The CD is dead....thank God

[Shell]

Hey, I didn't get a cell phone until I was 39 or 40...And managed okay without it before I got it. It does come in handy, but there are probably people out there who get along fine without them. I haven't gotten a mp3 player yet, but I probably will one of these days. I do try to keep up with technology, but it takes me awhile to catch up. I remember not having cable T.V. or a computer too, and I did fine. I could still get by without cable T.V., that's not a big deal, but I don't know what I'd do without my computer, LOL.

There's nothing wrong with technology, but it was simpler not to have to worry about all that stuff.

[greenchili]

Sure.. whatever you say. I know some people that have mp3 players, far more who don't. The ones who don't from conversations with them never seem to be able to find the music the want in the stores. I've perused stores alot. CD's have too short a life span. Go in there instead of seeing a variety of an arist's titles you either see ten million copies of one release or a bunch of greatest hits. Who wants that kind of crap? Success of record sales is based on the few small weeks (or is it days) after it's release. It's like they think everyone has time on their hands to grab an album on release date.

I usually end up waiting a few months, sometimes more. I know if I wait too long though chances are it will be gone and difficult to find. I still think it's a problem of lopsided distribution and too much reliance on too little statistical data. But whatever, the record companies could implode on their on stupidity for all I care.

One thing I can say for sure is alot of people seem less interested in albums and more interested in individual songs for some reason. I suppos e there are alot of groups that release a few good songs surrounded by a bunch of filler. But I guess I'm still old school. Assuming your listening to a decent group. I tend to think of albums in terms of concept. The of course there is the album artwork and liner notes. Something you just won't see in an Ipod download. In fact I'd be willing to bet that alot of the songs on itunes do not even include lyrics although the ipod supports it (does anyone know? I don't download from itunes). Plus as someone pointed out I've found out some songs grow on me over time.

Regardless the music industry is gonna continue to follow the statistical marketing money making monkey until all the songs sound the same and the whole industry implodes on itself. In the meantime some of the "smarter" people will find more creative ways to get their product out. It almost seems like the christian music industry took off in spite of itself. One has to wonder how it even managed to exist.

From what I hear Weird Al's latest album has been taking off. Not bad for somebody who's popularity was waning a bit. Oddly enough the circumstances surrounding it's success are rather interesting.

The signs are there, but people are not watching. Their too busy looking at the statistical data and scratching their collective heads.

Yeah I know my words are going to empty ears, but whatever.

[Shell]

You have as much right to your opinion as anyone else. It can boil down to preference and what someone is willing to invest in. And, if you're like me, you get used to something and it takes awhile to change. I like my CDs (and my LPs too) and I haven't really had any good reason to give them up.

[brent]

CD's have too short a life span. Go in there instead of seeing a variety of an arist's titles you either see ten million copies of one release or a bunch of greatest hits. Who wants that kind of crap? Success of record sales is based on the few small weeks (or is it days) after it's release. It's like they think everyone has time on their hands to grab an album on release date.

One thing I can say for sure is alot of people seem less interested in albums and more interested in individual songs for some reason. I suppos e there are alot of groups that release a few good songs surrounded by a bunch of filler.

Regardless the music industry is gonna continue to follow the statistical marketing money making monkey until all the songs sound the same and the whole industry implodes on itself. In the meantime some of the "smarter" people will find more creative ways to get their product out. It almost seems like the christian music industry took off in spite of itself. One has to wonder how it even managed to exist.

From what I hear Weird Al's latest album has been taking off. Not bad for somebody who's popularity was waning a bit. Oddly enough the circumstances surrounding it's success are rather interesting.

The signs are there, but people are not watching. Their too busy looking at the statistical data and scratching their collective heads.

Yeah I know my words are going to empty ears, but whatever.

You hit something on the head, which is the topic of many older people that remember the mom and pop, niche and mega music stores. Tower records just went belly up. The store in LA was great because that was where people, fans and stars, used to shop. It was like a library. People could get exposed to obscure, imports and non-radio crap. Now, it is all Walmart marketing. Find the top 50 titles that the masses want, and stock it.

Businesses like Best Buy have a hyper-market. They really go after a narrow age group of people that buy technology and entertainment items. That is their business. So you can't fault them for trying to stay in business, because it makes no sense to appeal to a 60 year old that still has the 12:00 flashing on their BetaMax.

People today have even less free time than they did 5 years ago. Technology advances 10 years in one day. The attention span in churches is so short that we have to have the IMAG changing every 2.5 seconds. The cardinal rule for website design is "3 clicks to anything". WE are the reason why things are what they are.

Like my good pal Ripley sang, "All the good stuff...is gone away."

[greenchili]

You hit something on the head, which is the topic of many older people that remember the mom and pop, niche and mega music stores. Tower records just went belly up. The store in LA was great because that was where people, fans and stars, used to shop. It was like a library. People could get exposed to obscure, imports and non-radio crap. Now, it is all Walmart marketing. Find the top 50 titles that the masses want, and stock it.

Businesses like Best Buy have a hyper-market. They really go after a narrow age group of people that buy technology and entertainment items. That is their business. So you can't fault them for trying to stay in business, because it makes no sense to appeal to a 60 year old that still has the 12:00 flashing on their BetaMax.

People today have even less free time than they did 5 years ago. Technology advances 10 years in one day. The attention span in churches is so short that we have to have the IMAG changing every 2.5 seconds. The cardinal rule for website design is "3 clicks to anything". WE are the reason why things are what they are.

Like my good pal Ripley sang, "All the good stuff...is gone away."

Watch it now, your beginning to depress me.

I suppose it is a little bit harder for me to understand since I'm so much into technology. But yeah the 12:00 flashing VCR is so common it's not funny. Maybe things will change as companies move online. Having stuff stored on a server is certainly cheaper than building a store, renting it, hiring employees, etc. The technology is there, they just need to use it.

Funny you should talk about lack of time. I was just talking to my co-worker last night about how people these days seem to have that "I want it now" mentality. Even corporations are that way. They run on quarterly profits instead of long term plans. It's a chase the wind mentality these days it seems.

Another thing I find interesting is how much we are bombarded with images and music all the time these days. Just watch TV for a few hours and you will see what I mean. I purposely stay away from TV as much as I possibly can. The mind can only take so much. People need to slow down so they can think clearly and hear the voice of God.

I'm curious, slightly off topic question. You mentioned some of the methods used to master LP's. When CD's first came out did they have a problem with alot of sound engineers not completely understanding the technology and it's capabilities/limitations?

I remember hearing alot of albums that just did not sound as good as I felt they should have when CD's first hit the market. I was pretty much exclusively christian music at the time, so I'm not sure if they were a few steps behind or not.

I can't really explain it very well. I suppose lack of good bass (or low end) seemed to be a big problem. As well as it seemed they would place all the levels (instruments, whatever) at the same loudness, not allowing for variance. It was almost like they didn't bother with mixing/processing and just dumped everything straight to the CD. Sorry for the lousy description, but I'm not real familar with terminology used in the industry.

[brent]

Record cutting was an art. It required specific lathes, with a limited amount of processing. Records were kind of mastered on the fly. There was a human, with the hands on the controls, doing all kinds of tricks to get the most out of the vinyl.

(Recordings in a studio sound completely different than anything produced. It all gets jacked in the process. A TV mix will be mixed and mastered differently than radio, than CD, than cassette, than MP3... It is because we must compensate for what the stations and boradcast processes do to the sound. This is why an indie release always sounds like crap on your radio stations. They haven't mastered for each application.)

The better record companies had better products, plain and simple. As reissues, compiliations and licensed record clubs came out, then you might see a degredation in quality, because of cost cutting and less experienced people doing the work.

Your other question about digital and the early sound. I could write a book. Lets just say that the whole industry built equipment, studios, procedures, etc to get the most out of analog tape, vinyl, etc. When digital arrived, all of that went out the window in time. The older engineers kept trying to insert digital, keeping their work habbits and supporting gear the same. It didn't work. It took some time for people to adapt to it. There are older big money engineers today that write articles, revealing how little they know about digital technology.

How did analog processes make for bad digital recording? For instance. One popular vintage studio mics (ones we pay $10k a pop for now), was designed to capture speech for BBC TV in the 50s. They were designed for distance mic'ing. Now, they were recording on dull tape, and playing on 1950s TVs with dull speakers. So this one model in particular has an excessive amount of treble. So when new guys came along, they use this microphone for vocals, with the singer 4" away, on a digital machine (which has no high frequency drop off, has no hiss, no rumble, etc), and they complain about digital being too bright. Bull crap. They used the wrong tools for the job. Much of what you heard in the 80s was misapplied tools and techniques.

Then, people decided that they wanted CDs to be louder. Then mastering engineers began making the soft passages as loud as explosions, so that the disc has one volume all of the time. This removes the subtlety and dynamics. It has killed music.

[greenchili]

That's what I suspected, but it's always to hear a more complete description of what occured during the transition to digital.

I'm pretty aware of the limitation of radio, probably why I dislike it so much. It just kills so much subtlety in a song.

Then, people decided that they wanted CDs to be louder. Then mastering engineers began making the soft passages as loud as explosions, so that the disc has one volume all of the time. This removes the subtlety and dynamics. It has killed music.

Is this the process I hear about referred to as compression that they use to make songs sound louder on the radio? Yeah I can't stand that one either. To me dynamics and things like pauses (a dying art?) are things that seem to be lost these days.

[Epyon5757]

Brent,
Seems like you know quite a bit about the music industry...you must be involved in it to know so much about it.
That being said, I'm sure that there is a negative difference in quality between 128 kps and a CD. I'll also be the first person to tell you that on 98% of my 892 digital songs, I cannot detect a difference between the actual song file and the CD (and yes, I own the CD's to all my music. None of my songs are purchased from ITunes...but I have to have ITunes for my IPod to work correctly...grr). There are 18 songs in my library where there is a noticeable difference. That's it. Only 18.
My friends with digital players agree with me - none of us can tell a difference between a digital file at 128 kbps and the original CD with the same song on it on 90-something percent of our music libraries.
I'm not saying the difference isn't there - just that most people do not notice the difference either because it's not discernable to people without extra-sensitive hearing OR some of their hearing is shot (I lost 8% just from playing trombone - and sitting two feet in front of the percussion sections in rehearsals and concerts - all through JHS, HS, and college - I wear an earplug in my left ear during church - the drums and guitar amps (including mine) are too loud at a range of 15 - 25 feet without an earplug on that side).

Forgot to add when I submitted: All my digital files are 128 kbps AAC format - unless it's classical - then I have to move it to 256 kbps to make the quality difference undetectable to me.
Even with my hearing loss and not being able to detect quality differences in digital files, I can still pick out a single marching band member who is a quarter step out of tune on the field from a distance of about 75 yards...and tell you who it is that's out of tune .

[greenchili]

Well I've heard people with golden ears say that one of the most obvious problems with MP3 is something like the cymbals on drums (they sound swishy). I didn't think much of it at the time.

But take an album like Audio Adrenaline's Bloom album and listen to someone elses ripped version compared to yours. I certainly noticed the difference for me.

I think the quality of the encoder has something to do with it as well. There are 3 or 4 different encoders. Most people seem to think that LAME is the best. I can only take their word for it.

Another odd thing that I've noticed is that MP3's seem to sound better on computer speakers. Considering that they were designed on a computer, one cannot help but wonder. Plus alot of MP3 players do not have very good equalizer control so they don't seem to "put out" as much bass as putting a CD in.

[charl]

I wanted The Information on CD because MP3's don't come with stickers. I want STICKERS!

eta...well maybe the "interactive book" has the images I don't know.

[charl]

Also the Blues and especially Jazz sound like HELL on mp3. No bass and the brass is horribly tinney.

[bakersfieldpethead]

NBC/Universal Entertainment Division really sucks right now. About the only thing anyone is watching on NBC is Sunday Night Football and Nascar. The are still making very good money, but the margin has gone down(unlike the other networks) from 2 years ago.

If you notice, NBC don't really have any Sit-Coms anymore, ABC and CBS still do, but not NBC. If there are I would like to know. The biggest three shows I think on NBC are ER, My Name Is Earl and VEGAS, then you have the game shows, Deal or No Deal and the Late Night Shows, which don't compare to David Letterman by far, in my opinion. It was pure Luck if you believe in that for them to grab Sunday Night Football. And NBC may not have NASCAR for long.

I think who ever is running the ball game for them, needs to be replaced, and Bill Cosby, Bob Newhear or someone needs to write a new show to get them back on their feet.

[bakersfieldpethead]

Also the Blues and especially Jazz sound like HELL on mp3. No bass and the brass is horribly tinney.

The higher the Megabites for the track, the better it will sound. Microsoft introduced I believe with Windows Media Player 11 the new "Lossless" format, but it's like 940kpbs and the size on disk will be much bigger than the standard ripping format.

If you remember during the old Cassette days, we started buying 60 min, then 90 min and then we started going to Radio Shack for the 120 min Cassettes so we could copy our friends albums off for ourselves. The thing now is to buy bigger Hard Drives.

[Life_AWKI]

LifeHacker Article on cd vs mp3


Great article on the MP3 vs. CD's.

I am a bit old school (as a lot of the Petheads probably are [Petra started in the 70's, grew in the 80's, peaked in the early 90's and recently retired -- not exactly new music]) and I sure like owing a hard copy of my music. I do download some music (mostly local and regional bands with myspace sites) but usually buy CD's to back them up. I find the quality of the CD's to be light years ahead of myspace downloads (as they should be).

I went to a hi-end audio store the other day that still does vinyl and relished listening to the "warm" yet scratchy sound of the turntables. Call me old school, but that was cool!

[Edward]

Brent,
Seems like you know quite a bit about the music industry...you must be involved in it to know so much about it.
That being said, I'm sure that there is a negative difference in quality between 128 kps and a CD. I'll also be the first person to tell you that on 98% of my 892 digital songs, I cannot detect a difference between the actual song file and the CD (and yes, I own the CD's to all my music. None of my songs are purchased from ITunes...but I have to have ITunes for my IPod to work correctly...grr). There are 18 songs in my library where there is a noticeable difference. That's it. Only 18.
My friends with digital players agree with me - none of us can tell a difference between a digital file at 128 kbps and the original CD with the same song on it on 90-something percent of our music libraries.
I'm not saying the difference isn't there - just that most people do not notice the difference either because it's not discernable to people without extra-sensitive hearing OR some of their hearing is shot (I lost 8% just from playing trombone - and sitting two feet in front of the percussion sections in rehearsals and concerts - all through JHS, HS, and college - I wear an earplug in my left ear during church - the drums and guitar amps (including mine) are too loud at a range of 15 - 25 feet without an earplug on that side).

Forgot to add when I submitted: All my digital files are 128 kbps AAC format - unless it's classical - then I have to move it to 256 kbps to make the quality difference undetectable to me.
Even with my hearing loss and not being able to detect quality differences in digital files, I can still pick out a single marching band member who is a quarter step out of tune on the field from a distance of about 75 yards...and tell you who it is that's out of tune .

Here is the deal with MP3 math. This is over simplified ok? You cannot have perfect stereo reproduction with an MP3. It becomes a jacked up Left and Right mess. Why? Because the MP3 protocol calls for the elimination of idential left and right signals. One is thrown away, and then the other is just split into two upon playback. There is some phasing as a result. It may be evident in a swishing sounding noize.

The data that represents the audio is compressed. Tails of the data are chopped off. So reverb tails go away. Subtle things are lost. the dimension and depth of the music is lost. A songs length changes in some cases. Now a CD has nowhere near the resolution of analog reproduction. There are not enough computers in the world to process music the way analog gear can electically. So wht take another step back? People only care about convenience now. They don't care about sound and quality.

There are some types of music that have no subtlety, dimension or dynamic range (the distance between the most quiet and most loud music is minimal) that will sound about the same on an MP3. So you may not notice. But take a classical piece, or something with dynamic range that uses real instruments in a real environment, and it is painfully obvious.