CD - RIP
See what I did with the title? Oh,...
CDs to be phased out (maybe) in 2012.
Seems a lot more feasible than when the rumour last few around.
CDs to be phased out (maybe) in 2012.
Seems a lot more feasible than when the rumour last few around.
Comments
i doubt its the end for the silver disc but it must go, leaving just an underground of cult users,
personally i have always hated the things, it should have remained what it was intended to be, a replacement for the recordable compact cassette,
dont get me wrong , i am not anti digital , its just the silver disc i hate, and the machines that play them , and the nasty jewel cases,and the way even a perfect looking disc can get stustustustustustuck, i believe that CD as a primary source was a retrograde step in terms of engaging the listener .
vinyl and hi rez audio files are IMO the best way to go if you really want the music to 'touch your soul' for want of a better expression .
no offence to those that love them, just my opinion.
:-D
I wondered for ages whether digital replay was the poor relation to analogue replay - and it often is the poor relation in the sense that more moulah gets tied up in a TT, 'stage, cart, PS etc than a one or two box CD system. Digital rarely got a fair crack at the whip IMO, mostly because the results were poor even with fairly decent investment.
I understand some of the super expensive, heavily engineered Krell et al CD players re-clock and bufffer the data, and sound as good as anything past or present. But, they are still frightfully expensive second hand.
Computer audio with a decent DAC gives a similar order of performance (and massive flexibility) for comparatively little money.
:-D B-) ;;)
Will get involved when less tired...
Even good Redbook is stunning through a good playback system.
:-D
I think you're also perhaps muddling Redbook files and Redbook CDs. CDs are
hopelessly behind computer-based audio as a playback mechanism of the
same specification files.
Shame you're so far away. You could have come to my place and hear what digital is capable of. I'm not saying it's the best you'll hear from digital - far from it - but it is very good, nonetheless. I'm not being big-headed, just realistic. I've got to where I am with the system with steady improvements over many years.
i am of the opinion that CD was driven solely by the music industries greed and desire to have ever greater margins , and by turntable manufacturers making ever worse quality plastic devices that they called HI FI.
of course i suffer bad digital files, and vinyl LP's but i love the music contained on them so continue to use them,
as you mentioned computer audio is the future but for the hi fi nerd it depends on file quality , and so we are back to same old sad fact, any format is only as good as the work that went into the recording and processing of the data prior to it reaching us the user,
after a recent Gomez gig i attended i got home and fired up the download file via a CA dacmagic and the same lp on the systemdek /alphason/modded DL103 combo through a CA 640p , the digital system cost almost double that of the analogue system and yet the analogue system was by far the closest to the gig i had just attended 2 hours before, yet the Brandenburg FLAC files i recently downloaded are by far the best recording i have heard in a long time and has me looking again at digital as a viable contributor to my enjoyment of music, its this sort of inconsistency that keeps me on the vinyl path , digital is full of promise but is being let down by the media , CD as a carrier regardless of effort put into production always has me heading for the power button and switching off half way through albums and skipping through tracks ,
please dont take all this the wrong way as its just my opinion and personal preference but it does make me wonder if there is real validity to my point on different people being better able to process music being digitally reproduced.
all the best,
matt
We're not going to agree on this one, and that's cool.
Your point about the digital arm of your rig costing more than the analogue side is - I think - relevant. As I said a little earlier, its easy to spend a lot on digital and get comparatively poor results, though that doesnt mean the DACmagic is poor. I liked mine.
The thing is, I used a DACMagic, a Caiman, a Theta DS Pro Basic 2 and a Theta DS Pro Progeny. The two 'cheap' modern DACs were 'better' than the Thetas, but most of us would surely live with the Theta DACs by choice. They really played music very nicely indeed, but cost nearly £3k when new, and still make £400 ish second hand (which is how I came to have them). Accuracy didnt seem to be the be-all and end-all, desirable as it is. But thats changed now with newer generations of DACs, phenominal accuracy but fabulously musical presentation.
Yes, I will have that cake. What's more, I am going to eat it!
I contend that DACs have leapt ahead in value vs performance terms over the last year or so, the performance available for say £500 - £1500 now probably outstrips what you could get for £5000 and more going back to last year and further back.
How would we know though? Given that digital replay meant poor results even at quite a high price point when analogue could be made very good for just a few hundred, no-one would want to splash out £5000 to hear what could really be done. Well, now we can, easily. A world class DAC can be had cheaply in hifi terms, Young, MDAC, Calyx etc.
But the DAC is only part of the issue. Excellent decoding is essential for sure, but I only found the leap I was looking for when I did away with spinning discs. Cds have little place in High Fidelity IMO, they are good simply as storage and a delivery mechanism. They tend to post well...and they do make good bird scarers Col, placemats too.
Eliminating trying to decode music in real time from a spinning disc is the greatest advance Im likely to hear from a single change of direction. Digital is honestly as good as anything now, and affordably so - which is a good thing. But spinning CDs is not they way forward.
Sorry for the length of this post, lunchbreak appears to have overrun somewhat...
your point about the quality of the recording, mixing and mastering being the biggest arbiter of quality, regardless of format, is spot on my friend. Have a cookie.
also i can hardly wait to get some of those hi rez files playing via a good digital system , good as the dacmagic is for the cost i dont feel i am in a real position to asses how good/bad digital replay can be!
matt
;-)
Listen to them all the time, meself
No idea how accurate this claim is mind.
regardless of CD's bit depth we still must rely on the replay device to reconstruct all those bits at the right time and in the right order into an analogue of the wave form ,
i just prefer the re-EQ of the analogue rather than an attempt to reconstruct and then convert into an analogue of the waveform.