I bought my first ever CD on the weekend.

[JazznFunk]

Welcome to the old school! I still have CDs I bought almost 35 years ago when I was just a little kid, and I have CD players from the early 90s that I still use. My CD collection is probably north of 600 at least. There's nothing like owning the music you love and enjoy!

 

[40Hz]

Yea, most things do have their uses. I am an old school, well skilled IT pro and I really like doing things as manually as possible.

I hear you.

I too am an old school IT pro who still likes doing things manually. Or at least when it makes sense to do so. For everything else there’s Python or a shell script.

 

[40Hz]

There seems to be a trend of new movie releases only showing in theaters, with no available streaming.

No doubt due in part to the growing desperation of a studio system which can’t seem to release a halfway decent movie anymore, and the growing frustration and revenue loss movie theaters are experiencing because of it.

Interesting to see how some theaters are now starting to stream live major act concerts to make up for the slack. Something that makes a lot more sense for ticket buyers than restricting distribution of a prerecorded movie to force ticket sales.

 

[Deleted member 394181]

I'm older. My Father went to Viet Nam in the sixties. Starting when I was five he would bring me 45's whenever he came to see me. I grew up on Rock and pop music. By the eighties I had about 550 vinyl albums. I was a stereo snob as well. When in Germany in the late seventies I had a stereo system kids in the U.S. had no idea even existed. By the nineties I couldn't give away the albums and started collecting cd's. I kept some albums. I sold my entire collection of Beatles albums, mostly European, and bought my 2002 COY Burgundy Rickenbacker. Still have it. I have hundreds Of cd's now and I love them. I have two five disc carousel in case one dies. I never have downloaded music from the net. Are downloaded songs quality? Does it sound as good as CD's? Idk.

 

[prom311]

My whole idea is to go to the CD store every month and pick one album that I am a fan of and one album that I know nothing about.

So awesome, congrats!!

This pretty much defined my childhood. I would save up whatever money I could find to take a bus or ride my bike to the mall and spend hours at the music stores pouring through cds.

Most of the time I couldn't even buy anything but the big stores would have a listeneing area with a bunch of headphones set up so you could listen to different albums.

Stores like the Wall, Sam Goody, and Tower records were like a safe haven you could just go and hang out.

And of course the classic used CD store MR. CHEAPO! I spent countless hours at these places looking for new music.

Edit: Im terrible at TBing

 

[P. Aaron]

I've lived long enough to know sooner or later everything crashes and stored everything vanishes into the ether.

With physical media, it can go right on doing it, I'm good. Believe me, I can see all that money I spent on iTunes just going bye-bye !

The head of IT at a previous job told me she always pays the extra charge for CD's of every program loaded on a new desktop or laptop as insurance . . . . against the inevitable. Plus on the jacket, you get credits or lyrics, occasionally even liner notes ! !

We have more than a few used music stores here in Nashville (who do BIG business in LP's), so I don't ever plan of downloads, just not for me.

Owning the media on disc, vinyl or in print means it's beyond stealth edits of the tech overlords.

The same overlords that couldn't handle PePe Le Pew.

 

[Spectre Gunner]

CD sound quality can be very good when it's done properly. Steely Dan albums are a good example of this. They were all recorded and produced very very well. Also SACD sound is at a higher level if you have a good SACD player and sound system. I don't know if you can copy a CD into your iPod though.

 

[lark_z]

Check your local library. Many allow you to check out CDs. Some also have used book stores/corners with CDs practically free.

About a month ago, I ripped all my CDs to MP3s and donated all the CDs to the library. Contemplating a move and I wasn't wanting to move them yet again.

 

[Guitalia]

There have been many claims that vinyl records sound better than CDs, however there are also claims that both formats’ sound quality do not have much difference from one another. These claims have really caused much confusion and so we have stepped up to give some clarifications.

Indeed, vinyl records give a richer and closer sound to what an artist intends to let their audience hear compared to CDs, as long as the custom vinyl record pressing was done professionally. This may have been due to being an analog format. It’s a format that’s a complete replica of the track’s soundwave, so every bit of information is present during playback.

CD is a digital type of audio format, which means that they contain snippets of the tracks’ sound waves and translate them into numbers. This method causes some music information to be lost, therefore removing some of the nuances that the artists may have included.

If joking---well done.

If serious---your sig line says "Computer numerical control (CNC) doesn't have a bad day,,,,"

You can't have it both ways. You trust CNC to cut perfectly smooth curves in guitar and bass bodies---controlled by ones and zeros. If digital control causes music information to be lost, the same would be true of programmed cutting information.

You'll enjoy this, I think. Here's a recent video from a veteran record producer who began his career recording and mixing for vinyl in the olden days.

He's pretty scathing about uninformed claims of vinyl's superiority coming from people who don't understand the science. But he also says that while digital recordings are and have always been capable of a much wider dynamic range than vinyl---record company bosses these days order mastering companies to compress the hell out of every song. That's what the term "Loudness wars" refers to.

(By the way---compressing recordings for the pop market isn't a new thing. The original vinyl release of the Rolling Stones song "Satisfaction" in 1965 was mastered to have a total dynamic range of something like 4 dB. If you want your songs to have any chance of racking up streaming numbers on Spotify, you'd better do the same.)

 

[ctmullins]

So cute.

Why do you need a DAC with an iPod?

Edit: Oh, I get it - never mind....

 

[brianrost]

Congratulations to buying your first physical albums!

I did want to respond to your post, discussing my own experiences.

I got really tired of the streaming

they take away songs/albums as they see fit

I want to own what I want to own and not let some algorithm or some suit decide what I can and cannot listen to.

If you are a paid subscriber to streaming services you are not subject to algorithm limitations. As a subscriber, I never play any of the “recommended” playlists at Spotify, I search out what I want to listen to myself. Then I download it to my phone and/or laptop to listen offline.

At Amazon Music, any music you buy through Amazon (CDs, LPs, digital) is automatically available for you to listen to using Amazon Music as well. When I buy CDs from Amazon, I can download mp3 versions to my computer for listening without streaming even before the CD shows up in my mailbox.

This is also true of Bandcamp, but both compressed and lossless downloads are supported. I can stream tracks before I buy and leave tips for the artists. Too bad all streaming services aren’t like that.

Disappearing tracks and albums is because of licensing deals between the owners of the recordings and the streaming service. I have seen albums come and go on Spotify and also specific tracks of an album greyed out. Sometimes artists pull their content, such as when Neil Young pulled all of his content off Spotify because he was unhappy that they were hosting Joe Rogan’s podcasts. If you look up any CSNY albums on Spotify, all of the songs written by Neil Young are missing, in addition to all his solo recordings. Recently I noticed Captain Beefheart’s “Trout Mask Replica” is no longer available, but all his other Warner Brothers albums are there. I had set up a playlist for the prog band Gryphon and one day all four of their albums had the tracks were greyed out. A few years later, they all returned. Annoying, to say the least.

I’m far from satisfied with streaming (I’ve posted about that here in the past) but it is a necessary evil for me. I can listen to music that is no longer in print in any physical format. At one point I owned a few thousand LPs (I’ve downsized to less than a thousand) and still own about 5000 CDs. If I estimate the average price I paid for albums starting from 1967 was $8, I’ve spent about $60,000 on albums. If I could have been streaming at $10 a month from day one, it would have only cost me about $6000 up to now.

Spotify allows me to listen to more music than I could possibly afford to buy and also solves my storage problems. Truly a deal with the devil.

 

[sabre79]

Just wait until you get an LP with liner notes!

I'm so glad I'm an old fogey. Having to dig through a drawer full of reading glasses to read LP and especially, CD liner notes would be depressing.

 

[bucephylus]

I’m going to dissent on the whole vinyl popularity thing. I ALWAYS hated vinyl, even when that was the only available option for source material. I could list the Garrard, Dual, AR turntables etc that I went through trying to find something resembling good sound. Still have my Diskwasher D3 setup gathering dust and a Denon turntable, which isn’t hooked up to anything and never will be, if I can help it. The only vinyl I kept were a pile of bootleg discs I bought in college; Zep, Hendrix etc.

The rest of you can absolutely have your vinyl. CD’s were a breath of fresh air for me. The vintage gear I am still using consists of a Marantz 2270, which needs servicing and my Dynaco A25’s, which my spouse has relegated to my rehearsal space, because they look so ratty. The Marantz is hooked up to a set of JBL Studio Monitors.

Just totally no to the vinyl movement. You all can have it.

 

[Crackle]

I have a small collection of vinyl but I would choose CD over vinyl any day. A lot of my CDs are over 25 years old and show no signs of deterioration. They are stored in a climate-controlled environment - my house.

I do a fair amount of audio streaming on YouTube. Spotify on a rare occasion.

These days, a lot of my general music listening is on shortwave radio.

 

[frankie5string]

Yes!! Vinyl has the best sound. When producers went to CD wave format they had to reduce the “sound” to make the album fit the cd. Then mp3 came out. Reduced the “sound” even more. So. Congrats on the CD format purchase! Move on to vinyl. Grew up poor? Yes, me too. I lived on the edge of the ghetto all my life because we could not afford anything else. (Sorry if that offends anyone) fortunately God has blessed me enough to live in a better neighborhood. I do like inexpensive basses.

Um... it's the other way around... You would be shocked at the amount of work that was/is required to fit most music onto an LP.

 

[Luther]

Wow, I bought my first CD in 1986 - Steve Winwood, Back in the High Life.

 

[seanm]

I held off on CDs for as long as I could. New CDs where $25, tapes where $8 or $10 (early '90s?). I could buy way more tapes. And I was mainly buying new (to me) music, so if I bought a clunker, $8 was easier to stomach than $25.

My first CD was, ironically, Magic Sam - Magic Touch. Recorded live with a cheap tape recorder. If you like Magic Sam, and like the vibe of live music, this CD actually captures it really well. And Shakey Jake was in really good form that night.

 

[Nightsprinter]

Thread cracks me up because one of your first CD's is Benighted, but when I was growing up, I used mail order to buy an import Benighted CASSETTE. lol!

 

[dbsfgyd1]

Hi!

This might be weird to most of you, but I just got my first two CDs on the weekend, this past Friday (I often work night shifts etc so to me, Friday was the weekend ).

I really do not enjoy the current streaming services and the requirement to be always online for most of them and the God awful implementation of most of the offline modes along with ads, so I decided to buy their stuff in the meatspace.

I grew up poor and I never had most of the things that a lot of people in the western world take for granted, so this felt a lot like rewarding my child-self a little bit and being my own cool mom My whole idea is to go to the CD store every month and pick one album that I am a fan of and one album that I know nothing about.

So... one old, one new. That way I collect my faves and add something new to my listening, whatever it ends up being.

During the holidays I received a few gift cards, so with these I was able to buy a CD drive to rip the CDs onto my Music app that's on my iMac. The next step?

Buying a modded iPod classic 5.5 with an upgraded battery and storage, Wolfson DAC and to get some IEMs to tie it all together for that ultimate old-new-on-the-go music solution.

View attachment 5309401

Anyway, the music I got so far is -
The Black Dahlia Murder - the Nocturnal album from 2007. My old favourite...
I really like that the cover for the case doubles as a booklet with lyrics for every single song on the album, such a great thing!


Benighted - Obscene Repressed from 2020. I had no idea what this was, turned out pretty good. I would get another album from them Some of the songs are in French, which really messed me up for a moment. Also, the song "Muzzle" has this bizarre jazz (?) in the middle, this made me laugh so much (I was drunk, had 5 bottles of mead...) that it became my instant favourite.



So that's it for now. We will see what I get at the end of this month.
Thanks and until next time TB!

Aside from ripping off technology is stealing intellectual property without a license in our country, I’m not so sure about yours, I agree some streaming services leave little to be desired.

That said, I’ve used Pandora as well as IHeart music when subscribed there are no commercials.

One other place that is really cool is with Chordfy app, you have access to 400,000 songs, along with the chord charts to play along with. $20 a year.

Best wishes.

 

[JKos]

Are downloaded songs quality? Does it sound as good as CD's? Idk.

They can be better than CD quality with higher bit depth and sampling rate. It is easy to find better-than-CD downloads.

About a month ago, I ripped all my CDs to MP3s and donated all the CDs to the library.

Just know that you no longer have legal rights to that ripped music.