Sony Closing 18M CD/Month Plant

coondoggie writes "Sony this week said it was shuttering one of its largest CD manufacturing plants — citing the impact of digital downloads and other economic issues. The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years, first producing vinyl records, will close on March 31 and about 300 people will lose their jobs. The 500,000-square-foot warehouse began producing vinyl LPs in 1960 and moved to CD manufacturing in 1988. At its capacity, the plant was making 18 million CDs per month, according to its website."

The eco-friendliness of downloads.

[couchslug]

That's a stunning amount of plastic waste and manufacturing process waste no longer being generated.

Availability has decreased drastically

[olsmeister]

I was in Walmart a month ago looking for two CD's that I wanted to purchase. Neither was particularly obscure, and both were recent (released within the last year). They had neither, and actually I couldn't believe how small their selection was compared to what it used to be. I understand the convenience of downloading via Walmart or Amazon, but what I can't understand is why people wouldn't actually want to have a bit-perfect digital copy on physical medium as a back up.

Re:It's in South Jersey.

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, every single one of Coondoggie's Slashdot submissions [slashdot.org] are links to Michael Cooney's Network World blog [networkworld.com].

Everything is lossy

[tepples]

Non-DRMed, but still lossy.

Here's a hint: Everything is lossy [pineight.com]. CDs are lossy; they have only about 93 dB of SNR and lose all audio above 22 kHz. So I settle for the smallest representation of the recording where I can't tell the difference [wikipedia.org] from the original. And in mobile listening environments, even 96 kbps Vorbis qualifies.