to buy a SA-CD that they couldn't play in their car. I remember my dad diligents copying every new CD, that went in the stereo case, to a cassette deck for the car for a while... that's unnecessary when Hybrid tech exists, and impossible when you don't make it easy to copy the new SA-CD to CD.

The desire to listen to music on the iPod in no way endangered CD sales inherently, but that would have required more effort to release good CDs, not overcompress the music by making everything LOUD, and encouraged better quality hardware... companies like Sony that do hardware and software could have raised the bar with inexpensive SA-CD bedroom stereos that sounded okay...

However, CDs sound better on a decent system than MP3s, and SA-CDs no doubt sound better, but the refusal to support SA-CD killed it. Digital audio is damned convenient, busy moving my old CD-Jukebox (400 disc, takes forever to change CDs if you want to mix up tracks) to a lossless media server, but there was no reason for the studios not to make that a reality, other than laziness and a fear of change.

Alex

Serves em right

[realityfighter]

I said it back then, and I'll say it again now: the recording industry should have been making huge inroads into digital delivery way back in the Napster era. Now sales for their main medium are collapsing and they don't have enough control over the new delivery system to milk it for enough of a profit. (They did try to control the new system - pity they didn't realize that the best way to control it was to provide the best digital delivery system on the planet and make it ubiquitous. The solution was not to try to rein in the technology, and certainly NOT to haunt their potential buyers with the constant threat of lawsuit.)

I'm not making a defense of piracy here, I'm just saying that RIAA members made some really BAD business decisions back in the day, the main result being that they now have to rely on a computer manufacturer to give them the digital release portal they should have built for themselves. Serves the idiots right.

CDs are not obsolete

[SpryGuy]

Who are these idiots who only buy downloaded tracks? I cannot fathom that.

I want to OWN my music. I want it to be uncompressed, un-DRMed, and I don't want to have to pay for it all again should my MP3 player die, or my hard disk bite the big one. If I change MP3 player brands, I want my music to be compatable, and to not have to rebuy it.

CDs are great. They play everywhere. There's a CD player in my car. My car does not have an MP3 player that I can "sync" with my music library, nor does it have a way to connect my MP3 player to my Car's audio system.

The notion that CDs are becoming obsolete is absurd.

I don't pay a cent for any downloadable music that isn't the free and open and universal MP3, and even then I burn it to a CD so I can play it anywhere I want.

Besides, when you download, you don't get anything PHYSICAL. You don't get liner notes, lyrics, artwork, or even "track order". Music and albums are so much more than just collections of "singles". You lose all that on many MP3 players that you have to go out of your way to get the tracks to play in "album/CD order". And it's ridiculous to pay the same for a 20 second "interlude" track as you do for a 15 minute opus track (whether classic, pop, or rock). And finally, being forced to buy the whole CD to get a single song I liked has opened up my eyes and my tastes to lots of music I never, ever, would have heard on the radio. Generally my favorite tracks are not the singles.

So no, CDs are not obsolete. Not by a long shot.

Re:Not yet

[adolf]

I believe that the attitude would apply equally to blues, jazz, classical, and classic soul/funk as it would to the modern pop tripe that you seem to think it implies.

Quit being a snob! Look again at what the poster said, and then apply it to your scenario without immediately disqualifying yourself on the basis that you posess Superior Culture.

In other words:

Listen to better [blues|jazz|classical|classic soul/funk|pop tripe], and a greater percentage of what actually gets put onto a CD will actually be good.

Re:what does Bob Dylan know?

[MillionthMonkey]

But the past 40 years are irrelevant. The CD audio standard dates back to 1980. I would have just assumed Bob Dylan first heard a CD at about the same time I did sometime in the early 80s, and that he made up his mind back then.

Re:Not yet

[rtb61]

Speaking of oldies, in both music and people terms, a big reason for declining sales is because us oldies already own all the cds we are interested in, basically from the time period in our youth when we had the greatest exposure to music. In terms of recent music, why would we bother to buy crap remixes of what we already have.

This is a time related phenomena, and is bound to the survival rate of cds vs earlier media formats. Forget the BS coming out of the RIAA or the publishers they just don't want to admit to falling sales as a result of the market channel basically being flooded out and older ages groups dropping out of the buying market.

Re:Not yet

[croddy]

Concert hall systems actually tend to be among the most troublesome. The example you were looking for was "studio reference system".

Re:None of the Above

[Technician]

RIAA, meet MPAA. Sony, Universal, Warner - you're competing with yourselves

Excellent point. The CD is generaly compressed to sound loud. The DVD has THX cert in most cases. In most cases a 5 year old film is marked down while a 5 year old CD is still at full retail. I buy DVD's pre-viewed for either 2,3, or 4 for $20. CD's are lower quality, have higher prices, have dropped technical standards for quality and the industry is attacking their best customers.

I bought more DVD's last week than I bought CD's all of last year. Guess why?
The music cartel has failed to compete for the entertainment dollar.

How about some new permissions given in the legal copies of their product? Say a public performance license? I have a good sound system. The CD's come with a license which prohibits taking my CD's and DJ'ing a school dance or other performance. I used to do some DJ type stuff at a hobby level until I found out it was in violation of the terms. To get legal was way too expensive for 3-6 gigs a year, so I simply folded. Needless to say this reduces the need to buy CD's by reducing their value simply because their use is restricted.

That one item is one of many restricting the usefuleness of CD's and reduces their value. Inspite of the reduced value, the price remains quite high. Then they wonder why sales are poor. They need a cluestick. I'm watching u-tube at the moment watching Pink Floyd Live. I don't need the shiny disc to enjoy music anymore. Give me a valid reason to part with lots of hard earned cash for a restricted use item. I find more value elsewhere. I spend more on monthly internet than I ever used to spend on LP's and cassettes.

Money I used to spend on music is spent on better values elsewhere.

Re:Not yet

[WasterDave]

No, you're missing the point.

Vinyl mixed by the right engineers and played on the right (and not totally ludicrously expensive) kit sounds a whole shitload more like live music than CD's do. This may be because CD's lose resolution as sounds get quieter, or because they lose resolution as sounds get higher frequencies, or because there is no headroom whatsoever, or because producers these days drop shitloads of compressor on and lose dynamic range ... while simultaneously stopping me from turning the volume UP to where it BELONGS!! I don't know why it is, but it is.

Blues albums suffer the most. Something that is supposed to be played by four depressed men in a nasty looking bar in Louisiana comes out sounding like it's been played on general midi.

Like it or not, something has been lost from music. The good news is that it's still there in live gigs and with totally rampant piracy (if we're honest) and thieving bastard record industry executives it seems that the only hope for the bands themselves is to play live more often. Hurrah!

Dave

Re:Are you honestly claiming...

[MillionthMonkey]

Actually what I think most people are really objecting to is the way that record companies pump up the volume and saturate the band. Everything sounds like a car commercial the way they use it.

Re:Not yet

[the_weasel]

There are plenty of bands who only ever manage to come up with one or two outstanding songs. In your opinion, I should stop listening to those songs then? You said "Good bands don't put out albums with only 2 or 3 good songs on them." I strongly disagree. Good bands DO put out albums with only a few good songs. GREAT bands do better.

Re:Simple explanation: gifts

[mr_matticus]

So wait. You give people opened CDs as gifts? I hope for the recipient's sake that they're used to begin with. Talk about bad form, to say nothing of the copying.

That's like giving someone a six pack of beer with one missing. Sure, it could be really good beer and the six pack might exceed some arbitrary spending limit, but how tacky can you get?

I get that the gift market point is why you got modded up, but I still think that's a stretch at best. I can't think of anyone who cares about getting the actual disc vs. getting identical data via download (I realize that this is not offered at present by any major store). In fact, not having something to worry about losing or storing cases is a godsend in our smaller, urban dwellings. iTunes does a pretty good job of displaying cover art in much the same way as a full CD tower gives some bragging rights. I can look all the lyrics up online and store it as metadata with the file itself. Between that and the cover art, I'm not missing anything from the physical medium that I care about. Fun anecdotes I can read on the group's website; posters I can buy or print from a high-quality PDF (without the permanent folds in mini-posters imposed by the CD case dimensions). I'm approaching 30, so maybe I'm part of some contaminated younger generation lacking in appreciation for bits of plastic and delicate paper slips.

"Mixed by the right engineers" is the key

[billstewart]

The big issue isn't whether it's CD vs. vinyl - it's how the sound gets mixed and warped and produced. Digital gives you more tools to adjust that, which not only means that good sound guys can do good things with it, but band sound guys can do bad things to it. These days just about the only people producing vinyl are going for the audiophile market (ahem.. snobs... ahem.. :-) which wants the sound to get managed in ways that sound better than the sound that gets produced for the Britney Spears Clone market. In the early days of rock&roll, nobody had a clue how to engineer the sound - the vinyl from those days is often produced just as badly as bad CDs today, with worse equipment and badly placed mikes.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Other: we don't sit and listen to music

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't listen to music while you're doing those things?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Aliasing

[DrYak]

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.

The point of using 96Khz or 192Khz isn't to have a higher max freq (due to Nyquist), but having a better resolution in the audible range to avoid aliasing. A 12Khz sound played on a digital system running @ 48Hz 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). On a 192Khz system, sound in the 12Khz range all take some 16 samples and even if they aren't quite exactly aligned with the sample rate, there's much less risk of distorting the waveform.

Nyquist theorem gives us information about the highest frequency that *could* be recorder/reproduced using a given sample frequency, *if all condition are optimal*. It does not guarantee us that all sound will be perfectly reproduced up to this frequency. In fact, the recording of a N/2 sound on a N frequency sample could also completly fail if, by chance, the dephasing was such that the sampler did measure at the exact moment when the source cross (either rising or falling) the 0. What the proponent of 96 or 192Khz are saying is, if the sampling frequency is an order of magnitute high (say N * 16 for the sampler) this is much less likely to happen, and you *mostly* have optimal conditions for *any* sound up to your target frequency, even if the sound has funny dephasing.

Re:Vinyl is a lot of fun!!

[Yoozer]

As far as the sound goes... my LPs sound every bit as good as your CDs

Yes. The first n times where n depends on the quality of the original vinyl. After that, inevitable degradation kicks in.

Re:Are you honestly claiming...

[PainKilleR-CE]

Honestly, compression is only an issue with a small subset of music anyway (though it may be a large portion of the high-volume sales). The real issue with the whole CD vs. LP debate is that most music hasn't even been recorded in analog in almost 20 years anyway, and hasn't been mastered in analog in 15 years or more. I don't even think most modern CDs include the 3 letter SPARS code to tell you whether it was recorded, mixed, and mastered in analog or digital. Most of the LPs I own were recorded in digital and converted to analog, not the other way around (for the CD version).

On the other hand, some people still use analog for various parts of the recording chain because they like a certain sound they get from a particular piece of equipment, and attribute this strictly to an analog/digital difference, even though digital components could reproduce the analog sound if someone took the time to make it do so (usually by analyzing the modifications made to the sound by the analog equipment and then reproducing them on the digital).

Re:what does Bob Dylan know?

[viracochas]

In addition to the changes in technology, the ear's sensitivity and pitch perception changes with age. I remember hearing a story about a musician with perfect pitch who was also highly synaesthetic describing music throughout his life. With Mahler's Symphony No.5, he heard it in the C-sharp minor key it is written in as a young man, with all the associated pitches and tone colors. Six decades later he perceived the piece to be in D-minor and could barely listen to it, such was the unfamiliarity of the familiar piece. Imagine how Dylan might feel if he is playing a song he wrote in the mid-60s, performing it exactly how he did then and it still doesn't 'feel' right. And as the GP states Dylan's hearing is likely highly degraded since his youth, especially once he went electric.

Re:Not yet

[Kjella]

At least with analog equipment there might be a point. But the most hilarious audiophiles are those that think digital transmissions get better, as if the 1s and 0s are more pure instead of being 0.996 and 0.002 :D. Bits are bits, and the only things that could possibly matter is the clock and D/A circuit on the last reciever, unless the cable is really broken with unrecoverable errors.

Re:Not yet

[darkgemini]

I think you've just struck another reason for the decline of CD sales. We can't buy it if we can't find it.

Re:A Silly Thing About Vinyl

[halcyon1234]

This just means that artists have a different canvas in which to be creative. Just take a look at any Tool CD. There's no arguing that, even on a small square, it's a work of art.

Offer me...

[spaceyhackerlady]

Offer me the over-produced manufactured shit that passes for music nowadays and I'll ignore it.

Offer me DRM-encumbered over-compressed downloads and I will walk away.

Offer me some decent new music and I'll have a listen.

Offer me some decent new music in an uncompressed, DRM-free format, and I'll buy it.

I don't want to be one of the curmudgeons grumbling about all the new music being crap, but the fact remains that I tuned out in the early 1990s, and have heard very little of interest since. My latest (in terms of production date) music purchases are Bailando con Lola by Azucar Moreno and Drama by Bananarama, both released in 2006. Hardly mainstream music, either of them.

...laura