Lunchtime Musing: CD Is My Generation’s Vinyl
El Reg posted a piece yesterday on the surprising health of CD sales in the growing age of online music downloads and streaming services. It’s hanging on a lot better that was thought in the face of retailers closing and the easiness of buying through services like iTunes and zapping straight into your portable music player of choice *coughSansaFuzecough*. This got me to thinking that more so than occurred to me before the CD is my generation’s Vinyl.
The dawn of CD was greeted with a volley ‘oh look how small it is and harder to break’ along side ‘aaaaah it sounds rubbish’. Granted it didn’t help that mastering audio to CD was an art that took a long while to mature so CDs had poorer sound quality due to the content rather than the media. In my humble opinion a well mastered CD on average sound kit sounds better than a Vinyl – but it’s still a digital representation rather than vinyl’s physical capturing of sound which in the high-end of things should always sound better.
Times move on.. vinyl wanes in popularity as CD players become cheaper and more portable, CDs themselves become cheaper it gets it’s feet solidly under the carpet. Now digital downloads are nuzzling their mitts in too, now, I’m seeing some similarities to the CD vs vinyl argument.
Digital downloads are, by nature, again smaller physically (i.e. intangible) and harder to break (you can’t snap an MP3, only break the drive it’s on – but that’s ok, you can download it again) but also by the same token there is a quality trade-off. MP3 / WMA / AAC / whatever all are ‘lossy’ audio formats which means to get the file size down elements of the audio data is removed. The level of audio data removed impacts the quality of the sound. MP3, being one of the oldest lossy formats, suffers the most with quality degradation. I’ve played with legitimate MP3 downloading but always feel it’s lacking something so I’m returning to CDs for the most part.
With a CD I get the full audio quality which I can then convert into the lossy audio format of my choosing, rather than the music’s retailer’s, at the quality I desire while still retaining the full quality audio for home enjoyment. Perhaps most importantly though I’ve grown up with CD and feel at home with it, much like the generation or two before me hold vinyl in such high esteem.
Perhaps the time will come when downloading full-quality, or loss-less, versions of music will become commonplace but until then I strike a balance: listening via Spotify premium when something is new then bide my time to snare the CD once the price drops.
As ever thoughts and comments are open 