The Compact Disk

[Rabs]

In my car I could care less about sound quality, but at home I want my stereo to be the business. I have CD's in my car as well and can plug in a ipod and can also Bluetooth my phone, which is what I do most when driving cause I always have it with me.

Yeah my car thus stereo system is 15 years old. No tech stuff just a CD player and radio...

 

This is the other thing.. Most of us if not all of us have mobile phones which have MP3 players built in which I use all the time when im working. Ive never needed to buy an MP3 player cos of that.

[Riffster]

Also I think that most people don't seem to care about sound quality and don't really know any better....

 

They do and they don't. Part of the success of the CD is that just about any CD player sounded great, good enough.

 

For an LP to sound better you need a good system and frankly back in the day most people did not have one.

 

I do cringe when I see people buying $25 $30 records to play them in a novelty record player.

[Cabarone]

Being an old head, I still buy cds...I hope players are going to be available for some years to come, but stores are carrying fewer and fewer of them...

[Guest Farnsbarns]

CDs are digital versions of records. You're already buying digital.

 

Not only are they digital but they're shite and will not (I predict) make a come back. 44KHz is not high enough a sample rate to be taken seriously. Not being able to reproduce anything above 22KHz is a major flaw. 96KHz is considered the lowest viable digital sample rate. There's a reason CDs sound sterile and there's a reason they were so short lived.

 

Then there's the 2mm of error correction we were promised. All that noise in the early days about how they were unscratchable was true but the manufacturers just started dropping the error correction immediately.

 

Tape was a far better medium than CD.

[jdgm]

Well all mine sound ok and I have a lot of CDs and LPs. I still buy CDs if they're cheap and I want the music.

 

If you buy a good CD player that takes care of all the jitter etc these days. Good means expensive, above £600 with the ability to play SACDs.

 

Yes tape is a good medium too. I started on a mono 1/4" - I had a Ferrograph; went to Philips sound-on-sound 1/4" and finished on a Tascam 38 - 1/2". 40 mins of 1/2" (multitrack) tape was £40+ back then (late 80s-90s) and even the good Ampex (456) sheds like f***.

Expensive, bulky, hard to store. Cassettes are good, still got all those.

 

If you have decent playback facilities, CD sounds fine and in many cases reveals more sonic information than the original LP ever did. Come hear mine sometime and I'll prove it.

 

The digital soundstage has (appears to have) more depth and goes back, whereas the analog one comes (appears to come) forward. IMO.

I hear this every day; it is simply differences in the presentation of the audio information to your ears.

[Notes_Norton]

I have a digital walkman (sounds better than my old iPod) for music in my car with >10,000 songs from my LP and CD collections ripped as mp3s. Long ago I recorded things to cassette tape to be played in my car. The car has so much ambient noise that a loss of fidelity doesn't really matter to me. And the better sounding recordings stay at home.

 

The only music downloads I have purchased are either for learning a new song that I don't want to keep the original on, or things I cannot get on CD anymore. And after the download, I store it on a HD and burn a CDR.

 

The SACD never went over, because most people don't care that much about better sound quality. Most people really can't tell the difference, and just want to sing along with the lyrics. It's the same reason why 45RPM, 8 tracks, cassettes and mp3s are or have been popular.

 

I don't prefer digital downloads and will purchase music that way if I can't get it any other way. However, many titles that would not be worth stocking in a retail store or 'pressing' can be purchased via download, and that makes it an advantage.

 

Notes

[Guest Farnsbarns]

Well all mine sound ok and I have a lot of CDs and LPs. I still buy CDs if they're cheap and I want the music.

 

If you buy a good CD player that takes care of all the jitter etc these days. Good means expensive, above £600 with the ability to play SACDs.

 

Yes tape is a good medium too. I started on a mono 1/4" - I had a Ferrograph; went to Philips sound-on-sound 1/4" and finished on a Tascam 38 - 1/2". 40 mins of 1/2" (multitrack) tape was £40+ back then (late 80s-90s) and even the good Ampex (456) sheds like f***.

Expensive, bulky, hard to store. Cassettes are good, still got all those.

 

If you have decent playback facilities, CD sounds fine and in many cases reveals more sonic information than the original LP ever did. Come hear mine sometime and I'll prove it.

 

The digital soundstage has (appears to have) more depth and goes back, whereas the analog one comes (appears to come) forward. IMO.

I hear this every day; it is simply differences in the presentation of the audio information to your ears.

 

With all due respect, they might sound fine to you but all the harmonic content above 22khz is missing. It's an unavoidable fact. One may not be able to "hear" frequencies that high but one can tell the difference when the harmonic effect, and phase impact of those frequencies is missing. Not talking about hearing paint, weight relief or tonewood here. It's not a matter of opinion. It is a simple consequence of the low sample rate. It seems obvious that any frequency lower than double the audible frequencies will have a harmonic impact which is why 96khz works (records up to 48khz frequencies) and 44khz doesn't.

 

I believe what you're describing as "going back" is the lack of presence and loudness resulting from the lack of ultrasonic frequencies which it seems most people find unappealing.

[jdgm]

Unfortunately my ears don't hear up to 22khz, probably only to about 12khz now, if that.....

Believe DVD, Blu-Ray use 48khz sampling...think my DAT does too.

Obviously the higher the better but I'm not able to hear it!

[Notes_Norton]

With everything there is a point of diminishing returns. And with everybody the point is different.

 

No sound reproduction sounds like the "real thing" (for lack of a better term).

 

Take frequency. Farns mentiond 22khz. What if the mic used only passed 16k? And according to the team that designed CDs, they add harmonic frequencies in the D/A converter that weren't in the original instrument or voice. And how about the frequency response curve of the recording gear at the volume level used?

 

There is also a frequency response curve of everything from the mic to the final speaker. Plus distortion. Every step along the way produces distortion and adds it to the distortion created by the previous steps. Once there, you can't eliminate it without creating a different distortion. It's one of the first things they taught me in college after AC and DC 101.

 

Perhaps the best reproduction would be on properly biased 2" tape with state-of-the-art vacuum tube analog gear. And even then you get tube saturation, tape saturation, and the response curve and bandwidth of everything.

 

So back to the point of diminishing returns.

 

That point in our case is when you spend the same amount of money on technology and you keep getting less and less of an improvement.

 

Then we have to decide where to draw the line for our own uses. If you can't hear the difference, or don't care about the slight difference you hear and decide more money won't make a significant difference, it's where you draw the line.

 

In my car I find a decent 128k or higher mp3 is fine. That wouldn't do in my living room. I never liked cassette tapes due to the high frequency loss, I could hear the difference, but in my car it was a way of playing the music I wanted to hear, so I recorded my own records to cassette as I do mp3s today. Plus I could hear the tape hiss when listening in a quiet room, in the car the hiss was covered up by car/road/traffic noises.

 

But to my neighbor down the street who just casually listens to music so he can sing along with the words, a cassette is just fine. In their day, a lot of people bought cassettes as their primary recorded music source.

 

Me? I like CDs OK. I accept the distortions and find them less offensive than the pops and clicks of an LP. Plus I like the convenience. In the car, the threshold is a 128k mp3, anything under that is too much of a compromise. Of course if I can't get what I want to hear at 64, I'll consider it.

 

What is your threshold point?

 

Insights and incites by Notes

[D-28]

 

 

What is your threshold point?

 

Insights and incites by Notes

I was in the Military and worked in noisy Engine Rooms and went to many concerts. Concerts I use no hearing protection, and in the ER I did use it. My hearing is not good any more and even when I was a kid I almost had to get hearing aids. Every time I get an audio-gram I am asked if I know I have High Freq loss (no really) bad in one ear and a little in the other.

[valtyr]

I still buy CDs for a couple of reasons. If available, I buy CDs from band websites. When I can't get an album from the band, I also buy blank CDs to keep a hard copy of any album I purchase from iTunes or other digital only formats.

 

I like the streaming technology, but I will not adopt it unless they start fairly compensating the artists. At the current rate, you'd probably never stream an album often enough to generate the same amount of $ an artists would get from a CD. So as it stands now, I won't use services like Spotify.

[zigzag]

I have a quality sound system and a thousand vinyl albums sitting in storage. I have almost as many CDs and counting and will continue with that format as long as they are available. I have tinnitus and also wear hearing aids, so Hi-fi is wasted on me. I like the 5.1 surround sound from my Bose home entertainment center using CDs. It took the better part of two days to wire everything inside and out... the main reason my wife will have to kill me before I'll move again. I'll be getting a wireless system to run through the auxiliary for my birthday.

[Pinch]

With all due respect, they might sound fine to you but all the harmonic content above 22khz is missing. It's an unavoidable fact. One may not be able to "hear" frequencies that high but one can tell the difference when the harmonic effect, and phase impact of those frequencies is missing. Not talking about hearing paint, weight relief or tonewood here. It's not a matter of opinion. It is a simple consequence of the low sample rate. It seems obvious that any frequency lower than double the audible frequencies will have a harmonic impact which is why 96khz works (records up to 48khz frequencies) and 44khz doesn't.

 

I believe what you're describing as "going back" is the lack of presence and loudness resulting from the lack of ultrasonic frequencies which it seems most people find unappealing.

 

Haha! Savor the moment, ladies and gentlemen, because... I'll tell you what we have here...

 

...we have a balanced and scientifically perfectly correct post in a discussion of sound quality.

[Murph]

 

And just to add on to the OP, my latest car I bought has XM Radio, USB, Aux and Blue Tooth but no CD player.

 

My new Ram 4x4, well it's now a 2016, has the same.

 

After the free year of Sirius I decided no way in he11 I was going to pay them to "rent" music.

 

I'm buying Free Form album stuff from iTunes on the phone, will never have to pay for those again, and will get a portable cd player for the aux when I need to make a road trip.

 

As for the OP, I'm afraid cd's are toast.

[Dub-T-123]

My new Ram 4x4, well it's now a 2016, has the same.

 

After the free year of Sirius I decided no way in he11 I was going to pay them to "rent" music.

 

I'm buying Free Form album stuff from iTunes on the phone, will never have to pay for those again, and will get a portable cd player for the aux when I need to make a road trip.

 

As for the OP, I'm afraid cd's are toast.

I have a subscription to Apple Music which is pretty cool. You can download as much as you want so you’re not using your data to stream music in your truck. Depending on how much music you want to download it might be cheaper than buying the albums individually