Shiny and Tiny: 40 years of the CD
October 2, 2022 1:01 PM Subscribe
The first commercially-available CD (Billy Joel's 52nd Street) was released forty years ago yesterday. Steve Knopper at Billboard relates "How the ‘Shiny, Tiny’ Discs Took Over" [archive.org link]. Daryl Worthington at The Quietus explores "the unique experimental potential of the format". At DW, Silke Wünsch ponders the medium's rise & fall. And Adam Aziz at grammy.com asks "Can CDs Make A Comeback?".
Additionally, on YouTube, watch Sonia Humphrey, Iain Finlay and Jeff Watson introduce the new technology to the Australian public in 1982; and likewise see Kieran Prendeville do likewise for Brits the year before.
Additionally, on YouTube, watch Sonia Humphrey, Iain Finlay and Jeff Watson introduce the new technology to the Australian public in 1982; and likewise see Kieran Prendeville do likewise for Brits the year before.
While some are into vinyl and the kids are all about the lower-fidelity streaming and downloadable audio formats, I'm buying up absolute classics on CD for like $1 to $2 each at thrift stores.
posted by Artful Codger at 2:31 PM on October 2, 2022 [17 favorites]
posted by Artful Codger at 2:31 PM on October 2, 2022 [17 favorites]
Can CDs Make A Comeback?
Well, there is a burgeoning CD collector market. I think it’s largely driven by people who were kids/teens in the 90s.
I still have all my CDs and play them regularly.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:33 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
Well, there is a burgeoning CD collector market. I think it’s largely driven by people who were kids/teens in the 90s.
I still have all my CDs and play them regularly.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:33 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
I found this article from Reuters as it was linked from one of the links in the original post. It says:
Despite a slow decline in sales in the past decade, CDs are still the most popular music format in Japan, accounting for around 70% of recorded music sales last year [2019].
It was written in November 2020, so I wonder how much has changed with the pandemic.
posted by hydra77 at 2:50 PM on October 2, 2022
Despite a slow decline in sales in the past decade, CDs are still the most popular music format in Japan, accounting for around 70% of recorded music sales last year [2019].
It was written in November 2020, so I wonder how much has changed with the pandemic.
posted by hydra77 at 2:50 PM on October 2, 2022
I feel that CDs had more of a transformative impact for personal computing than music -- without in any way lessening the merits of high quality music that didn't wear out on replay.
I think that you're on to something there. The iMac (1998) had a CD-ROM slot, but not a floppy drive, although add-on floppy drives (in matching Bondi Blue or whatever) were cheap and pretty common. But if CD-ROMs transformed personal computing, then personal computing-mediated music helped kill (or at least severely lessen) CDs, by virtue of speeding the adoption of online digital music sources (legal and otherwise) and MP3 players.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:56 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
I think that you're on to something there. The iMac (1998) had a CD-ROM slot, but not a floppy drive, although add-on floppy drives (in matching Bondi Blue or whatever) were cheap and pretty common. But if CD-ROMs transformed personal computing, then personal computing-mediated music helped kill (or at least severely lessen) CDs, by virtue of speeding the adoption of online digital music sources (legal and otherwise) and MP3 players.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:56 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
What a pick to be first though.
posted by mhoye at 2:58 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by mhoye at 2:58 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
After several moves, a hundred smoky house parties and other contributing factors, my 400+ CD collection was grimy, dusty and many cases were partially broken. I worked in an ad agency around 2005 when I decided to rip every CD I had to MP3. I did it at work so as not to burn out my own laptop's CD drive (I know...). I would bring 10-20 CDs to the office each day and rip them all using ancient iTunes while I was doing other tasks. Eventually I converted them all to MP3.
I bought several giant CD binders and kept every one of them, along with album art/inserts if they were worth saving. I still have all 400+ of these CDs stashed in a box somewhere downstairs...cool, dark and dry. I remember throwing all those old dirty cases into a recycling bin.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:04 PM on October 2, 2022 [11 favorites]
I bought several giant CD binders and kept every one of them, along with album art/inserts if they were worth saving. I still have all 400+ of these CDs stashed in a box somewhere downstairs...cool, dark and dry. I remember throwing all those old dirty cases into a recycling bin.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:04 PM on October 2, 2022 [11 favorites]
Among my friends who were early-adopters, one of the first discs bought was often a Pink Floyd CD, which they felt really showed off the capabilities of the format.
And speaking of their use in computers in the early days of the net, I recall one tipsy guy in a club waxing enthusiastically about this subscription service that would periodically send out CD-ROMs stuffed full of curated internet porn. This was back when dial up meant that images loaded slowly, don't even think about video clips, and search engine tech was in its infancy and might not index porn well, if at all.
posted by indexy at 3:09 PM on October 2, 2022
And speaking of their use in computers in the early days of the net, I recall one tipsy guy in a club waxing enthusiastically about this subscription service that would periodically send out CD-ROMs stuffed full of curated internet porn. This was back when dial up meant that images loaded slowly, don't even think about video clips, and search engine tech was in its infancy and might not index porn well, if at all.
posted by indexy at 3:09 PM on October 2, 2022
I remember Borland C++ Builder came on something like 40 floppies, if you didn't have a CD Rom drive. Installing everything was painful. Switching to a CD drive was awesome.
Libraries still loan out music and book CDs. I'm not sure how that works digitally.
posted by Spike Glee at 3:11 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
Libraries still loan out music and book CDs. I'm not sure how that works digitally.
posted by Spike Glee at 3:11 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
CDs are the only format I've ever bought more than a few of, growing up in the 90s. I enjoy the tactileness and process of vinyl but I don't know that i have the space for it. It also seems like a bit of Urban Outfitters-esque packaged personality to me. I like how easy CDs are to rip to mp3, vinyl lacks this portability.
Libraries still loan out music and book CDs. I'm not sure how that works digitally.
They pay a lot of money for subscriptions with DRM that can be used by library members.
posted by JauntyFedora at 3:12 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Libraries still loan out music and book CDs. I'm not sure how that works digitally.
They pay a lot of money for subscriptions with DRM that can be used by library members.
posted by JauntyFedora at 3:12 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
That subscription CD service was probably called FAO -- for adults only -- and yeah, they would send you CDs full of porn scraped off USENET. They also sold all kinds of other discs full of images, shareware, books, source code, whatever. I had a few of these discs, they were great ways to get access to stuff otherwise unaccessible without a fast UUCP connection.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:13 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:13 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
I also remember in the super early days of CDs, going to record stores and just looking through every one of their CDs, from A-Z. Because you never knew what was going to be newly released, or re-released in the new format.
One of the earliest CDs I bought with my own money was Queen's "A Night at the Opera" (I was a huge Queen fan, which was NOT cool back then in my circles, ahem, homophobia) probably around 1985 or so. I remember thinking it was so neat that they released an "old" record like that to a new format.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:29 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
One of the earliest CDs I bought with my own money was Queen's "A Night at the Opera" (I was a huge Queen fan, which was NOT cool back then in my circles, ahem, homophobia) probably around 1985 or so. I remember thinking it was so neat that they released an "old" record like that to a new format.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:29 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
CDs have made a comeback in certain circles due to the headaches of getting vinyl pressed and the relative ease with which you can get a few hundred CDs made that will sound better than vinyl. We also shouldn't forget that for a long time it was cheaper to get a few hundred records than a few thousand CDs. Troniks is a great example of a label that released a LOT of LPs in tiny numbers and has now switched to CDs exclusively*. The John Wiese episode of the Noisextra podcast digs into this topic.
* they also did a lot of CDs in their heyday.
posted by monkeymike at 3:49 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
* they also did a lot of CDs in their heyday.
posted by monkeymike at 3:49 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
Despite a slow decline in sales in the past decade, CDs are still the most popular music format in Japan, accounting for around 70% of recorded music sales last year [2019].
What's the saying? In Japan they've been living like it was the year 2000 since 1980?
posted by clawsoon at 3:54 PM on October 2, 2022 [14 favorites]
What's the saying? In Japan they've been living like it was the year 2000 since 1980?
posted by clawsoon at 3:54 PM on October 2, 2022 [14 favorites]
Here’s my CD story. I worked at Philips Design for awhile and one day there was a retirement party. Turns out it was for the guy who designed the jewel case. So I had some cake. End of story.
posted by misterpatrick at 3:55 PM on October 2, 2022 [31 favorites]
posted by misterpatrick at 3:55 PM on October 2, 2022 [31 favorites]
I was thinking about format obsolescence the other day, and I'm kind of glad I don't foresee a future in which I need to go out and buy stuff again. I replaced so many tapes with CDs, ripped all those CDs, moved to streaming, and yeah. Both the CDs and the ripped files are mostly collecting dust or rotting bits.
Same with VHS and DVD; never bothered with Bluray or whatever it is/was. The tangible asset was never as important to me as the content within those plastic carriers.
posted by Ickster at 3:58 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Same with VHS and DVD; never bothered with Bluray or whatever it is/was. The tangible asset was never as important to me as the content within those plastic carriers.
posted by Ickster at 3:58 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
I remember Borland C++ Builder came on something like 40 floppies, if you didn't have a CD Rom drive. Installing everything was painful. Switching to a CD drive was awesome.
CDRWs arrived just in time to kill Jaz drives, too. It was wonderful.
posted by mhoye at 3:59 PM on October 2, 2022 [8 favorites]
CDRWs arrived just in time to kill Jaz drives, too. It was wonderful.
posted by mhoye at 3:59 PM on October 2, 2022 [8 favorites]
I'm just now realizing that many things I like(d) about CDs are actually things I like(d) about consumer-recordable CDs.
-MP3s, either ripped from your own CD collection or the CDs of a friend*, actually sold a lot of CD-Rs.
If you were OK with the compression, you could fit up to 10 hours of whatever audio you want on a single disc.** Or just a 4 song GET HYPED parking lot playlist. Hand labeled CD-Rs scattered around your car and your backpack and your desk, like Bic lighters and ball point pens.***
Each unit of which cost you what, a dollar?
- homemade CDs as indie music and standup and wedding harpist Table Merch. Spend a couple of weeknights burning and folding paper inserts for a suitcase full of CDs, sell them at the venue after your performance for ten bucks each, that gets the band van fixed or pays your rent.
*** So much waste plastic, tho! Part of the Anthropocene is going to be a geologic layer of unlabeled CDs.
** a boon for audio book listeners. A book on 1 CD was much more portable than on 9 casettes. A much more manageable bookshelf and/or backpack.
* don't tell me you've never encountered "It's not a relationship. They're just fucking for as long as it takes to steal each other's good CDs".
posted by bartleby at 4:04 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
-MP3s, either ripped from your own CD collection or the CDs of a friend*, actually sold a lot of CD-Rs.
If you were OK with the compression, you could fit up to 10 hours of whatever audio you want on a single disc.** Or just a 4 song GET HYPED parking lot playlist. Hand labeled CD-Rs scattered around your car and your backpack and your desk, like Bic lighters and ball point pens.***
Each unit of which cost you what, a dollar?
- homemade CDs as indie music and standup and wedding harpist Table Merch. Spend a couple of weeknights burning and folding paper inserts for a suitcase full of CDs, sell them at the venue after your performance for ten bucks each, that gets the band van fixed or pays your rent.
*** So much waste plastic, tho! Part of the Anthropocene is going to be a geologic layer of unlabeled CDs.
** a boon for audio book listeners. A book on 1 CD was much more portable than on 9 casettes. A much more manageable bookshelf and/or backpack.
* don't tell me you've never encountered "It's not a relationship. They're just fucking for as long as it takes to steal each other's good CDs".
posted by bartleby at 4:04 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
My CD story is that I'm still somehow kinda upset that CD's showed up and made my massive cassette tape collection obsolete. Tears for Fears, Men at Work, Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, Pixies, and hundreds more. Some eventually were replaced by CD's but my CD collection never reached the heights of my cassette tape collection. Literally.
posted by WhenInGnome at 4:10 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by WhenInGnome at 4:10 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
What is the streaming era equivalent of wandering around a new hookup's apartment, and trying to get a read on them by checking out their CDs?
posted by bartleby at 4:10 PM on October 2, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by bartleby at 4:10 PM on October 2, 2022 [11 favorites]
The cd, for audio, had an amazing economic effect on the recording industry. People brought their favourite albums again, then they brought the remastered version, then they brought the album again. Suddenly the record company could make money from old rope - although it looks like the old rope market might be drying up, as recent evaluations of the mega-collections of rights holders are down.
posted by The River Ivel at 4:12 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by The River Ivel at 4:12 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
Part of the Anthropocene is going to be a geologic layer of unlabeled AOL CDs.
FTFY
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:16 PM on October 2, 2022 [15 favorites]
FTFY
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:16 PM on October 2, 2022 [15 favorites]
I still have all my CDs and play them regularly.
Over the last few years I've been ripping mine to FLAC before playing them, and it's been quite disappointing to find out how many of them, despite having been stored and handled with care, have now deteriorated to the point where I can't actually get a 100% clean rip any more. The most common failure mode seems to involve the foil layer becoming more transparent.
This is annoying, because in many cases the only available replacements have been remasters that I don't enjoy listening to as much.
posted by flabdablet at 4:18 PM on October 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
Over the last few years I've been ripping mine to FLAC before playing them, and it's been quite disappointing to find out how many of them, despite having been stored and handled with care, have now deteriorated to the point where I can't actually get a 100% clean rip any more. The most common failure mode seems to involve the foil layer becoming more transparent.
This is annoying, because in many cases the only available replacements have been remasters that I don't enjoy listening to as much.
posted by flabdablet at 4:18 PM on October 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
I bought several giant CD binders and kept every one of them, along with album art/inserts if they were worth saving.
Circa 1999, working in a hostel, we had a big group coming in who was going to be occupying an entire floor of the building. Another staffer and I did a walkthrough of all the rooms the morning before the group was arriving to make sure everything was okay (no burned-out light bulbs or the like). In one room we noticed one of the coin lockers was in use. This was odd as the room itself had not been in use for a couple of nights so whatever was in there had to be in from several days earlier.
We retrieved the master key for the lockers and popped it open. Inside, the locker was crammed full of random backpacker detritus: a pair of flip-flops and some laundry and a guidebook, etc. We went with the usual protocol: the stuff all gets tagged and goes into the lost and found and if it is unclaimed in ninety days, it goes to charity.
Emptying the locked info a box, I spotted partway back a big black vinyl slab: a CD wallet with two hundred discs (this was in a day when CDs were maybe twenty-five dollars per). Then a second wallet, and a third, then a fourth, fifth, and sixth.
Twelve hundred CDs, and a lot of good stuff in the collection. The equivalent value of a decent car or the down payment on a small house.
We assumed the owner was a DJ who was for some reason travelling with his entire collection and for reasons even more mysterious, decided to leave it all unattended in a locker in room 402 of a hostel.
Lacking any other guidance, we treated this the same as the beat-up guidebooks and spare socks in the locker: ninety days in the lost and found to see if the owner reclaimed it. However, we set aside some funds to purchase a CD jukebox for the common room.
He returned on day 88. “Hey, I think I may have left a bunch of CDs in a locker in room 402? Did you find these?”
“Of course. Here you go, you bastard.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:38 PM on October 2, 2022 [47 favorites]
Circa 1999, working in a hostel, we had a big group coming in who was going to be occupying an entire floor of the building. Another staffer and I did a walkthrough of all the rooms the morning before the group was arriving to make sure everything was okay (no burned-out light bulbs or the like). In one room we noticed one of the coin lockers was in use. This was odd as the room itself had not been in use for a couple of nights so whatever was in there had to be in from several days earlier.
We retrieved the master key for the lockers and popped it open. Inside, the locker was crammed full of random backpacker detritus: a pair of flip-flops and some laundry and a guidebook, etc. We went with the usual protocol: the stuff all gets tagged and goes into the lost and found and if it is unclaimed in ninety days, it goes to charity.
Emptying the locked info a box, I spotted partway back a big black vinyl slab: a CD wallet with two hundred discs (this was in a day when CDs were maybe twenty-five dollars per). Then a second wallet, and a third, then a fourth, fifth, and sixth.
Twelve hundred CDs, and a lot of good stuff in the collection. The equivalent value of a decent car or the down payment on a small house.
We assumed the owner was a DJ who was for some reason travelling with his entire collection and for reasons even more mysterious, decided to leave it all unattended in a locker in room 402 of a hostel.
Lacking any other guidance, we treated this the same as the beat-up guidebooks and spare socks in the locker: ninety days in the lost and found to see if the owner reclaimed it. However, we set aside some funds to purchase a CD jukebox for the common room.
He returned on day 88. “Hey, I think I may have left a bunch of CDs in a locker in room 402? Did you find these?”
“Of course. Here you go, you bastard.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:38 PM on October 2, 2022 [47 favorites]
My problem with the demise of physical media is that I can not depend on any streaming service to have anything that I want to listen to or watch. Or to have it anytime in the future. I’ve built a library of media - CDs, DVDs, cassettes, books, some vinyl - of the things I like. I can just grab it and away I go. I live not far from Amoeba in San Francisco and I used to go there at least once a week and just browse and I would find stuff all the time. Over the past couple years, their stock has been progressively shrinking in both quantity and diversity. I’ve bought maybe three CDs and DVDs over the past couple years. There’s nothing there anymore. Maybe it’s just me, but music, movies, books, etc. seems to be evening out to a level of sameness, blandness… It’s been ages since I’ve encountered anything that made me sit up and say What the fuck is that??!! and then frantically find out who / what it is and then go out and buy it. I used to be a faithful reader of the UK magazine Wire, dropped my subscription as they began to just repeat themselves over some avant garde nostalgia.
Twelve years ago I took all my CDs to work to rip them onto my 160 GB iPod, which made listening more convenient. A couple months ago my iPod died and now I’m back to listening to CDs and I actually like that.
posted by njohnson23 at 4:41 PM on October 2, 2022 [8 favorites]
Twelve years ago I took all my CDs to work to rip them onto my 160 GB iPod, which made listening more convenient. A couple months ago my iPod died and now I’m back to listening to CDs and I actually like that.
posted by njohnson23 at 4:41 PM on October 2, 2022 [8 favorites]
I feel that CDs had more of a transformative impact for personal computing than music The CompuServe vs AOL competition would have been quite different without them...
posted by Runes at 5:11 PM on October 2, 2022
posted by Runes at 5:11 PM on October 2, 2022
I remember the Great Vinyl Purge of the early 1990s where you could get classic albums for $1. I assembled a great library of the best of the best, then immediately processed to rip them to cassette, which probably cost me more than the album.
posted by credulous at 5:15 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by credulous at 5:15 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
As a DJ I know I should prefer vinyl, but let's just say that CDs are less likely to skip, stick, or whatever at a most inopportune moment.
While some are into vinyl and the kids are all about the lower-fidelity streaming and downloadable audio formats, I'm buying up absolute classics on CD for like $1 to $2 each at thrift stores.
Deja vu-ing back to when folks were dumping their vinyl for CDs, and you used to find total (and now rare) gems similarly going for $2 each. (Of course now the reverse is true).
I'm definitely not anti-vinyl, but if I have to choose between a $2x (or $3x) LP and a $1x CD (especially if the latter has bonus tracks).... That said, either is better than streaming (i.e. less chance of waking up tomorrow and finding your fave songs are now MIA), but that's another rant.
posted by gtrwolf at 5:19 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
While some are into vinyl and the kids are all about the lower-fidelity streaming and downloadable audio formats, I'm buying up absolute classics on CD for like $1 to $2 each at thrift stores.
Deja vu-ing back to when folks were dumping their vinyl for CDs, and you used to find total (and now rare) gems similarly going for $2 each. (Of course now the reverse is true).
I'm definitely not anti-vinyl, but if I have to choose between a $2x (or $3x) LP and a $1x CD (especially if the latter has bonus tracks).... That said, either is better than streaming (i.e. less chance of waking up tomorrow and finding your fave songs are now MIA), but that's another rant.
posted by gtrwolf at 5:19 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
Just another annoying reminder what I still have not pulled the trigger on the Brennan B2
Anyone have +/- experience that would push me over the edge - or make me stop thinking about it - to convert my 1,000+ CD collection forever?
posted by thecincinnatikid at 5:20 PM on October 2, 2022
Anyone have +/- experience that would push me over the edge - or make me stop thinking about it - to convert my 1,000+ CD collection forever?
posted by thecincinnatikid at 5:20 PM on October 2, 2022
Prior to our last move we donated most of our CDs to the local library, which seemed very happy to get them (whether for use or for resale, who knows). I still have a small collection, but haven't actually owned a device that can play CDs in years. At this point I listen to music exclusively on streaming and on the local college radio station, where they play some good stuff and the DJs are uniformly completely stoned.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:35 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Dip Flash at 5:35 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
Anyone else have fond memories of the Minidisc? I adored the tiny players with LCD screens on the headphone cables. One of my projects back in the 90s would index my CD jukebox with CDDB and make a nightly mix MD for my ride to work with a straight digital copy over the toslink optical along with all of the per track meta data.
Thinking back on it, CDDB was such a hack. It hashed the track lengths to try to identify the album and used user contributed titles. Why didn't the CD include is own track listings in digital format?
posted by autopilot at 5:55 PM on October 2, 2022 [8 favorites]
Thinking back on it, CDDB was such a hack. It hashed the track lengths to try to identify the album and used user contributed titles. Why didn't the CD include is own track listings in digital format?
posted by autopilot at 5:55 PM on October 2, 2022 [8 favorites]
I still like CDs, even if I don't really have a dedicated player for them anymore; downloads are convenient and that's the way I mostly get music these days, but CDs feel less ephemeral.
posted by Aleyn at 6:21 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
Thinking back on it, CDDB was such a hack. It hashed the track lengths to try to identify the album and used user contributed titles. Why didn't the CD include is own track listings in digital format?There's the CD Text standard, but it came pretty late in the game, and not many players supported it, and so most music publishers didn't bother adding the metadata. I'm guessing it wasn't in the standard from the beginning because it it just didn't occur to the developers of the format that people wouldn't treat CDs like the vinyl and cassettes they replaced, keeping everything like that part of the case and liner notes.
posted by Aleyn at 6:21 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
My car stereo has a CD player that plays audio cds and mp3 cds. After being overseas for several years and then coming back and driving my car again, I quickly got tired of searching for a radio station playing anything worthwhile or connecting my phone to my bluetooth dongle, picking a playlist, starting it, then having to pause and reconnect every time I got out of and returned to the car.
So my cd collection has found new life, and if I want to listen to music from my digital collection I'll just burn an mp3 cd because when I got back in town and got my stuff out of storage I found a spindle of 200 blank cdrs.
It really is the most convenient way to listen to music in my car.
I used to have an audio CD recorder. I wish I still had that, it would be great for capturing vinyl and cassette without having to patch the players into the computer. It worked with audio cdrws so I could capture those sources without burning a ton of cdrs.
When I was overseas I picked up a lot of cds in thrift stores for not much money. It was a great way to experience the popular culture of the places I was in circa 10 years earlier.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 6:22 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
So my cd collection has found new life, and if I want to listen to music from my digital collection I'll just burn an mp3 cd because when I got back in town and got my stuff out of storage I found a spindle of 200 blank cdrs.
It really is the most convenient way to listen to music in my car.
I used to have an audio CD recorder. I wish I still had that, it would be great for capturing vinyl and cassette without having to patch the players into the computer. It worked with audio cdrws so I could capture those sources without burning a ton of cdrs.
When I was overseas I picked up a lot of cds in thrift stores for not much money. It was a great way to experience the popular culture of the places I was in circa 10 years earlier.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 6:22 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
CDs were okay, but even if somehow you could, I never used one to record something off the radio.
posted by snofoam at 6:25 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by snofoam at 6:25 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
Regarding the Brennan B2: If you already have a computer, you can get a 2T external drive and an external CD player for less than $100, and many media players include a feature to rip CDs to MP3, and of course you can easily connect your computer to your stereo via audio cable. Even if you don't have a stereo, one of those Class-D mini amplifiers and a set of bookshelf speakers will still cost you far less than the B2.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:26 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:26 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
Anyone else have fond memories of the Minidisc?
Oh, yes. I loved creating mixes on Minidiscs. For a hot minute I was sure that’d be my last format of choice, until I got a Nomad Creative Jukebox with (IIRC) a whopping 6GB capacity that would let me bring dozens(!) of albums on a trip. Dozens!
I wish it’d stayed, though. I so very miss giving people a physical mix “tape” of songs. The future is stupid.
posted by jzb at 6:34 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
Oh, yes. I loved creating mixes on Minidiscs. For a hot minute I was sure that’d be my last format of choice, until I got a Nomad Creative Jukebox with (IIRC) a whopping 6GB capacity that would let me bring dozens(!) of albums on a trip. Dozens!
I wish it’d stayed, though. I so very miss giving people a physical mix “tape” of songs. The future is stupid.
posted by jzb at 6:34 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
I wonder if the sales stats for Japan account for and/or incorporate the fact that audio CD rentals have been a thing for literally decades now — even back in 2005, they kept spindles of CD-Rs in the rental CD section of Tsutaya, because it was very clear that everyone knew what was up
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:37 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:37 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
CD players were such a wonderfully bougie consumer good.
Better than cassette for sure but you had to have some discretionary income to get one!
IIRC I got my first one in '93 when I was in my mid-20s, just didn't have the budget to be buying $20 CDs in the 80s when that was 3 hours of work . . .
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:49 PM on October 2, 2022
Better than cassette for sure but you had to have some discretionary income to get one!
IIRC I got my first one in '93 when I was in my mid-20s, just didn't have the budget to be buying $20 CDs in the 80s when that was 3 hours of work . . .
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:49 PM on October 2, 2022
>even back in 2005, they kept spindles of CD-Rs
funny you mention that, once I got a CD burner for my Mac, on my first trip to Tsutaya in late '99 I joked to the cashier that they should be carrying CD-Rs to sell . . . $50 for weekend rentals of Guns N Roses, The Police, Rush, Dreams Come True, Judy and Mary CDs . . . around 25 CDs IIRC . . . still remember the feeling of hefting that backpack full of CDs when leaving the store . . . that was $500+ worth of music!
Ripped them all at 320 since I figured storage space would grow to be able to store these massive files on disk . . . and right I was!
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:55 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
funny you mention that, once I got a CD burner for my Mac, on my first trip to Tsutaya in late '99 I joked to the cashier that they should be carrying CD-Rs to sell . . . $50 for weekend rentals of Guns N Roses, The Police, Rush, Dreams Come True, Judy and Mary CDs . . . around 25 CDs IIRC . . . still remember the feeling of hefting that backpack full of CDs when leaving the store . . . that was $500+ worth of music!
Ripped them all at 320 since I figured storage space would grow to be able to store these massive files on disk . . . and right I was!
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:55 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
My love of the ill-fated Minidisc format notwithstanding, CDs never went away as far as I was concerned. If something is worth purchasing, it’s worth purchasing in physical format and ripping to digital.
If it’s on Bandcamp I might buy vinyl rather than CD as my backup physical copy, but I’m as apt to buy CDs as vinyl. But I will have a physical copy if at all possible if it’s worth spending money on.
I think my first CD was in 1987, maybe 1988. Probably Disintegration. I’d have started with CDs sooner, but I was 12 and didn’t have the disposable income to make the investment. My dad, who started with vinyl, then 8-tracks, and then cassettes, held that CDs were a scam. Just a way to milk fans for another format for the same music. Don’t suppose he was entirely wrong…
When I was 20 or 21 I felt very grown up when I marched into a Streetside Records on a Tuesday (they had a decent deal every Tuesday, 20% off I think?) and bought the entire Beatles catalog on CD. I hadn’t been able to decide which Beatles album to buy first, so I decided I was going to buy all of them. It was a pretty sizable investment for me at the time, pretty much a whole paycheck, but it was worth it. I handed them down to my kid recently. (I’ve bought a few of the remasters since…) Not sure they value them as much as I did but I hope they play them from time to time.
Will CDs make a real comeback? Dunno. But I intend to stick with them another 40 years.
posted by jzb at 7:00 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
If it’s on Bandcamp I might buy vinyl rather than CD as my backup physical copy, but I’m as apt to buy CDs as vinyl. But I will have a physical copy if at all possible if it’s worth spending money on.
I think my first CD was in 1987, maybe 1988. Probably Disintegration. I’d have started with CDs sooner, but I was 12 and didn’t have the disposable income to make the investment. My dad, who started with vinyl, then 8-tracks, and then cassettes, held that CDs were a scam. Just a way to milk fans for another format for the same music. Don’t suppose he was entirely wrong…
When I was 20 or 21 I felt very grown up when I marched into a Streetside Records on a Tuesday (they had a decent deal every Tuesday, 20% off I think?) and bought the entire Beatles catalog on CD. I hadn’t been able to decide which Beatles album to buy first, so I decided I was going to buy all of them. It was a pretty sizable investment for me at the time, pretty much a whole paycheck, but it was worth it. I handed them down to my kid recently. (I’ve bought a few of the remasters since…) Not sure they value them as much as I did but I hope they play them from time to time.
Will CDs make a real comeback? Dunno. But I intend to stick with them another 40 years.
posted by jzb at 7:00 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
1980s: Dire Straits 'Brothers in Arms' sets off the onslaught; taping CDs onto cassettes right away;
1990s: plundering charity shops for really nice vintage vinyl records sold off for pennies, those were the days;
2000s: friends with Napster compile some of the most amazing CD mix-tapes imaginable! It's a mix-tape revolution!
2010s: we have lots of various CDs that we always listen to in the car;
2020s: I miss the CD player in my old car.
posted by ovvl at 7:02 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
1990s: plundering charity shops for really nice vintage vinyl records sold off for pennies, those were the days;
2000s: friends with Napster compile some of the most amazing CD mix-tapes imaginable! It's a mix-tape revolution!
2010s: we have lots of various CDs that we always listen to in the car;
2020s: I miss the CD player in my old car.
posted by ovvl at 7:02 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
Being a collector of video game music, I still buy a half dozen or so CDs a year. Got some in last week (from Japan, naturally), one of the albums being a personal grail which I was lucky to score at a decent price. The other album was a more common remastered Final Fantasy soundtrack, and the third item was a two-disk Blu-ray anime box set... containing an eight-disk CD soundtrack (again, remastered).
I currently have somewhere around 300 game soundtracks on CD, including many multi-disk sets. A few of them took me months-- or years-- to hunt down, and there are some rarities I would love to have if they didn't cost an arm and a leg.
The "cool" thing in the VGM scene these days seems to be vinyl, but that's not for me. CDs forever!
posted by May Kasahara at 7:14 PM on October 2, 2022
I currently have somewhere around 300 game soundtracks on CD, including many multi-disk sets. A few of them took me months-- or years-- to hunt down, and there are some rarities I would love to have if they didn't cost an arm and a leg.
The "cool" thing in the VGM scene these days seems to be vinyl, but that's not for me. CDs forever!
posted by May Kasahara at 7:14 PM on October 2, 2022
I have two main categories of things I still get on CD:
1) Random pre-2000 stuff that I know I can snag on SwapaCD if I wait a bit. I like this mostly because it is cheaper than buying the downloads and I get the art.
2) Renaissance Music, World Music, or anything else where I definitely want to read the booklet.
I don't play the CDs, of course, I rip 'em and play them as MP3s.
posted by anhedonic at 7:15 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
1) Random pre-2000 stuff that I know I can snag on SwapaCD if I wait a bit. I like this mostly because it is cheaper than buying the downloads and I get the art.
2) Renaissance Music, World Music, or anything else where I definitely want to read the booklet.
I don't play the CDs, of course, I rip 'em and play them as MP3s.
posted by anhedonic at 7:15 PM on October 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
many media players include a feature to rip CDs to MP3
Sorry, I meant to say many computer media players...
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:25 PM on October 2, 2022
Sorry, I meant to say many computer media players...
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:25 PM on October 2, 2022
I regularly buy CDs. I don't do any streaming services (I do listen to music on YouTube, but I use it as a jukebox and pick and choose), but I have a pretty large iTunes library and nearly all of it is ripped from CD. I do this to provide material support to the artist, and so I have a physical archive of a thing I own.
I do also buy digital albums here and there, but those to me feel like lesser purchases, like something I wouldn't really miss if I lost it somehow.
posted by hippybear at 7:26 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
I do also buy digital albums here and there, but those to me feel like lesser purchases, like something I wouldn't really miss if I lost it somehow.
posted by hippybear at 7:26 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
Anyway, after hearing about these new-fangled digital CD things, I was in Japan forty years ago and I heard one on the street, and said OH THAT'S A CD! because it was tinny and shitty...
Well, they got better, and the rest is the history you can read in the above posts.
Being 70, I am cranky about what choices I have in music-listening these days.
Playing piano is the same as ever, though. Audiences change, but a piano is a piano.
posted by kozad at 7:26 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
Well, they got better, and the rest is the history you can read in the above posts.
Being 70, I am cranky about what choices I have in music-listening these days.
Playing piano is the same as ever, though. Audiences change, but a piano is a piano.
posted by kozad at 7:26 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
These days I buy most of my music from independent musicians on Bandcamp. CDs are for stuff I can't get digitally, mostly titles I miss from the 80s or 90s, and they get ripped to MP3. I still have a couple of binders of CDs which I go through every couple of years and rip a few if I'm feeling nostalgic for them, but my tastes have shifted.
posted by Foosnark at 7:30 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Foosnark at 7:30 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's interesting to be reminded that CDs debuted in '82, 'cause I didn't own one until my junior year of college (I think it was "Dream of the Blue Turtles"), and the college radio station didn't have a CD player in the studio by the time I graduated in '88. Working in the music business, we got all advance tapes for new music, and vinyl coming from the indie labels, and plenty of CDs from the majors. I had a tiny DiscMan for listening to music when working on deadline.
About 12 years ago, I went through my collection and rid myself of all the jewel boxes. They were so dirty and grimy and broken. I saved the discs and the artwork in clear plastic sleeves. I got through at least part of the collection, ripping it to iTunes, but then I had a hard drive crash, and now I need to start over. I still don't ever plan to toss the physical discs themselves.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:42 PM on October 2, 2022
About 12 years ago, I went through my collection and rid myself of all the jewel boxes. They were so dirty and grimy and broken. I saved the discs and the artwork in clear plastic sleeves. I got through at least part of the collection, ripping it to iTunes, but then I had a hard drive crash, and now I need to start over. I still don't ever plan to toss the physical discs themselves.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:42 PM on October 2, 2022
Walter was extremely smart. Instead of $12.99, which was the list price for an LP, he made it $15.99 for a compact disc. He said, “I’m going to tell the artists this is new technology. We’re taking a risk. We don’t know how this is going to turn out.” What Walter did not tell people was he made sure artists all signed amendments to their contracts to allow the issuance on compact disc — but he also made sure the royalty payments to the artists remained the same that they were on an LP. It meant the royalty rate was lower. The artists didn’t complain: “I’m getting the same money.” It was only years later, when the sales for the CDs started to become significant, and the artists began to realize their royalty rate had dropped, that they complained. And it was fixed.
I am gonna bet this fix took as long as the record companies could drag it out for. But I am also currently reading Cory Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism, whose first half is a lengthy litany of the ways record companies, publishers, and Internet content farms have found to screw creators out of money, and the immense reluctance with which they have given up any of these ways.
posted by egypturnash at 7:44 PM on October 2, 2022 [6 favorites]
I am gonna bet this fix took as long as the record companies could drag it out for. But I am also currently reading Cory Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism, whose first half is a lengthy litany of the ways record companies, publishers, and Internet content farms have found to screw creators out of money, and the immense reluctance with which they have given up any of these ways.
posted by egypturnash at 7:44 PM on October 2, 2022 [6 favorites]
CDs I remember:
* The first albumn I bought: Sponge: Rotting Pinata
* The second album I bought: Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
* An album a relative gave me: Toad the Wet Sprocket: Dulcinea
* Baldur's Gate might've been the first multi-CD game I bought? I remember the terrible cardboard sleeves and how they scratched up the discs. (and I've kept the manuals and map and definitely did some early Infinity Engine modding) I know I had some single-disc CD games prior to that but I can't remember the timeline.
* I think the last album I bought on CD was probably Ys. (ironically, I had a TurboGrafix-16 but never the CD module, so never had that Ys on CD.
I can't really imagine ever buying a CD again. My car doesn't have a CD drive, none of my computers have one, I have a USB plug-in one (slash DVD drive) but I've only got that for legacy access.
I have good memories of downloading RealMedia copies of anime fansubs off of IRC and burning those to CD for posterity but gods be damned if I have any idea where all that Dragonball Z, Bubblegum Crisis 2040, Berserk, Lain, Infinite Ryvius, and every other thing I was watching in the late 90s/early 00s went.
posted by curious nu at 8:07 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
* The first albumn I bought: Sponge: Rotting Pinata
* The second album I bought: Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
* An album a relative gave me: Toad the Wet Sprocket: Dulcinea
* Baldur's Gate might've been the first multi-CD game I bought? I remember the terrible cardboard sleeves and how they scratched up the discs. (and I've kept the manuals and map and definitely did some early Infinity Engine modding) I know I had some single-disc CD games prior to that but I can't remember the timeline.
* I think the last album I bought on CD was probably Ys. (ironically, I had a TurboGrafix-16 but never the CD module, so never had that Ys on CD.
I can't really imagine ever buying a CD again. My car doesn't have a CD drive, none of my computers have one, I have a USB plug-in one (slash DVD drive) but I've only got that for legacy access.
I have good memories of downloading RealMedia copies of anime fansubs off of IRC and burning those to CD for posterity but gods be damned if I have any idea where all that Dragonball Z, Bubblegum Crisis 2040, Berserk, Lain, Infinite Ryvius, and every other thing I was watching in the late 90s/early 00s went.
posted by curious nu at 8:07 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
I guess I was a very late adopter, I didn't have a CD player until 1989. I listened to vinyl and TDK SA-90s all through the 80s.
posted by octothorpe at 8:07 PM on October 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 8:07 PM on October 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
Was marking the discs DDD just a gimmick?
One of the first CDs I ever bought was Special Beat Service and it sounded amazing.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:24 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
One of the first CDs I ever bought was Special Beat Service and it sounded amazing.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:24 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
Here’s my CD story. I worked at Philips Design for awhile and one day there was a retirement party. Turns out it was for the guy who designed the jewel case. So I had some cake. End of story.
The jewel case was quite a nice design. However, I can't say the same for the cellophane wrap they came in. It was monumentally difficult to open without tools, especially when you were hepped up to listen to all that sweet new music that it imprisoned. I would have boycotted the retirement party for the cello wrap design guy.
posted by fairmettle at 9:05 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
The jewel case was quite a nice design. However, I can't say the same for the cellophane wrap they came in. It was monumentally difficult to open without tools, especially when you were hepped up to listen to all that sweet new music that it imprisoned. I would have boycotted the retirement party for the cello wrap design guy.
posted by fairmettle at 9:05 PM on October 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
< 2020s: I miss the CD player in my old car.>
Not me. I bought a touch screen for my new car because I could take all my favorite hi-def flacs and load them on a 2 tb drive that sits in the glovebox. I buy files from Bandcamp and Qobuz and both places have hi def flac for a reasonable price. With Bandcamp the artist does better financially. And then there’s the CarPlay. Apple has hi def I can play over my phone and it sounds pretty damned fine. It plays album sides or entire albums and just keeps going. And then there’s the podcasts…
Only reason I ever need a CD is if there’s something I can’t get anywhere else but Amazon and then it gets ripped straight to the drive.
posted by cybrcamper at 9:21 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
Not me. I bought a touch screen for my new car because I could take all my favorite hi-def flacs and load them on a 2 tb drive that sits in the glovebox. I buy files from Bandcamp and Qobuz and both places have hi def flac for a reasonable price. With Bandcamp the artist does better financially. And then there’s the CarPlay. Apple has hi def I can play over my phone and it sounds pretty damned fine. It plays album sides or entire albums and just keeps going. And then there’s the podcasts…
Only reason I ever need a CD is if there’s something I can’t get anywhere else but Amazon and then it gets ripped straight to the drive.
posted by cybrcamper at 9:21 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
heh I would have too.
I worked as a chip designer with a guy who worked on the first CD player chip - he recalled a time when there were only 3 CDs - a classical one, a pop one, and a CD full of tests.
posted by mbo at 9:22 PM on October 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
I worked as a chip designer with a guy who worked on the first CD player chip - he recalled a time when there were only 3 CDs - a classical one, a pop one, and a CD full of tests.
posted by mbo at 9:22 PM on October 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
Thinking back on it, CDDB was such a hack. It hashed the track lengths to try to identify the album and used user contributed titles. Why didn't the CD include is own track listings in digital format?
As Aleyn mentions, the data was sometimes there as CD Text, but I think there were licensing issues that kept it from reading directly into most consumer playback software on PCs and Macs... Car stereos were not under the same obligations apparently, so most with a decent display would read CD Text, although often incomplete or truncated. Home stereos seemed to be a mixed bad when it came to CD Text.
Another cool thing I learned about in my days working at a CD duplication shop was how to create CDs with a song hidden in the gap before Track 1.
posted by Nosmot at 9:57 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
As Aleyn mentions, the data was sometimes there as CD Text, but I think there were licensing issues that kept it from reading directly into most consumer playback software on PCs and Macs... Car stereos were not under the same obligations apparently, so most with a decent display would read CD Text, although often incomplete or truncated. Home stereos seemed to be a mixed bad when it came to CD Text.
Another cool thing I learned about in my days working at a CD duplication shop was how to create CDs with a song hidden in the gap before Track 1.
posted by Nosmot at 9:57 PM on October 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
What about the CD rot they warned us about? Can you still play your 40 year old CDs?
posted by Termite at 10:48 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Termite at 10:48 PM on October 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
Dang. First time I even touched a CD player was in 1987 with a friend playing me a copy of the Best of King Crimson. I could hear the lack of tape hiss, but I didn't understand the rest of the appeal and what made it so worth it to shell out big bucks for it. So I doubled down and stuck with cassettes (which I could copy others' CD's onto and play in my car). Then I phased into the CD world slowly by buying a used 5-disc changer and going to my friend's record store to find "things I'd like to hear clearly out of big speakers". So my first five were early-Zappa, early-Stereolab, A Residents compilation (I'd never heard them), Coltrane, and Pink Floyd's Meddle.
By then I had boxes and boxes of cassettes and I was getting sick of moving them from apartment to apartment. When I finally got a computer capable of burning CD's, we were already into the mid 2000's. That's when I finally got rid of my cassettes.
One thing though: a new, blank CD-ROM would never smell as good as a freshly-opened blank Maxell 90-min tape. And it was a long time before I got into digital music making, so I was still hooked on 4-track and kept blank cassettes. Mmmmm Maxell. The 4-tracks, I am now sloooowly digitizing.
When I found out the libraries had CDs, I went out and taped onto cassette as many as I could, and stopped buying CDs altogether because damn, they were expensive, and I was broke and love music. When I finally had enough money to get a computer with a CD burner, mp3's and Napster had already elbowed their way past. But that brief window from 1993-1998, I did discover some great bands because of CD reissues. They bankrupted and educated me.
At one point, I had about 1800 cassettes (mostly double-sided maxells), 300 CDs, and TWO vinyl albums (and one was of the band I was in). I've had a turntable for a while but only now am I in a place where I can set it up well, and I have about maybe five-hundred random albums that I got, all told for the whole random collection, for maybe $10-$20 from this fine establishment. I am looking forward to discovering the hidden gems.
When I found my biological father, it turned out he had a massive collection of records on all sorts of media, and so much equipment that it was stressing the foundations of his house. He donated TONS of boxes of his old 78's to the Internet Archive (which he insists were mislabelled when the IA finally received them—"those aren't my 78's! I took CARE of my 78's!"). He also insists that if you listen to CDs that aren't meant for 5.1 surround-sound, you can sometimes hear unintentionally-included channels on some tracks. I'll have to check that out.
tl;dr: Yeah, CDs were a little too rich for my taste at the time they were peaking, but used record stores and SO MANY REISSUES helped allay the cost, and I did discover so much. But it kept my bank acccount too low for comfort. Thank you for allowing me to reminisce. Now I'm going to find a fresh Maxell tape and crack the cellophane open with my fingernail and then take a WHIFF. Ahhhhhhhh chemicals.
Also one last takeaway: CD's were really my gateway to becoming a library superuser.
posted by not_on_display at 11:02 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
By then I had boxes and boxes of cassettes and I was getting sick of moving them from apartment to apartment. When I finally got a computer capable of burning CD's, we were already into the mid 2000's. That's when I finally got rid of my cassettes.
One thing though: a new, blank CD-ROM would never smell as good as a freshly-opened blank Maxell 90-min tape. And it was a long time before I got into digital music making, so I was still hooked on 4-track and kept blank cassettes. Mmmmm Maxell. The 4-tracks, I am now sloooowly digitizing.
When I found out the libraries had CDs, I went out and taped onto cassette as many as I could, and stopped buying CDs altogether because damn, they were expensive, and I was broke and love music. When I finally had enough money to get a computer with a CD burner, mp3's and Napster had already elbowed their way past. But that brief window from 1993-1998, I did discover some great bands because of CD reissues. They bankrupted and educated me.
At one point, I had about 1800 cassettes (mostly double-sided maxells), 300 CDs, and TWO vinyl albums (and one was of the band I was in). I've had a turntable for a while but only now am I in a place where I can set it up well, and I have about maybe five-hundred random albums that I got, all told for the whole random collection, for maybe $10-$20 from this fine establishment. I am looking forward to discovering the hidden gems.
When I found my biological father, it turned out he had a massive collection of records on all sorts of media, and so much equipment that it was stressing the foundations of his house. He donated TONS of boxes of his old 78's to the Internet Archive (which he insists were mislabelled when the IA finally received them—"those aren't my 78's! I took CARE of my 78's!"). He also insists that if you listen to CDs that aren't meant for 5.1 surround-sound, you can sometimes hear unintentionally-included channels on some tracks. I'll have to check that out.
tl;dr: Yeah, CDs were a little too rich for my taste at the time they were peaking, but used record stores and SO MANY REISSUES helped allay the cost, and I did discover so much. But it kept my bank acccount too low for comfort. Thank you for allowing me to reminisce. Now I'm going to find a fresh Maxell tape and crack the cellophane open with my fingernail and then take a WHIFF. Ahhhhhhhh chemicals.
Also one last takeaway: CD's were really my gateway to becoming a library superuser.
posted by not_on_display at 11:02 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Can't remember when I bought it (late 80's most likely), but my first CD was Felt's Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty/The Splendour Of Fear, two fab releases on one shiny disc. Bought it at the late lamented Leopold's Records in Berkeley. (For a while they also had literally boxes of new "Between the Buttons" CDs for $2 each. Kept thinking I'd buy one "next time" and then one day they disappeared. Alas, I haven't always taken the lesson to heart since then).
I also remember the 3" CDs that would occasionally be free with magazines like Offbeat (the late 80's/early 90's mag, not the New Orleans music one) and Spiral Scratch. I remember major labels (and SST) utilizing said format in an attempt to replace the single before realizing how easily those little buggers could get lost and switched to standard size CDs for "maxi-singles" instead. (Though the format is (was?) still kept semi-alive today by various experimental/noise folks).
posted by gtrwolf at 11:22 PM on October 2, 2022
I also remember the 3" CDs that would occasionally be free with magazines like Offbeat (the late 80's/early 90's mag, not the New Orleans music one) and Spiral Scratch. I remember major labels (and SST) utilizing said format in an attempt to replace the single before realizing how easily those little buggers could get lost and switched to standard size CDs for "maxi-singles" instead. (Though the format is (was?) still kept semi-alive today by various experimental/noise folks).
posted by gtrwolf at 11:22 PM on October 2, 2022
There's the CD Text standard, but it came pretty late in the game, and not many players supported it, and so most music publishers didn't bother adding the metadata.
There were plenty of car audio head units that did support CD-Text, but vanishingly few pressed releases with text. I had a vaguely decent 1998ish Kenwood that had CD-Text support. Just wish it had been a VFD instead of a matrix LCD. On cold mornings the display was hilariously useless because the response time was around one second. It did handle CD-Rs perfectly, though, which was not at all a given for CD players of that age. It even dealt with most CD-RWs ok, but there were some brands of media it couldn't make sense of thanks to the lower contrast (read: cheaper) dye. I had a CD case full of disks I burned from bin/cue images I got off Usenet, which usually did have track names in the cue file so my CDs had CD-Text even when the original releases didn't.
Of course, I later drove a 2008 Toyota whose factory CD player didn't support CD text. That annoyed me greatly.
My first CDs were Pink Floyd and Weird Al. Kinda wish I still had that copy of Wish You Were Here pressed with gold instead of aluminum that my sister picked up for me at some random thrift store.
posted by wierdo at 11:29 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
There were plenty of car audio head units that did support CD-Text, but vanishingly few pressed releases with text. I had a vaguely decent 1998ish Kenwood that had CD-Text support. Just wish it had been a VFD instead of a matrix LCD. On cold mornings the display was hilariously useless because the response time was around one second. It did handle CD-Rs perfectly, though, which was not at all a given for CD players of that age. It even dealt with most CD-RWs ok, but there were some brands of media it couldn't make sense of thanks to the lower contrast (read: cheaper) dye. I had a CD case full of disks I burned from bin/cue images I got off Usenet, which usually did have track names in the cue file so my CDs had CD-Text even when the original releases didn't.
Of course, I later drove a 2008 Toyota whose factory CD player didn't support CD text. That annoyed me greatly.
My first CDs were Pink Floyd and Weird Al. Kinda wish I still had that copy of Wish You Were Here pressed with gold instead of aluminum that my sister picked up for me at some random thrift store.
posted by wierdo at 11:29 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
We had a bulk CD burner at work for data CDs, but it was so buggy that it was easier to just burn them one at a time on my computer while I was doing other things. (my program sent a lot of data CDs to teachers all over the state). The printer that put text and graphics onto the tops of the discs was just as buggy, but it’s all I had to work with. We wasted so many discs that were only half-printed when the machine stopped working.
I also remember that period when everybody was getting more AOL CDs then they knew what to do with in the mail. I was teaching Sunday school at the time, and we did a craft project to make them into Christmas tree ornaments.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:40 PM on October 2, 2022
I also remember that period when everybody was getting more AOL CDs then they knew what to do with in the mail. I was teaching Sunday school at the time, and we did a craft project to make them into Christmas tree ornaments.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:40 PM on October 2, 2022
Shout-out to Exact Audio Copy. I like FLAC rips using EAC, but does anyone know how they compare to FLAC files sold straight by the artists/record companies?
What's the source of FLAC albums sold in sites like Bandcamp? Are they from masters or plain retail CDs?
posted by dogstoevski at 11:49 PM on October 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
What's the source of FLAC albums sold in sites like Bandcamp? Are they from masters or plain retail CDs?
posted by dogstoevski at 11:49 PM on October 2, 2022 [5 favorites]
Also, I never thought CDs were a scam. Way better than records that you could never quite clean all the dust off of and had a tendency to warp if you treated them the least bit harshly and better even than chrome tape with Dolby noise reduction, on which you could still hear the damnable hiss and noticeably worse frequency response. Plus you could listen to a whole album without getting up. Sure, you could get record players that could play both sides, but they were stupid expensive and went away by the mid 80s. I will say that record players with a changer mechanism were fun in a way that CD changers never were. Of course, you still had the problem of not getting to hear everything in order, but at least you could listen to more music in one go.
The one thing vinyl had going for it that CDs never had was quadrophonic audio. Of course, quadrophonic releases were never plentiful and were rare to see secondhand, so that wasn't exactly a huge advantage. Quadrophonic amps also went away after a few short years. Then SACD and DVD Audio releases came along in the 2000s (many of which were taken from the masters of those 1970s quadrophonic records) and put an end to the last use for vinyl.
posted by wierdo at 11:57 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
The one thing vinyl had going for it that CDs never had was quadrophonic audio. Of course, quadrophonic releases were never plentiful and were rare to see secondhand, so that wasn't exactly a huge advantage. Quadrophonic amps also went away after a few short years. Then SACD and DVD Audio releases came along in the 2000s (many of which were taken from the masters of those 1970s quadrophonic records) and put an end to the last use for vinyl.
posted by wierdo at 11:57 PM on October 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Maybe it’s just me, but music, movies, books, etc. seems to be evening out to a level of sameness, blandness… It’s been ages since I’ve encountered anything that made me sit up and say What the fuck is that??!! and then frantically find out who / what it is and then go out and buy it.
I don't think it's you; I think it's the ubiquity of personalized algorithmic curation.
Algorithmic curation is based on the premise that there exists some collection of potentially ML-computable metrics about song similarity that would allow a machine to predict that if you like tracks A, B and C then you will like track D as well, and to have those predictions succeed often enough to be commercially useful. Which in fact they do, otherwise Spotify would not be a thing.
But there's an underlying assumption there that the "what the fuck!?" factor that made you sit up and take notice of A, B and C in the first place is in fact a matter of similarity, and I don't think it necessarily is. It sometimes is, but I think we ignore the times when it's not at our peril.
The more we allow algorithmic curation to be the thing that picks the next track we listen to, the higher our chance of feeling consistently vaguely satisfied by our musical landscapes and the fewer opportunities we get for exposure to those magical "what the fuck!?" moments that are actually what drives us to collect music in the first place. Over time, algorithmic curation scleroses our listening habits in ways wholly detrimental to our health.
And that's why I don't have a Spotify account, or an Apple Music account, or anything like them. I would much rather maintain my own collection of albums I like, and rely on competent and occasionally inspired human curators sharing stuff that they like. That's where I get my WTF!? in 2022.
I so very miss giving people a physical mix “tape” of songs. The future is stupid.
A few months ago I blew my myotherapist's mind by mentioning the possibility that she could, if she wanted, amass a substantial music collection that she could carry around with her and listen to any time she felt like without needing an active Internet connection to make that happen.
Since then I've been supplying her with "mix tapes" on micro SD cards, filled with MP3s transcoded from my FLAC collection of CD rips. She says it's changed her life for the better.
CDDB was such a hack
MusicBrainz is the current version of that hack. As well as working off track lengths it also supports audio fingerprinting, which can reliably match tracks based on how they sound even in the face of quite substantial encoding and/or transcription degradation.
Interacting with the MusicBrainz website to add metadata it doesn't already have is a complete pain in the arse because the UI is truly horrid and the data model has a steep learning curve, but for doing robust curation of stuff that it does already know about (which in my experience has been about 90% of my CD collection) the MusicBrainz Picard tagging software is invaluable.
What about the CD rot they warned us about? Can you still play your 40 year old CDs?
Most of them, yes. But CD rot is real.
Regarding the Brennan B2: If you already have a computer, you can get a 2T external drive and an external CD player for less than $100, and many media players include a feature to rip CDs to MP3, and of course you can easily connect your computer to your stereo via audio cable. Even if you don't have a stereo, one of those Class-D mini amplifiers and a set of bookshelf speakers will still cost you far less than the B2.
And if you don't already have a computer, even a cheap single-board Linux toy is more than enough compute power, uses only a tiny sniff of electricity, and gives you complete control over the hard drives you use with it. That and a USB-connected CD-ROM reader is all the hardware you'd need to get started. And as long as you're ripping to a lossless format using a tool like EAC or Whipper that guarantees either a 100% good rip or no rip at all, you don't need "golden ears grade" digital hardware to guarantee that you will get playback quality from your rips that's not even theoretically distinguishable from what would have come off the same CD under perfect conditions in the world's most expensive CD player.
Achieving high-quality playback from a locally maintained digital media collection is actually the easy part. The hard part is reliability and resilience. Disc rot is absolutely a thing, but it's incredibly unlikely that an entire CD collection would all rot simultaneously. A hard drive full of ripped albums, though, might well suffer sudden and complete failure, and unless it's been properly and conscientiously backed up, that's potentially thousands of hours of ripping and curation work down the gurgler. Worse still if you actually turfed out the CDs you ripped.
That said, it takes a lot less effort per track to maintain proper backups of a hard disk drive containing tens to hundreds of thousands of them than it does to store, move and care for a wall full of jewel cases, let alone battle the relentless forces of entropy as embodied by other household members to maintain them in anything like a readily accessible alphabetical order.
I like FLAC rips using EAC, but does anyone know how they compare to FLAC files sold straight by the artists/record companies?
What's the source of FLAC albums sold in sites like Bandcamp? Are they from masters or plain retail CDs?
Can't give a general answer to that, but I've bought a few FLAC albums from Bandcamp to get clean rips of CDs with some rotted tracks, and the few spot-check WAVs I've generated from my own FLAC rips of the non-rotted tracks on those CDs have all been bit-for-bit identical with the corresponding FLACs from Bandcamp.
Seems likely to me that audible differences between a FLAC rip made with EAC and the same title bought from Bandcamp would be far more likely due to somebody having decided to "improve" a track by remastering it than from any inadequacy in Bandcamp's FLAC generation pipeline.
I do run all my Bandcamp FLACs through MusicBrainz Picard before archiving them, to ensure that they get tagged the same way as the CD rips I make with Whipper.
posted by flabdablet at 12:09 AM on October 3, 2022 [18 favorites]
I don't think it's you; I think it's the ubiquity of personalized algorithmic curation.
Algorithmic curation is based on the premise that there exists some collection of potentially ML-computable metrics about song similarity that would allow a machine to predict that if you like tracks A, B and C then you will like track D as well, and to have those predictions succeed often enough to be commercially useful. Which in fact they do, otherwise Spotify would not be a thing.
But there's an underlying assumption there that the "what the fuck!?" factor that made you sit up and take notice of A, B and C in the first place is in fact a matter of similarity, and I don't think it necessarily is. It sometimes is, but I think we ignore the times when it's not at our peril.
The more we allow algorithmic curation to be the thing that picks the next track we listen to, the higher our chance of feeling consistently vaguely satisfied by our musical landscapes and the fewer opportunities we get for exposure to those magical "what the fuck!?" moments that are actually what drives us to collect music in the first place. Over time, algorithmic curation scleroses our listening habits in ways wholly detrimental to our health.
And that's why I don't have a Spotify account, or an Apple Music account, or anything like them. I would much rather maintain my own collection of albums I like, and rely on competent and occasionally inspired human curators sharing stuff that they like. That's where I get my WTF!? in 2022.
I so very miss giving people a physical mix “tape” of songs. The future is stupid.
A few months ago I blew my myotherapist's mind by mentioning the possibility that she could, if she wanted, amass a substantial music collection that she could carry around with her and listen to any time she felt like without needing an active Internet connection to make that happen.
Since then I've been supplying her with "mix tapes" on micro SD cards, filled with MP3s transcoded from my FLAC collection of CD rips. She says it's changed her life for the better.
CDDB was such a hack
MusicBrainz is the current version of that hack. As well as working off track lengths it also supports audio fingerprinting, which can reliably match tracks based on how they sound even in the face of quite substantial encoding and/or transcription degradation.
Interacting with the MusicBrainz website to add metadata it doesn't already have is a complete pain in the arse because the UI is truly horrid and the data model has a steep learning curve, but for doing robust curation of stuff that it does already know about (which in my experience has been about 90% of my CD collection) the MusicBrainz Picard tagging software is invaluable.
What about the CD rot they warned us about? Can you still play your 40 year old CDs?
Most of them, yes. But CD rot is real.
Regarding the Brennan B2: If you already have a computer, you can get a 2T external drive and an external CD player for less than $100, and many media players include a feature to rip CDs to MP3, and of course you can easily connect your computer to your stereo via audio cable. Even if you don't have a stereo, one of those Class-D mini amplifiers and a set of bookshelf speakers will still cost you far less than the B2.
And if you don't already have a computer, even a cheap single-board Linux toy is more than enough compute power, uses only a tiny sniff of electricity, and gives you complete control over the hard drives you use with it. That and a USB-connected CD-ROM reader is all the hardware you'd need to get started. And as long as you're ripping to a lossless format using a tool like EAC or Whipper that guarantees either a 100% good rip or no rip at all, you don't need "golden ears grade" digital hardware to guarantee that you will get playback quality from your rips that's not even theoretically distinguishable from what would have come off the same CD under perfect conditions in the world's most expensive CD player.
Achieving high-quality playback from a locally maintained digital media collection is actually the easy part. The hard part is reliability and resilience. Disc rot is absolutely a thing, but it's incredibly unlikely that an entire CD collection would all rot simultaneously. A hard drive full of ripped albums, though, might well suffer sudden and complete failure, and unless it's been properly and conscientiously backed up, that's potentially thousands of hours of ripping and curation work down the gurgler. Worse still if you actually turfed out the CDs you ripped.
That said, it takes a lot less effort per track to maintain proper backups of a hard disk drive containing tens to hundreds of thousands of them than it does to store, move and care for a wall full of jewel cases, let alone battle the relentless forces of entropy as embodied by other household members to maintain them in anything like a readily accessible alphabetical order.
I like FLAC rips using EAC, but does anyone know how they compare to FLAC files sold straight by the artists/record companies?
What's the source of FLAC albums sold in sites like Bandcamp? Are they from masters or plain retail CDs?
Can't give a general answer to that, but I've bought a few FLAC albums from Bandcamp to get clean rips of CDs with some rotted tracks, and the few spot-check WAVs I've generated from my own FLAC rips of the non-rotted tracks on those CDs have all been bit-for-bit identical with the corresponding FLACs from Bandcamp.
Seems likely to me that audible differences between a FLAC rip made with EAC and the same title bought from Bandcamp would be far more likely due to somebody having decided to "improve" a track by remastering it than from any inadequacy in Bandcamp's FLAC generation pipeline.
I do run all my Bandcamp FLACs through MusicBrainz Picard before archiving them, to ensure that they get tagged the same way as the CD rips I make with Whipper.
posted by flabdablet at 12:09 AM on October 3, 2022 [18 favorites]
Technology Connections has an excellent video series about the CD: Digital Sound and the Compact Disc.
posted by Pendragon at 12:47 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Pendragon at 12:47 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
The first CD I ever bought was Chips from the Chocolate Fireball by The Dukes of Stratosphear (you've probably never heard of them).
My favorite "way the future was" tidbit about compact discs is that they were how people played music in Superdimension Fortress Macross, which was released in 1982 (when CDs absolutely felt like The Future), but set in 2009/2010 (when CDs were already on their way out in the real world).
posted by The Tensor at 1:18 AM on October 3, 2022 [7 favorites]
My favorite "way the future was" tidbit about compact discs is that they were how people played music in Superdimension Fortress Macross, which was released in 1982 (when CDs absolutely felt like The Future), but set in 2009/2010 (when CDs were already on their way out in the real world).
posted by The Tensor at 1:18 AM on October 3, 2022 [7 favorites]
For some labels, new media technology = new ripoff technology. From 2006:
How is Sony doing the math? Right off the bat, the company is cutting the artist's royalty by 25 percent, citing a provision in every recording contract that allows the label to pay less while coping with the costs of employing "new technology." When Cheap Trick originally signed to the label in 1976, vinyl LPs were the primary music media. As CDs came into vogue, the company "had to retool the plant and take out all of the vinyl-making machines and put in CD burners instead," Frey says. CDs were widely introduced to the market in 1983, and they became the primary medium by 1990; nevertheless, Sony still defines compact discs as "new technology" and pays Cheap Trick the lower royalty, Frey says.posted by farlukar at 1:29 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
What's the source of FLAC albums sold in sites like Bandcamp? Are they from masters or plain retail CDs?
As someone who releases music on Bandcamp: it'll vary. Bandcamp generally wants you to provide your music in uncompressed format (WAV) and then it encodes the FLAC and various grades of MP3 from that.
Now what the source of that supplied wav was will vary. I've bought things off Bandcamp where the source for all of it is a decoded MP3 (but then I've bought CDs where that's the case). If there's a particular mix or master for streaming, that'll often be the source, but I'm seeing that increasingly rarely. It feels like it would be roundabout and more work to use a retail CD as a source these days, if you've there kind of backend access to be selling from Bandcamp, you can probably get at the master files these days.
posted by Dysk at 2:08 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
As someone who releases music on Bandcamp: it'll vary. Bandcamp generally wants you to provide your music in uncompressed format (WAV) and then it encodes the FLAC and various grades of MP3 from that.
Now what the source of that supplied wav was will vary. I've bought things off Bandcamp where the source for all of it is a decoded MP3 (but then I've bought CDs where that's the case). If there's a particular mix or master for streaming, that'll often be the source, but I'm seeing that increasingly rarely. It feels like it would be roundabout and more work to use a retail CD as a source these days, if you've there kind of backend access to be selling from Bandcamp, you can probably get at the master files these days.
posted by Dysk at 2:08 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
From what I understand, the major labels are happy with CDs dying out, because that closes one hole that pirates can use for copying their content, and are looking forward to a future where the only options are DRM-secured streaming and collectible vinyl (which is not a piracy risk because its value is not perfection but Authenticity™, and also because, without the aura of Authenticity™ you get when playing it on your retro Crosley or Technics SL-1200, it sounds like mud and grit; vinyl is in itself a magical form of DRM)*. Some major-label releases (like the Lil Nas X album) never got CD releases, for example.
* There are still downloads on Apple Music and Amazon, but only in low-bitrate formats from the 56k-modem age; presumably every time the issue of licensing FLAC downloads comes up it gets shot down by some risk-averse lawyer. Downloads appear to be dwindling and I wouldn't be surprised if the option was quietly removed one of these years.
posted by acb at 2:09 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
* There are still downloads on Apple Music and Amazon, but only in low-bitrate formats from the 56k-modem age; presumably every time the issue of licensing FLAC downloads comes up it gets shot down by some risk-averse lawyer. Downloads appear to be dwindling and I wouldn't be surprised if the option was quietly removed one of these years.
posted by acb at 2:09 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
Perhaps some of my rotted CDs would benefit from having their edges bevelled or being demagnetized :-)
posted by flabdablet at 3:17 AM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 3:17 AM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
There are still downloads on Apple Music and Amazon, but only in low-bitrate formats from the 56k-modem age; presumably every time the issue of licensing FLAC downloads comes up it gets shot down by some risk-averse lawyer.
I'm often amused by the sheer amount of effort that commercial music distribution channels have put into to making the process of acquiring a personal music collection monotonically more annoying while simultaneously returning an ever-decreasing share of revenue to music creators.
If we lived in a less advertising-addled world, the old friend and Bandcamp between them would have out-competed Apple Music years ago.
posted by flabdablet at 3:23 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm often amused by the sheer amount of effort that commercial music distribution channels have put into to making the process of acquiring a personal music collection monotonically more annoying while simultaneously returning an ever-decreasing share of revenue to music creators.
If we lived in a less advertising-addled world, the old friend and Bandcamp between them would have out-competed Apple Music years ago.
posted by flabdablet at 3:23 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
Was marking the discs DDD just a gimmick?
I mean, kind-of, but maybe not?
DDD just informed the buyer that the music on the disc was the result of a purely digital production flow. There were also combinations of A (analog) and D (digital) codes. They didn’t necessarily inform the buyer about the sound quality of the music on the CD, so in that sense I guess they definitely were a gimmick.
That said, early in the CD era, we definitely endured a period where record companies were simply plopping music onto CDs without any re-mastering for the format, resulting in some horrible-sounding discs. I have a few early music CDs that were produced that way, and are simply shrill and lacking in any bottom end, no matter how good the system playing them was. They were usually discs with the AAD code, though there were definitely DDD discs that sounded like shit, too, so *shrugs*
It took a couple of years for record companies to get their shit together and understand they had to re-master the music to fit the new CD format, just as they had to master the music to fit the vinyl format.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:43 AM on October 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
I mean, kind-of, but maybe not?
DDD just informed the buyer that the music on the disc was the result of a purely digital production flow. There were also combinations of A (analog) and D (digital) codes. They didn’t necessarily inform the buyer about the sound quality of the music on the CD, so in that sense I guess they definitely were a gimmick.
That said, early in the CD era, we definitely endured a period where record companies were simply plopping music onto CDs without any re-mastering for the format, resulting in some horrible-sounding discs. I have a few early music CDs that were produced that way, and are simply shrill and lacking in any bottom end, no matter how good the system playing them was. They were usually discs with the AAD code, though there were definitely DDD discs that sounded like shit, too, so *shrugs*
It took a couple of years for record companies to get their shit together and understand they had to re-master the music to fit the new CD format, just as they had to master the music to fit the vinyl format.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:43 AM on October 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
I have a few early music CDs that were produced that way, and are simply shrill and lacking in any bottom end, no matter how good the system playing them was.
Those were most likely made using pre-emphasis and tagged with associated playback flags that whatever you're playing them on is ignoring - pretty much a certainty if they've been ripped to WAV files at some point in the chain between the CD factory and your ears.
If they're truly horrid to the point of sounding completely screechy and utterly lacking in bass, then they might have been made from vinyl-cutting masters that had already had the much more extreme RIAA pre-emphasis applied. I would not be surprised to learn that at least some early CD mastering engineers were unclear on the differences between RIAA and CD pre-emphasis and just assumed them to be the same thing.
RIAA de-emphasis uses fixed amounts of bass boost and treble cut and is normally applied automatically and unavoidably inside phono cartridge pre-amplifiers. But it's quite extreme, needing up to +20dB of low-end boost and -20dB of high-end cut, and that puts it beyond the range of what's ordinarily achievable with commonly available graphic equalizers if it needs to be applied explicitly.
Standard CD de-emphasis, though, involves only 10dB of difference between low-end and high-end and should be pretty easy to fake with a graphic EQ on recordings that require it.
posted by flabdablet at 7:24 AM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
Those were most likely made using pre-emphasis and tagged with associated playback flags that whatever you're playing them on is ignoring - pretty much a certainty if they've been ripped to WAV files at some point in the chain between the CD factory and your ears.
If they're truly horrid to the point of sounding completely screechy and utterly lacking in bass, then they might have been made from vinyl-cutting masters that had already had the much more extreme RIAA pre-emphasis applied. I would not be surprised to learn that at least some early CD mastering engineers were unclear on the differences between RIAA and CD pre-emphasis and just assumed them to be the same thing.
RIAA de-emphasis uses fixed amounts of bass boost and treble cut and is normally applied automatically and unavoidably inside phono cartridge pre-amplifiers. But it's quite extreme, needing up to +20dB of low-end boost and -20dB of high-end cut, and that puts it beyond the range of what's ordinarily achievable with commonly available graphic equalizers if it needs to be applied explicitly.
Standard CD de-emphasis, though, involves only 10dB of difference between low-end and high-end and should be pretty easy to fake with a graphic EQ on recordings that require it.
posted by flabdablet at 7:24 AM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
CDs: We could have had surround sound a generation earlier.
posted by meehawl at 7:40 AM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by meehawl at 7:40 AM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
I just bought a new CD rig this year. Figured it was a good time for it, while good ones are still being built. Sometimes its nice to get away from streaming, but not be fussy about cleaning (or flipping) LPs.
I remember the Great Vinyl Purge of the early 1990s where you could get classic albums for $1.
This was also a thing for laserdiscs when DVD was rolling out. Well, I guess still, but availability is much lower now.
posted by hwyengr at 8:07 AM on October 3, 2022
I remember the Great Vinyl Purge of the early 1990s where you could get classic albums for $1.
This was also a thing for laserdiscs when DVD was rolling out. Well, I guess still, but availability is much lower now.
posted by hwyengr at 8:07 AM on October 3, 2022
There are still downloads on Apple Music and Amazon, but only in low-bitrate formats from the 56k-modem age; presumably every time the issue of licensing FLAC downloads comes up it gets shot down by some risk-averse lawyer.
Eh? You can download pretty much anything you own on Apple Music DRM-free in Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format. ALAC isn’t FLAC but it’s open source and royalty-free so you can just transcode to FLAC if you want to get your purchase fully out of the Apple ecosystem.
You can also stream anything available on Apple Music in ALAC format but I don’t believe those tracks are cached locally.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:15 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Eh? You can download pretty much anything you own on Apple Music DRM-free in Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format. ALAC isn’t FLAC but it’s open source and royalty-free so you can just transcode to FLAC if you want to get your purchase fully out of the Apple ecosystem.
You can also stream anything available on Apple Music in ALAC format but I don’t believe those tracks are cached locally.
posted by nathan_teske at 8:15 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Algorithmic curation is based on the premise that there exists some collection of potentially ML-computable metrics about song similarity that would allow a machine to predict that if you like tracks A, B and C then you will like track D as well, and to have those predictions succeed often enough to be commercially useful. Which in fact they do, otherwise Spotify would not be a thing.
I have to counter this. I have a voracious appetite for new kinds of music and Spotify's algorithm is frankly incredible. Once it dialed into what I like, sure, it'd give me some more of that. But it's not afraid to throw a few curveballs to keep things interesting. In the years I had Spotify (I cancelled during the whole Joe Rogan thing, and kinda miss it...) I found so many new artists I wouldn't have found otherwise, even trying to keep up with new things via blogs, recommendations from friends, etc. When I trialed Apple Music when they first launched and they were super huge on curation from people with supposed music taste, I found it utterly boring and didn't push any boundaries.
posted by zsazsa at 8:23 AM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
I have to counter this. I have a voracious appetite for new kinds of music and Spotify's algorithm is frankly incredible. Once it dialed into what I like, sure, it'd give me some more of that. But it's not afraid to throw a few curveballs to keep things interesting. In the years I had Spotify (I cancelled during the whole Joe Rogan thing, and kinda miss it...) I found so many new artists I wouldn't have found otherwise, even trying to keep up with new things via blogs, recommendations from friends, etc. When I trialed Apple Music when they first launched and they were super huge on curation from people with supposed music taste, I found it utterly boring and didn't push any boundaries.
posted by zsazsa at 8:23 AM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
It took a couple of years for record companies to get their shit together and understand they had to re-master the music to fit the new CD format, just as they had to master the music to fit the vinyl format.
The noise floor of even the shittiest early CD players was so far below that of even the best contemporary vinyl that mastering for CD shouldn't have needed anything beyond not applying pre-emphasis and just setting the master tape playback level so as just to squeak in underneath the analog-to-digital converter's clipping ceiling in order to make a CD that sounded at least as clean as vinyls sourced from the same studio masters.
Trouble was, though, that exactly because CDs are so accurate, they'd reveal tape hiss and splicing artifacts on those studio masters that vinyl would have buried under at least 20dB of pop and crackle.
Personally I'd much rather put up with a bit of tape hiss from a studio master that was clearly a labour of love than listen to an allegedly "cleaner" remaster that's obviously had all kinds of noise reduction applied to the original tracks before remixing those in some doomed attempt to make a "perfected" version of the original. I almost always prefer the "AAD" CD versions of albums I first bought on vinyl to subsequent "ADD" re-releases because these are often loaded with different musical choices that remove some of what made me go WHOA in the first place. I'm pretty convinced that it's bad remasters, not any deficiency in digital audio per se, that continues to prop up the spurious belief that vinyl is somehow inherently "warmer" or "more natural" than CDs.
It's also kind of ironic that the Loudness Wars mean that so much of what's now recorded using entirely digital studio chains has been compressed to the point where you could operate a jackhammer on the noise floor without it being audible. Quite a lot of what comes out these days could be encoded at six bits per sample and remain audibly indistinguishable from the "ultra high quality" 24-bit@192kHz rubbish releases touted as somehow superior.
We could have had surround sound a generation earlier
Surround sound doesn't need four channels. You can do it way better with two channels, half-decent earbuds, and even relatively primitive spatial modelling software.
Hell, you don't even need the software. Get The Trinity Session on CD, listen to it through a nice pair of wired earbuds, and tell me you can't hear the reverb from Margo Timmins's solo vocal on Mining for Gold bouncing off the wall behind you. I won't believe you.
Really the only thing stopping earbud-spatial from being a totally normal release format for music in this day and age is the same thing that killed quadraphonic audio in the first place: the almost complete lack of consumer demand can't justify the extra time required for making the masters.
Shitty Car Audio is now, as then, the dominant use case that sets the standard of what's made generally available.
posted by flabdablet at 8:23 AM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
The noise floor of even the shittiest early CD players was so far below that of even the best contemporary vinyl that mastering for CD shouldn't have needed anything beyond not applying pre-emphasis and just setting the master tape playback level so as just to squeak in underneath the analog-to-digital converter's clipping ceiling in order to make a CD that sounded at least as clean as vinyls sourced from the same studio masters.
Trouble was, though, that exactly because CDs are so accurate, they'd reveal tape hiss and splicing artifacts on those studio masters that vinyl would have buried under at least 20dB of pop and crackle.
Personally I'd much rather put up with a bit of tape hiss from a studio master that was clearly a labour of love than listen to an allegedly "cleaner" remaster that's obviously had all kinds of noise reduction applied to the original tracks before remixing those in some doomed attempt to make a "perfected" version of the original. I almost always prefer the "AAD" CD versions of albums I first bought on vinyl to subsequent "ADD" re-releases because these are often loaded with different musical choices that remove some of what made me go WHOA in the first place. I'm pretty convinced that it's bad remasters, not any deficiency in digital audio per se, that continues to prop up the spurious belief that vinyl is somehow inherently "warmer" or "more natural" than CDs.
It's also kind of ironic that the Loudness Wars mean that so much of what's now recorded using entirely digital studio chains has been compressed to the point where you could operate a jackhammer on the noise floor without it being audible. Quite a lot of what comes out these days could be encoded at six bits per sample and remain audibly indistinguishable from the "ultra high quality" 24-bit@192kHz rubbish releases touted as somehow superior.
We could have had surround sound a generation earlier
Surround sound doesn't need four channels. You can do it way better with two channels, half-decent earbuds, and even relatively primitive spatial modelling software.
Hell, you don't even need the software. Get The Trinity Session on CD, listen to it through a nice pair of wired earbuds, and tell me you can't hear the reverb from Margo Timmins's solo vocal on Mining for Gold bouncing off the wall behind you. I won't believe you.
Really the only thing stopping earbud-spatial from being a totally normal release format for music in this day and age is the same thing that killed quadraphonic audio in the first place: the almost complete lack of consumer demand can't justify the extra time required for making the masters.
Shitty Car Audio is now, as then, the dominant use case that sets the standard of what's made generally available.
posted by flabdablet at 8:23 AM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
~Here’s my CD story. I worked at Philips Design for awhile and one day there was a retirement party. Turns out it was for the guy who designed the jewel case. So I had some cake. End of story.
~The jewel case was quite a nice design.
Ehhhh...sort of. The jewel case was very nice, but it had a serious failure point...the small tabs that held the lid to the body of the case. Damn things were highly prone to snapping off. I have more than a few jewel cases where the lid simply lifts off, because one of those tabs is missing.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:31 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
~The jewel case was quite a nice design.
Ehhhh...sort of. The jewel case was very nice, but it had a serious failure point...the small tabs that held the lid to the body of the case. Damn things were highly prone to snapping off. I have more than a few jewel cases where the lid simply lifts off, because one of those tabs is missing.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:31 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
I don't think it's necessarily mixing for shitty earbuds/speakers these days. We've lost the compression war so everything just sounds loud, but at least EQ is flatter than it ever was for broadcast radio. There's bass in today's tracks that was never there at all before CDs were a thing. Stereo separation is also much better than it was, too.
I know I'm not the only person who thinks it's ironic that our perfect digital audio recording/digital medium is now used to distribute stuff that's absurdly over-processed and uniformly loud, when LPs were made that you actually had to sit in a quiet room and listen to to be able to enjoy. With dynamic range. And e.g. binaural micing where you could place and hear the instruments on a soundstage; hear which side of a piano the notes were played on.
I think a lot of it is that music is 95% listened to by people who are just not paying much attention to it. It's background, and the qualities that make good background music are quite in opposition to really good concert recordings.
The one consistent thing now as then is that you have to seek out good recordings, you can't just expect greatness despite the uniformly great capability of the playback medium.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:39 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
I know I'm not the only person who thinks it's ironic that our perfect digital audio recording/digital medium is now used to distribute stuff that's absurdly over-processed and uniformly loud, when LPs were made that you actually had to sit in a quiet room and listen to to be able to enjoy. With dynamic range. And e.g. binaural micing where you could place and hear the instruments on a soundstage; hear which side of a piano the notes were played on.
I think a lot of it is that music is 95% listened to by people who are just not paying much attention to it. It's background, and the qualities that make good background music are quite in opposition to really good concert recordings.
The one consistent thing now as then is that you have to seek out good recordings, you can't just expect greatness despite the uniformly great capability of the playback medium.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:39 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
I missed the record era, so I don't have much comment about them vs CDs, but lousy freakin' cassette tapes were such a joy to drop. I gladly paid double for the higher quality, the lack of 'sides' with 5 minutes of blankness, the ability to choose tracks, and the lack of warping in the sun in the car.
All my CDs still play fine, though I very much prefer the technical improvements of a homespun digital music player vs CDs - album art, lyrics, etc! So they are all stored away.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:40 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
All my CDs still play fine, though I very much prefer the technical improvements of a homespun digital music player vs CDs - album art, lyrics, etc! So they are all stored away.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:40 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
the relentless forces of entropy as embodied by other household members
Brilliantly pithy, and accurate.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:25 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Brilliantly pithy, and accurate.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:25 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Perhaps some of my rotted CDs would benefit from having their edges bevelled or being demagnetized :-)
The snake oil, it burns. I could kinda laugh at the beveling machine even though it damages the disc because at least there's an almost plausible theory of operation to it, if you don't know how error correction works, anyway.
The demagnetizer, though? That's total WTF sauce. Even if you could somehow strongly magnetize aluminum, lasers don't give a fuck. The least they could have done was make it good enough to degauss tapes, but it couldn't even do that. It's straight up fraudulent.
posted by wierdo at 9:53 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
The snake oil, it burns. I could kinda laugh at the beveling machine even though it damages the disc because at least there's an almost plausible theory of operation to it, if you don't know how error correction works, anyway.
The demagnetizer, though? That's total WTF sauce. Even if you could somehow strongly magnetize aluminum, lasers don't give a fuck. The least they could have done was make it good enough to degauss tapes, but it couldn't even do that. It's straight up fraudulent.
posted by wierdo at 9:53 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
I came across a service in the early 00s who would rip your CDs to MP3s and send them to you on an iPod, and keep the CDs. Mail off a big box, get back a small box. I think they resold them in Eastern Europe. Worked great!
posted by gottabefunky at 9:55 AM on October 3, 2022
posted by gottabefunky at 9:55 AM on October 3, 2022
The physical artifact of the music is important to me, which is why I collect vinyl (mostly used, unless the only way I can get something reasonably is a reissue), but as a format, I'm not enthralled by CDs anymore. Once I could stop carrying around a CD binder and just listen to anything I wanted on an iPod, CDs quickly lost appeal as a medium for me. A few bands I like have been doing major deluxe reissue campaigns on CD, and so I've been buying up these multi-CD box sets put out by The Residents, or TISM, because I want the bonus content and all that nice stuff. I get them, rip them, and put the box on a shelf to sit and admire while I listen to the rips. The advantages of the CD are that it is a) easily ripped to other formats, b) compact so my CD collection takes up far less room than my vinyl collection, and c) they can hold more so I get bonus tracks for all those reissue albums. Vinyl is an artifact to me, a CD is a container.
Now, the cassette revival? That I truly don't get. Cassettes sucked. I mean, mix tapes were cool, but albums on cassette always felt fragile to me, and the sound wasn't great either.
posted by SansPoint at 10:21 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Now, the cassette revival? That I truly don't get. Cassettes sucked. I mean, mix tapes were cool, but albums on cassette always felt fragile to me, and the sound wasn't great either.
posted by SansPoint at 10:21 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
when LPs were made that you actually had to sit in a quiet room and listen to to be able to enjoy. With dynamic range. And e.g. binaural micing where you could place and hear the instruments on a soundstage; hear which side of a piano the notes were played on.
The mixing of CDs is far too broad to make such generalizations. I'd say I have too many mixed too quiet as I do too loud.
I would also say that for the pop CDs you are talking about the 'loud' equalization, the greater crime is the piano being synthesized for no reason other than cost.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:23 AM on October 3, 2022
The mixing of CDs is far too broad to make such generalizations. I'd say I have too many mixed too quiet as I do too loud.
I would also say that for the pop CDs you are talking about the 'loud' equalization, the greater crime is the piano being synthesized for no reason other than cost.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:23 AM on October 3, 2022
Thorzdad:
posted by SansPoint at 10:26 AM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
That said, early in the CD era, we definitely endured a period where record companies were simply plopping music onto CDs without any re-mastering for the format, resulting in some horrible-sounding discs. I have a few early music CDs that were produced that way, and are simply shrill and lacking in any bottom end, no matter how good the system playing them was.Yyyyup. And amazingly, some of those CDs and masterings, are not only still in print, but are the source for some of the digital copies sold in music download stores or used for streaming. There's a 1987 CD master of DEVO's 1980 album Freedom of Choice that sounds abysmal, with zero low-end (something that's criminal for an album that was mixed to sound like an 70s R&B record) and it's still the default version on Apple Music and Spotify... one of many reasons why I do not do streaming music.
posted by SansPoint at 10:26 AM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
I happen to be in Lisbon on vacation right now, and ran across a jazz record store. To commemorate this anniversary, I stopped in and bought three CDs: Keith Jarret, Xavier Cougat, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (obviously the place doesn’t stock jazz exclusively). The place had a bunch of cheap box sets. Also a bunch of LPs.
Now if only I had a way to play CDs with me…
posted by adamrice at 11:07 AM on October 3, 2022
Now if only I had a way to play CDs with me…
posted by adamrice at 11:07 AM on October 3, 2022
The snake oil, it burns
Yours actually burns? Mine just fizzled and went out, leaving behind a nasty stain.
posted by flabdablet at 11:16 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yours actually burns? Mine just fizzled and went out, leaving behind a nasty stain.
posted by flabdablet at 11:16 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
On vacation through rural parts of the US with poor radio reception I recently bought my first CD in at least a decade. It was 50 cents from a thrift store and I bought it purely based on the cover alone. The liner notes describe Woody Wills as a chiropractor in Alaska who enjoys most sports and arabian horses. I wouldn't call it good but it could be a whole lot worse than it is. At least it passed the time through endless farmland.
posted by downtohisturtles at 11:18 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by downtohisturtles at 11:18 AM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
I bought it purely based on the cover alone
I've done that (e.g. 1, 2, 3) and never regretted it, though clearly my selection criteria differ from yours.
posted by flabdablet at 11:36 AM on October 3, 2022
I've done that (e.g. 1, 2, 3) and never regretted it, though clearly my selection criteria differ from yours.
posted by flabdablet at 11:36 AM on October 3, 2022
Eh? You can download pretty much anything you own on Apple Music DRM-free in Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format. ALAC isn’t FLAC but it’s open source and royalty-free so you can just transcode to FLAC if you want to get your purchase fully out of the Apple ecosystem.
You can't. Apple will stream music to Apple Music subscribers in (DRM-protected) ALAC, but if you want to buy a download, 256kbps AAC is the highest you can get it.
posted by acb at 11:40 AM on October 3, 2022
You can't. Apple will stream music to Apple Music subscribers in (DRM-protected) ALAC, but if you want to buy a download, 256kbps AAC is the highest you can get it.
posted by acb at 11:40 AM on October 3, 2022
Flabdablet, 4-channel CDDA was not going to use the simpler quadraphonic channels. It was going to use Ambisonic (or something similar), which already in 2 channels creates a wider spatial field. With 4 channels, we could have got full 3D spatialisation.
posted by meehawl at 12:12 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by meehawl at 12:12 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
...which can still be cleanly encoded into two audio channels, as long as the transducers ultimately involved do a reasonably good job of isolating the feeds to each eardrum.
Lowest-tech way to get that job done involves making live recordings using small but decent mikes embedded into a physical model of a human head including reasonably realistic external ears, thereby offloading all the spatial modelling to the listener's own brain. Even with a fully two-channel audio chain all the way from mikes to earbuds, the results can be quite startlingly good.
posted by flabdablet at 12:45 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Lowest-tech way to get that job done involves making live recordings using small but decent mikes embedded into a physical model of a human head including reasonably realistic external ears, thereby offloading all the spatial modelling to the listener's own brain. Even with a fully two-channel audio chain all the way from mikes to earbuds, the results can be quite startlingly good.
posted by flabdablet at 12:45 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
mhoye: What a pick to be first though.
The first few DAT releases were way hipper, and look how well that worked out…
(obligatory first CD purchase info: Machaut, Messiaen, The Feelies. I figured classical music would benefit the most, and yeah, as much as I love The Good Earth, it’s not exactly an audiophile’s dream.)
posted by doubtfulpalace at 12:54 PM on October 3, 2022
The first few DAT releases were way hipper, and look how well that worked out…
(obligatory first CD purchase info: Machaut, Messiaen, The Feelies. I figured classical music would benefit the most, and yeah, as much as I love The Good Earth, it’s not exactly an audiophile’s dream.)
posted by doubtfulpalace at 12:54 PM on October 3, 2022
Yours actually burns? Mine just fizzled and went out, leaving behind a nasty stain.
You'd be amazed at what a little liquid oxygen can do. Failing that, flourine will do. If it's a really bad batch, a bit of FOOF will fix it right up.
posted by wierdo at 1:12 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
You'd be amazed at what a little liquid oxygen can do. Failing that, flourine will do. If it's a really bad batch, a bit of FOOF will fix it right up.
posted by wierdo at 1:12 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
You'd be amazed at what a little liquid oxygen can do. Failing that, flourine will do. If it's a really bad batch, a bit of FOOF will fix it right up.
Metafilter: Come for the Gen-X discussion of CD's. Stay for the flourine chemistry.
posted by mikelieman at 1:19 PM on October 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
Metafilter: Come for the Gen-X discussion of CD's. Stay for the flourine chemistry.
posted by mikelieman at 1:19 PM on October 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
There's a 1987 CD master of DEVO's 1980 album Freedom of Choice that sounds abysmal, with zero low-end (something that's criminal for an album that was mixed to sound like an 70s R&B record)
Yup. I own that particular CD, and it remains my personal poster child for shitty CDs.
...and it's still the default version on Apple Music and Spotify... one of many reasons why I do not do streaming music.
WTF??? That’s criminal.
I’m not huge fan of streaming. It irks me that I must pay eternally to listen to music.
Is there a properly-mixed/mastered CD for FoC?
posted by Thorzdad at 1:50 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
Yup. I own that particular CD, and it remains my personal poster child for shitty CDs.
...and it's still the default version on Apple Music and Spotify... one of many reasons why I do not do streaming music.
WTF??? That’s criminal.
I’m not huge fan of streaming. It irks me that I must pay eternally to listen to music.
Is there a properly-mixed/mastered CD for FoC?
posted by Thorzdad at 1:50 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
If you're old enough, you might remember the "Is this a lemon?" ads from one of the high-end hifi companies. Who eventually relented and released a multi-thousand CD player so full of woo it needed exorcism.
→
Hard same. There's a kind of grumpy delight I get in adding all of the details, like in this monster multi-CD release of covers: Peter Stampfel's 20th Century. Took me about a week.
posted by scruss at 2:30 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
→
MusicBrainz … is a complete pain in the arse
Hard same. There's a kind of grumpy delight I get in adding all of the details, like in this monster multi-CD release of covers: Peter Stampfel's 20th Century. Took me about a week.
posted by scruss at 2:30 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
As an indie musician, there is still no substitute for selling CDs at shows. LPs are great but too bulky to travel with and limited in appeal. USB sticks are practical but unpopular. Even today, fans far prefer a CD with some decent artwork, preferably autograph-able, as a tangible reminder of the live show experience. With the cardboard digipaks replacing jewel cases, I can carry 100 to a show in the same space and weight as 30 jewel cases or 10 vinyl records, sell them for a $10 each and make more profit in one night than in a year of streaming royalties. Long live the CD!
posted by platinum at 2:53 PM on October 3, 2022 [12 favorites]
posted by platinum at 2:53 PM on October 3, 2022 [12 favorites]
Thorzdad: There's several... well, two (or three, if you're willing to go used) options for a decent quality FoC CD. The gold standard, in my book, is the 2008 Japanese mini-LP release, also included in the original This Is the DEVO Box Box set in Japan. A close runner up is the 2009 Warner Bros deluxe remaster of FoC. This is the same master that's in the 2009 "Ultra DEVO-Lux" edition box of Q?A! and FoC, but that one's out of print.
posted by SansPoint at 3:38 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by SansPoint at 3:38 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
I have a few early music CDs that were produced that way, and are simply shrill and lacking in any bottom end, no matter how good the system playing them was.
yeah, we had a CD pressing of Tom Waits 'Swordfishtrombones' that sounded pretty messed-up.
Of course the big weirdness later on was the massive slew of remastered 60s/70s Classic Rock CDs compressed all to hell. A whole other saga about that story has often been mentioned.
posted by ovvl at 3:48 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
yeah, we had a CD pressing of Tom Waits 'Swordfishtrombones' that sounded pretty messed-up.
Of course the big weirdness later on was the massive slew of remastered 60s/70s Classic Rock CDs compressed all to hell. A whole other saga about that story has often been mentioned.
posted by ovvl at 3:48 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
The Songs of '89 AskMe was a reminder that Robyn Hitchcock 'n'* The Egyptians' Queen Elvis was never released as a standalone CD in the UK. For several years I'd trawl the used CD racks in obscure malls on my trips to the USA to bring copies back to discerning UK fegmaniax†. Best score I had was in a tiny used book store in a slightly sad mall behind in crazy golf course in Ocean City: several copies, great condition, $4 each.
This is before we had bandwidth and knew what streaming was, of course.
---
*: don't blame me, it's written that way on the cover
†: Robyn Hitchcock fans, after the listserv of the same name, after the album Fegmania!
posted by scruss at 4:10 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
This is before we had bandwidth and knew what streaming was, of course.
---
*: don't blame me, it's written that way on the cover
†: Robyn Hitchcock fans, after the listserv of the same name, after the album Fegmania!
posted by scruss at 4:10 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
99.9% of my CDs sound great. But there was one LP I got and fell in love with and played the hell out for years - still my #1 Desert Island Disk. The sound was very open and airy, just exquisite (ECM label, so anyone familiar with them will know what I mean). But over the years it accumulated a lot of typical vinyl noise. I bought it on CD back in the late 80's or early 90's hoping to get back to the pristine listening experience...sound was ok, but kind of flat, none of that spacious quality. A few years later I bought some sort of audiophile or special edition or something (it's currently in a box so I can't check) hoping for a better remaster, but no luck. Very disappoint. I may have to buy a good non-noisy copy on vinyl, set up my turntable (which has been in storage for like 8 years), and rip that - like a CHUMP - to get satisfaction.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:14 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:14 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
I cannot process being six years younger than CDs. I just can't. Especially because I lost my collection somehow last year and with it what remained of my youth. Fuck aging, man.
Maybe one of my original iPods still works. :(
posted by The Adventure Begins at 7:51 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Maybe one of my original iPods still works. :(
posted by The Adventure Begins at 7:51 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
I cannot process being six years younger than CDs.
Yeah, well, try processing being 20 years older than them, and see how you feel...
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:50 PM on October 3, 2022 [7 favorites]
Yeah, well, try processing being 20 years older than them, and see how you feel...
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:50 PM on October 3, 2022 [7 favorites]
Some of my favorites out of what I own are mini-CDs. They're a delightful format. Cloudberry Records is still doing those. Not sure who else might be. The only downside is that don't work in slot-loading players - you need a tray.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 8:53 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 8:53 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
I really miss all my cd of the month clubs, including the MetaFilter music swap. So fun to compile, and I discovered so much good music by getting packages in the mail from people I trusted to be intelligent and thoughtful about music.
My first CD was Tin Machine. Still have it, still love it, don’t @ me. though it’s been ripped to the computer and iPod for many years now.
I boycott streaming services because of the paltry royalties, so I do still buy CD’S but also purchase lots of stuff from Bandcamp. I download the .aif files then rip those to 320 k MP3’s for my iPod which goes everywhere with me. Having 10,000 songs in a dedicated player is still a miracle to me, and I can pick it up and choose an album without getting distracted by Facebook. I’m sticking with physical media or at least locally-stored and owned uncompressed files.
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:23 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
My first CD was Tin Machine. Still have it, still love it, don’t @ me. though it’s been ripped to the computer and iPod for many years now.
I boycott streaming services because of the paltry royalties, so I do still buy CD’S but also purchase lots of stuff from Bandcamp. I download the .aif files then rip those to 320 k MP3’s for my iPod which goes everywhere with me. Having 10,000 songs in a dedicated player is still a miracle to me, and I can pick it up and choose an album without getting distracted by Facebook. I’m sticking with physical media or at least locally-stored and owned uncompressed files.
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:23 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
locally-stored and owned uncompressed files
Locally stored and owned losslessly compressed files are my sweet spot. I'm really glad that FLAC is a thing.
posted by flabdablet at 10:22 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
Locally stored and owned losslessly compressed files are my sweet spot. I'm really glad that FLAC is a thing.
posted by flabdablet at 10:22 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
What is the streaming era equivalent of wandering around a new hookup's apartment, and trying to get a read on them by checking out their CDs?
Trading Spotify playlists. Or telling Alexa to start playing music to see what the algorithms think the person likes.
I really miss all my cd of the month clubs
If you're not aware of them, check out Mojo and Uncut magazines. Their monthly CDs are very often extremely well curated and sometimes have themes like remaking a classic album with modern musicians.
Was marking the discs DDD just a gimmick?
Mostly. It lacked precision to actually tell you much about the recording (every trip from digital to analog and back again decreases the sound quality a little), a lot of early digital gear wasn't all that good, and a strictly digital path is not necessarily beneficial. Even with today's much nicer digital conversion, bit depth/sampling rate, better algorithms, etc., there's a certain binding effect that going through analog summing or compression (the type that reduces dynamic range, not like mp3 compression) that digital just doesn't have.
You can buy summing mixers which are designed to be used with computer recording rigs during the mixdown where the computer is controlling the levels of each channel in the mix but the analog device handles combining them into the final mix. Some top of the line studios will do the same thing with much more full featured analog consoles during mixdown.
Similarly, recording to analog tape sounds just a little bit different in a way that some purists prefer. There's a compression effect (again, the type that reduces dynamic range) that happens with analog tape when it's being pushed to its limits that we can emulate pretty closely these days but some people think isn't quite as good particularly with drums. Pushing analog gear to extremes can be interesting. Digital just clips and not in a good way.
And of course, a talented mixer can make a good recording on digital or analog gear. The difference between recording drums to Pro Tools with good analog to digital converters vs 2" tape is pretty small if you know what you're doing and emulation of analog gear is getting better every year.
posted by Candleman at 11:24 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
Trading Spotify playlists. Or telling Alexa to start playing music to see what the algorithms think the person likes.
I really miss all my cd of the month clubs
If you're not aware of them, check out Mojo and Uncut magazines. Their monthly CDs are very often extremely well curated and sometimes have themes like remaking a classic album with modern musicians.
Was marking the discs DDD just a gimmick?
Mostly. It lacked precision to actually tell you much about the recording (every trip from digital to analog and back again decreases the sound quality a little), a lot of early digital gear wasn't all that good, and a strictly digital path is not necessarily beneficial. Even with today's much nicer digital conversion, bit depth/sampling rate, better algorithms, etc., there's a certain binding effect that going through analog summing or compression (the type that reduces dynamic range, not like mp3 compression) that digital just doesn't have.
You can buy summing mixers which are designed to be used with computer recording rigs during the mixdown where the computer is controlling the levels of each channel in the mix but the analog device handles combining them into the final mix. Some top of the line studios will do the same thing with much more full featured analog consoles during mixdown.
Similarly, recording to analog tape sounds just a little bit different in a way that some purists prefer. There's a compression effect (again, the type that reduces dynamic range) that happens with analog tape when it's being pushed to its limits that we can emulate pretty closely these days but some people think isn't quite as good particularly with drums. Pushing analog gear to extremes can be interesting. Digital just clips and not in a good way.
And of course, a talented mixer can make a good recording on digital or analog gear. The difference between recording drums to Pro Tools with good analog to digital converters vs 2" tape is pretty small if you know what you're doing and emulation of analog gear is getting better every year.
posted by Candleman at 11:24 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]
there is still no substitute for selling CDs at shows. LPs are great but too bulky to travel with and limited in appeal. USB sticks are practical but unpopular. Even today, fans far prefer a CD with some decent artwork, preferably autograph-able, as a tangible reminder of the live show experience.
I've heard that one substitute is artwork with a Bandcamp download code. (Which I suspect that a proportion of purchased vinyl counts as, the records never being actually played by the purchaser, but merely HODLed as a token of fandom, if you will.)
In fact, "_ + download code" is a formula that could work for all sorts of things (art cards, baked goods, repurposed thrift shop finds).
posted by acb at 1:55 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
I've heard that one substitute is artwork with a Bandcamp download code. (Which I suspect that a proportion of purchased vinyl counts as, the records never being actually played by the purchaser, but merely HODLed as a token of fandom, if you will.)
In fact, "_ + download code" is a formula that could work for all sorts of things (art cards, baked goods, repurposed thrift shop finds).
posted by acb at 1:55 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
there's a certain binding effect that going through analog summing or compression (the type that reduces dynamic range, not like mp3 compression) that digital just doesn't have.
I'm not sure that this is an analog vs digital thing so much as a this specific musical instrument vs that specific musical instrument thing. Focusing too much on the analog vs digital distinction just leads the discussion off into the weeds of unproductive argument about what constitutes technical perfection and whether or not digital audio tools can ever achieve it.
The making of a recorded work raises the entire audio production chain to the status of a musical instrument and that, to my way of thinking, makes remastering a form of re-performance or even re-orchestration. Sometimes - usually when the original mixing team is still involved - that gets done really well, but too often it's done with a heavy hand and not enough gut-level feel for what made the original recorded work so great. I've heard a lot of remasters that seem to be mostly about showing off what the whizzy new digital tech is capable of regardless of whether or not those capabilities were actually called for, as if somebody tried to improve Mona Lisa by sharpening up all her outlines.
But I think there's a qualitative difference between the kinds of audible changes made during the digital remastering of an existing recording and those that get inevitably and accidentally made to every recording between completion of the studio master and arrival of the result at my earholes. To the extent that noise and distortion and other mechanical reproduction artifacts make what I'm hearing different from what the mastering engineer was hearing, I'd generally rather not have to listen to those.
Which is why I'd often rather listen to even a poorly equalized AAD CD release than either the "AAA" vinyl version or an ADD remaster. Poor pressing master equalization is pretty easy to fix with a graphic EQ or a media player plugin, and what I can get by doing that is a closer simulacrum of what came out of the studio mastering engineer's monitors than 30+dB of irremovably added vinyl crackle and pop would ever have let me hear.
Which means I get closer to being able to hear the mastering engineer's intent. And I love that CDs happened and gave me so many opportunities to do that, even though I need to jump through a few hoops to make best use of some of them.
posted by flabdablet at 2:43 AM on October 4, 2022
I'm not sure that this is an analog vs digital thing so much as a this specific musical instrument vs that specific musical instrument thing. Focusing too much on the analog vs digital distinction just leads the discussion off into the weeds of unproductive argument about what constitutes technical perfection and whether or not digital audio tools can ever achieve it.
The making of a recorded work raises the entire audio production chain to the status of a musical instrument and that, to my way of thinking, makes remastering a form of re-performance or even re-orchestration. Sometimes - usually when the original mixing team is still involved - that gets done really well, but too often it's done with a heavy hand and not enough gut-level feel for what made the original recorded work so great. I've heard a lot of remasters that seem to be mostly about showing off what the whizzy new digital tech is capable of regardless of whether or not those capabilities were actually called for, as if somebody tried to improve Mona Lisa by sharpening up all her outlines.
But I think there's a qualitative difference between the kinds of audible changes made during the digital remastering of an existing recording and those that get inevitably and accidentally made to every recording between completion of the studio master and arrival of the result at my earholes. To the extent that noise and distortion and other mechanical reproduction artifacts make what I'm hearing different from what the mastering engineer was hearing, I'd generally rather not have to listen to those.
Which is why I'd often rather listen to even a poorly equalized AAD CD release than either the "AAA" vinyl version or an ADD remaster. Poor pressing master equalization is pretty easy to fix with a graphic EQ or a media player plugin, and what I can get by doing that is a closer simulacrum of what came out of the studio mastering engineer's monitors than 30+dB of irremovably added vinyl crackle and pop would ever have let me hear.
Which means I get closer to being able to hear the mastering engineer's intent. And I love that CDs happened and gave me so many opportunities to do that, even though I need to jump through a few hoops to make best use of some of them.
posted by flabdablet at 2:43 AM on October 4, 2022
There is no argument about what constitutes technical "perfection," though. It's mathematically provable that a PCM stream reproduces the input that created it exactly, up to the limit impressed by the sample rate and that the sample rate of plain 'ol CDs is sufficient to encode anything a record or a cassette can reproduce. There are probably high speed reel to reel recorders using 2" tape that can reproduce higher frequencies audible above the noise floor, though.
There is, however, plenty of room for argument about aesthetics. I'd be a liar if I said that I don't find the pops and cracks of vinyl or some amount of tape hiss nostalgic sometimes. I sometimes kinda miss the shitty rip I had of Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now off a mildly warped record. It could be argued (and sometimes I might even make that argument myself!) that it was aesthetically better than the perfectly clean version you can play off a CD, but it sure as shit isn't technically better.
When it comes to older music originally recorded and mastered on tape I do tend to prefer getting that fed into a digital chain as directly as possible. Analog masters aren't bad, it's the consumer formats that weren't very good. Not that I can really tell the difference on the equipment I have at my disposal at the moment, but there was a time I wasn't stuck with cheap Bluetooth headsets that only support SBC.
posted by wierdo at 3:41 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
There is, however, plenty of room for argument about aesthetics. I'd be a liar if I said that I don't find the pops and cracks of vinyl or some amount of tape hiss nostalgic sometimes. I sometimes kinda miss the shitty rip I had of Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now off a mildly warped record. It could be argued (and sometimes I might even make that argument myself!) that it was aesthetically better than the perfectly clean version you can play off a CD, but it sure as shit isn't technically better.
When it comes to older music originally recorded and mastered on tape I do tend to prefer getting that fed into a digital chain as directly as possible. Analog masters aren't bad, it's the consumer formats that weren't very good. Not that I can really tell the difference on the equipment I have at my disposal at the moment, but there was a time I wasn't stuck with cheap Bluetooth headsets that only support SBC.
posted by wierdo at 3:41 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
There are probably high speed reel to reel recorders using 2" tape that can reproduce higher frequencies audible above the noise floor, though.
Nope.
posted by flabdablet at 6:35 AM on October 4, 2022
Nope.
posted by flabdablet at 6:35 AM on October 4, 2022
> Nope
The statement is technically true; better analog tape recorders can faithfully reproduce frequencies above 20 kHz. So I assume that your point is that humans can't hear those frequencies, anyway.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:05 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
The statement is technically true; better analog tape recorders can faithfully reproduce frequencies above 20 kHz. So I assume that your point is that humans can't hear those frequencies, anyway.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:05 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
Exactly. There are no frequencies that are both (a) higher than 44.1kHz 16 bit PCM sampling can represent more accurately than the best analog tape deck ever built and (b) audible above any noise floor.
At first glance, 44.1kHz is a weird looking choice for a sampling rate. If the aim is to be able to encode all audio that a human being is physically capable of hearing, and all of the evidence-based hi-fi design rules of the time say that a flat frequency response from 20Hz to 20kHz is more than enough to do that, why put your sampling's Nyquist limit at 22.050kHz instead of 20kHz? Surely that's just a 10% waste of bits, and therefore a 10% reduction in available playback time for any given choice of overall bit capacity?
Well, like all of engineering, 44.1kHz is a trade-off.
At the time the CD format was being worked out, existing digital audio recording gear - notably DAT - had adopted a 48kHz sampling standard, which yields a Nyquist limit of 24kHz.
Preparing an analog signal for distortion-free sampling requires that all frequency components above the Nyquist limit are suppressed to levels below the sampler's quantization noise floor. The usual design rule of thumb puts the noise floor at bits×6dB below the clipping limit, which for 16 bit sampling makes it -96dB. So ideally there needs to be a low pass filter before the sampler, with a frequency response that's flat below 20kHz but rolls off to -96dB at 24kHz.
Designing an analog filter that can do that cleanly is quite tricky. Implementing that design successfully requires many components with very tight tolerances, which makes it expensive. So if what you're building is gear that can record analog audio signals digitally, you probably wouldn't want to push the required Nyquist limit any lower than 24kHz.
But that's not what a CD player ever needed to do: the hardware requiring mass production was playback only gear to compete with record players.
It's still the case that the closer the Nyquist limit of the digital representation is to the actual top of the required audio bandwidth, the more expensive it becomes to build a DAC that achieves theoretically perfect results. But as it turns out, the inverse of sampling - digital to analog conversion - can be quite a lot more cavalier about perfect reconstruction of signals that contain frequencies close to its Nyquist limit before the resulting conversion flaws become anywhere near audible to most listeners.
First-gen CD players didn't even try to achieve the whole potential that the encoding format allowed for. They were built around 14-bit DACs, not 16-bit, which puts quantization noise roughly 78dB below peak output. But since even an eye-wateringly expensive audiophile vinyl playback rig would struggle hard to achieve a noise floor 70dB below peak output on even the cleanest, best-mastered vinyl, that was deemed more than acceptable.
Widespread consumer-grade amplifier tech wasn't all that flash at the time, either; the role that intermodulation distortion plays in degrading reproduction wasn't well understood, and a bit of extra IMD emerging from a CD player's relatively shitty DAC would often just be lost underneath what the user's amp and speakers had been inflicting on them anyway.
But it didn't take long for oversampling DACs to appear in mass-market CD players, at which point the fairly minimalist 2kHz of spectrum headroom built into their 44.1kHz sampling format became way more than enough. Digital signal processing to upsample a 44.1kHz stream to its 44.1kHz × 4 = 176.4kHz theoretical equivalent can be done absolutely perfectly, and the Nyquist limit of the resulting digital stream is at 88.2kHz which is so far above the required analog bandwidth that even a really crude DAC running at that rate will have all its flaws thoroughly swamped by the rest of the analog audio chain.
So why 44.1kHz specifically? If you want to save a bit of space compared to 48kHz but not push all the way down to 40kHz for the sake of keeping a little headroom, why not just use the rather rounder-looking 44kHz?
Well, 44100 is the product of the squares of the first four prime numbers: 44100 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 x 7 x 7. It's just a really nice number if what you're after is flexibility in ways to carve it into chunks that fit nicely into one second. And people like playback counters that tick over on nice clean one-second boundaries, so I'm guessing it's that.
posted by flabdablet at 8:02 PM on October 4, 2022 [7 favorites]
At first glance, 44.1kHz is a weird looking choice for a sampling rate. If the aim is to be able to encode all audio that a human being is physically capable of hearing, and all of the evidence-based hi-fi design rules of the time say that a flat frequency response from 20Hz to 20kHz is more than enough to do that, why put your sampling's Nyquist limit at 22.050kHz instead of 20kHz? Surely that's just a 10% waste of bits, and therefore a 10% reduction in available playback time for any given choice of overall bit capacity?
Well, like all of engineering, 44.1kHz is a trade-off.
At the time the CD format was being worked out, existing digital audio recording gear - notably DAT - had adopted a 48kHz sampling standard, which yields a Nyquist limit of 24kHz.
Preparing an analog signal for distortion-free sampling requires that all frequency components above the Nyquist limit are suppressed to levels below the sampler's quantization noise floor. The usual design rule of thumb puts the noise floor at bits×6dB below the clipping limit, which for 16 bit sampling makes it -96dB. So ideally there needs to be a low pass filter before the sampler, with a frequency response that's flat below 20kHz but rolls off to -96dB at 24kHz.
Designing an analog filter that can do that cleanly is quite tricky. Implementing that design successfully requires many components with very tight tolerances, which makes it expensive. So if what you're building is gear that can record analog audio signals digitally, you probably wouldn't want to push the required Nyquist limit any lower than 24kHz.
But that's not what a CD player ever needed to do: the hardware requiring mass production was playback only gear to compete with record players.
It's still the case that the closer the Nyquist limit of the digital representation is to the actual top of the required audio bandwidth, the more expensive it becomes to build a DAC that achieves theoretically perfect results. But as it turns out, the inverse of sampling - digital to analog conversion - can be quite a lot more cavalier about perfect reconstruction of signals that contain frequencies close to its Nyquist limit before the resulting conversion flaws become anywhere near audible to most listeners.
First-gen CD players didn't even try to achieve the whole potential that the encoding format allowed for. They were built around 14-bit DACs, not 16-bit, which puts quantization noise roughly 78dB below peak output. But since even an eye-wateringly expensive audiophile vinyl playback rig would struggle hard to achieve a noise floor 70dB below peak output on even the cleanest, best-mastered vinyl, that was deemed more than acceptable.
Widespread consumer-grade amplifier tech wasn't all that flash at the time, either; the role that intermodulation distortion plays in degrading reproduction wasn't well understood, and a bit of extra IMD emerging from a CD player's relatively shitty DAC would often just be lost underneath what the user's amp and speakers had been inflicting on them anyway.
But it didn't take long for oversampling DACs to appear in mass-market CD players, at which point the fairly minimalist 2kHz of spectrum headroom built into their 44.1kHz sampling format became way more than enough. Digital signal processing to upsample a 44.1kHz stream to its 44.1kHz × 4 = 176.4kHz theoretical equivalent can be done absolutely perfectly, and the Nyquist limit of the resulting digital stream is at 88.2kHz which is so far above the required analog bandwidth that even a really crude DAC running at that rate will have all its flaws thoroughly swamped by the rest of the analog audio chain.
So why 44.1kHz specifically? If you want to save a bit of space compared to 48kHz but not push all the way down to 40kHz for the sake of keeping a little headroom, why not just use the rather rounder-looking 44kHz?
Well, 44100 is the product of the squares of the first four prime numbers: 44100 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 x 7 x 7. It's just a really nice number if what you're after is flexibility in ways to carve it into chunks that fit nicely into one second. And people like playback counters that tick over on nice clean one-second boundaries, so I'm guessing it's that.
posted by flabdablet at 8:02 PM on October 4, 2022 [7 favorites]
I'm a little sad that there probably isn't some freak out there who transferred their impressive music collection to DAT cassettes 20 years ago, and has a double bookcase full of tiny little tapes.
posted by bartleby at 9:13 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by bartleby at 9:13 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
tiny little tapes
Excellent username up for grabs
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:14 PM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
Excellent username up for grabs
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:14 PM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
I'm a little sad that there probably isn't some freak out there who transferred their impressive music collection to DAT cassettes 20 years ago, and has a double bookcase full of tiny little tapes.
Well, FWIW, there's a bunch of people out there sitting on collections of hundreds of Grateful Dead -- and other jam bands -- audience recording masters in dead formats. Analog cassette. DAT. Minidisc.
posted by mikelieman at 3:12 AM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]
Well, FWIW, there's a bunch of people out there sitting on collections of hundreds of Grateful Dead -- and other jam bands -- audience recording masters in dead formats. Analog cassette. DAT. Minidisc.
posted by mikelieman at 3:12 AM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]
> So why 44.1kHz specifically?
Hardware re-use:
Hardware re-use:
From John Watkinson, The Art of Digital Audio, 2nd edition, pg. 104:posted by Bangaioh at 3:21 AM on October 5, 2022 [6 favorites]
In the early days of digital audio research, the necessary bandwidth of about 1 Mbps per audio channel was difficult to store. Disk drives had the bandwidth but not the capacity for long recording time, so attention turned to video recorders. These were adapted to store audio samples by creating a pseudo-video waveform which would convey binary as black and white levels. The sampling rate of such a system is constrained to relate simply to the field rate and field structure of the television standard used, so that an integer number of samples can be stored on each usable TV line in the field. Such a recording can be made on a monochrome recorder, and these recording are made in two standards, 525 lines at 60 Hz and 625 lines at 50 Hz. Thus it is possible to find a frequency which is a common multiple of the two and is also suitable for use as a sampling rate.
The allowable sampling rates in a pseudo-video system can be deduced by multiplying the field rate by the number of active lines in a field (blanking lines cannot be used) and again by the number of samples in a line. By careful choice of parameters it is possible to use either 525/60 or 625/50 video with a sampling rate of 44.1KHz.
In 60 Hz video, there are 35 blanked lines, leaving 490 lines per frame or 245 lines per field, so the sampling rate is given by :
60 X 245 X 3 = 44.1 KHz
In 50 Hz video, there are 37 lines of blanking, leaving 588 active lines per frame, or 294 per field, so the same sampling rate is given by
50 X 294 X3 = 44.1 Khz.
The sampling rate of 44.1 KHz came to be that of the Compact Disc. Even though CD has no video circuitry, the equipment used to make CD masters is video based and determines the sampling rate.
I'm a little sad that there probably isn't some freak out there who transferred their impressive music collection to DAT cassettes 20 years ago, and has a double bookcase full of tiny little tapes.
DAT? Not weird enough. Those folks probably used one of the various systems for recording digital audio onto the video part of vhs cassettes.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:53 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
DAT? Not weird enough. Those folks probably used one of the various systems for recording digital audio onto the video part of vhs cassettes.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:53 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
Where Watkinson says "In 60 Hz video, there are 35 blanked lines, leaving 490 lines per frame or 245 lines per field" and "In 50 Hz video, there are 37 lines of blanking, leaving 588 active lines per frame, or 294 per field" he gives the impression that these were standards already in active use for video recording and/or broadcast. I don't believe they were; I've never encountered 490 or 588 as active line counts before. The visible line counts for an interlaced pair of NTSC or PAL fields are 480 and 576 respectively, and these numbers survive in the 480i and 576i digital video resolutions used on DVDs.
He's closer to the mark where he mentions "careful choice of parameters" and it's my contention that the particular careful choice he ends up citing is only made possible by the nicely spread collection of factors that 44100 has.
44100 is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28, 30, 35, 36, 42, 45, 49, 50, 60, 63, 70, 75, 84, 90, 98, 100, 105, 126, 140, 147, 150, 175, 180, 196, 210, 225, 245, 252, 294, 300, 315, 350, 420, 441, 450, 490, 525, 588, 630, 700, 735, 882, 900, 980, 1050, 1225, 1260, 1470, 1575, 1764, 2100, 2205, 2450, 2940, 3150, 3675, 4410, 4900, 6300, 7350, 8820, 11025, 14700 and 22050. That's an impressive collection and really evenly spread, which is a consequence of its prime factors being both relatively diverse and quite small.
Note particularly that both 50 and 60, the field rates of monochrome broadcast video (and, not coincidentally, the frequencies of the AC electricity mains) in Europe and the US respectively, are in that list. So if we're sampling at 44100Hz, we can packetize those samples at either 50Hz or 60Hz and achieve constant packet sizes in both cases.
So are 245, which is only 2% more than 240, the standard number of visible lines for a 60Hz video field; and 294, which is only 1% more than 288, the standard number of visible lines for a 50Hz field. Looks promising!
Breaking all those numbers down:
44100 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 x 7 x 7
50 = 2 x 5 x 5 and 294 = 2 x 3 x 7 x 7
60 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 5 and 245 = 5 x 7 x 7
Both of those splits use up all the factors of 44100 except one of the threes. So we can packetize our 44100Hz samples at the video field rate, and then sub-packetize again at something really close to the number of visible scan lines normally used with that field rate, and end up with three samples per scan line - 96 bits, for 2-channel 16-bit PCM - and that's all just amazingly tidy and should be well within what's achievable with tiny or maybe even no tweaks to existing VTR hardware, which in fact it turned out to be.
On a CD, samples are processed in groups of six rather than three, and the timecode base is 75Hz rather than 50Hz or 60Hz. Wikipedia has the gory details.
Before Sony's 48kHz 16-bit PCM DAT got released, a lot of videotape-based digital audio had had to deal with the NTSC-driven video field rate reduction from 60Hz to 60/1.001 or roughly 59.94Hz, and gone with a corresponding reduction in audio sampling rate from 44.1kHz to 44.056kHz. So I wonder how many CDs have been mastered two cents sharp and 0.1% short.
posted by flabdablet at 7:03 AM on October 5, 2022 [4 favorites]
He's closer to the mark where he mentions "careful choice of parameters" and it's my contention that the particular careful choice he ends up citing is only made possible by the nicely spread collection of factors that 44100 has.
44100 is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28, 30, 35, 36, 42, 45, 49, 50, 60, 63, 70, 75, 84, 90, 98, 100, 105, 126, 140, 147, 150, 175, 180, 196, 210, 225, 245, 252, 294, 300, 315, 350, 420, 441, 450, 490, 525, 588, 630, 700, 735, 882, 900, 980, 1050, 1225, 1260, 1470, 1575, 1764, 2100, 2205, 2450, 2940, 3150, 3675, 4410, 4900, 6300, 7350, 8820, 11025, 14700 and 22050. That's an impressive collection and really evenly spread, which is a consequence of its prime factors being both relatively diverse and quite small.
Note particularly that both 50 and 60, the field rates of monochrome broadcast video (and, not coincidentally, the frequencies of the AC electricity mains) in Europe and the US respectively, are in that list. So if we're sampling at 44100Hz, we can packetize those samples at either 50Hz or 60Hz and achieve constant packet sizes in both cases.
So are 245, which is only 2% more than 240, the standard number of visible lines for a 60Hz video field; and 294, which is only 1% more than 288, the standard number of visible lines for a 50Hz field. Looks promising!
Breaking all those numbers down:
44100 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 x 7 x 7
50 = 2 x 5 x 5 and 294 = 2 x 3 x 7 x 7
60 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 5 and 245 = 5 x 7 x 7
Both of those splits use up all the factors of 44100 except one of the threes. So we can packetize our 44100Hz samples at the video field rate, and then sub-packetize again at something really close to the number of visible scan lines normally used with that field rate, and end up with three samples per scan line - 96 bits, for 2-channel 16-bit PCM - and that's all just amazingly tidy and should be well within what's achievable with tiny or maybe even no tweaks to existing VTR hardware, which in fact it turned out to be.
On a CD, samples are processed in groups of six rather than three, and the timecode base is 75Hz rather than 50Hz or 60Hz. Wikipedia has the gory details.
Before Sony's 48kHz 16-bit PCM DAT got released, a lot of videotape-based digital audio had had to deal with the NTSC-driven video field rate reduction from 60Hz to 60/1.001 or roughly 59.94Hz, and gone with a corresponding reduction in audio sampling rate from 44.1kHz to 44.056kHz. So I wonder how many CDs have been mastered two cents sharp and 0.1% short.
posted by flabdablet at 7:03 AM on October 5, 2022 [4 favorites]
So I wonder how many CDs have been mastered with all the pitches two cents sharp and runtimes 0.1% short.
More than a few.
posted by Candleman at 7:06 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
More than a few.
posted by Candleman at 7:06 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
> So I wonder how many CDs have been mastered two cents sharp and 0.1% short.
The PCM mastering equipment (such as the SONY PCM-1630) was a stand-alone unit that output a video signal to a 3/4" U-Matic recorder (and vice versa for playback). It was perfectly capable of recording audio at a 44.1 kHz sample rate to an NTSC video recorder. So I don't think that was ever a problem in the CD mastering world.
The "44.056" stuff is an artifact of how film was converted to video. Film is (was) mostly shot at 24 fps. When film was transferred to video, it was done as a process called "3:2 pull-down" which turned 24 frames of film into 30 frames of video. But wait you say, NTSC video runs at 29.97 frames per second. Yes. That's why, when we watch a NTSC tv show that was originally shot on film, it is actually running on TV that 0.1% slower. And if the audio post studio worked to NTSC video and not film, then they were also running that bit slower, too. Finally, if the location audio, or the audio medium used in post were digital, they had to be pulled own that 0.1% too, to stay in sync. This was relatively easy to do; you set the digital device to expect an external reference of 60 Hz, but you feed it video sync which is 59.94, and the resulting word clock is 44.056 kHz.
(I worked in post during that interesting time)
posted by Artful Codger at 10:35 AM on October 5, 2022 [3 favorites]
The PCM mastering equipment (such as the SONY PCM-1630) was a stand-alone unit that output a video signal to a 3/4" U-Matic recorder (and vice versa for playback). It was perfectly capable of recording audio at a 44.1 kHz sample rate to an NTSC video recorder. So I don't think that was ever a problem in the CD mastering world.
The "44.056" stuff is an artifact of how film was converted to video. Film is (was) mostly shot at 24 fps. When film was transferred to video, it was done as a process called "3:2 pull-down" which turned 24 frames of film into 30 frames of video. But wait you say, NTSC video runs at 29.97 frames per second. Yes. That's why, when we watch a NTSC tv show that was originally shot on film, it is actually running on TV that 0.1% slower. And if the audio post studio worked to NTSC video and not film, then they were also running that bit slower, too. Finally, if the location audio, or the audio medium used in post were digital, they had to be pulled own that 0.1% too, to stay in sync. This was relatively easy to do; you set the digital device to expect an external reference of 60 Hz, but you feed it video sync which is 59.94, and the resulting word clock is 44.056 kHz.
(I worked in post during that interesting time)
posted by Artful Codger at 10:35 AM on October 5, 2022 [3 favorites]
It was perfectly capable of recording audio at a 44.1 kHz sample rate to an NTSC video recorder.
That would presumably be true because those recorders were built to be able to cope with both 15734 lines per second color and 15750 lines per second monochrome NTSC variants.
But you worked in post, so tell me: how did the VTRs of the day derive their tape transport timings for playback? Did they look for a color burst in the video signal off the tape and servo the scanning drum speed until that came out to 3.579545MHz, or was there some manual adjustment involved in getting the output field rate right?
If what a VTR was feeding was not in fact a color video broadcasting chain but the input of a digital CD mastering machine, was there some way for the mastering machine to feed back its own crystal-derived reference clock so that the VTR would send exactly 15750 lines per second? Inquiring minds must know.
posted by flabdablet at 1:03 PM on October 5, 2022
That would presumably be true because those recorders were built to be able to cope with both 15734 lines per second color and 15750 lines per second monochrome NTSC variants.
But you worked in post, so tell me: how did the VTRs of the day derive their tape transport timings for playback? Did they look for a color burst in the video signal off the tape and servo the scanning drum speed until that came out to 3.579545MHz, or was there some manual adjustment involved in getting the output field rate right?
If what a VTR was feeding was not in fact a color video broadcasting chain but the input of a digital CD mastering machine, was there some way for the mastering machine to feed back its own crystal-derived reference clock so that the VTR would send exactly 15750 lines per second? Inquiring minds must know.
posted by flabdablet at 1:03 PM on October 5, 2022
> That would presumably be true because those recorders were built to be able to cope with both 15734 lines per second color and 15750 lines per second monochrome NTSC variants.
Without looking it up, I believe it's because there was enough redundancy in the video encoding of the digital audio, and sufficient buffering (ie play memory) in the PCM unit that there was enough "slack" to stream out the decoded digital audio at the desired 44.1 kHz sample rate. It didn't require a nice integral relationship between the video frame rate and the sampling rate.
> how did the VTRs of the day derive their tape transport timings for playback? Did they look for a color burst in the video signal off the tape and servo the scanning drum speed until that came out to 3.579545MHz, or was there some manual adjustment involved in getting the output field rate right?
Play speed was regulated by video frame rate, which could come from an internal crystal-controlled framerate generator, but more commonly all video recorders and players were fed an external sync signal (usually video black or just the sync pulse) so that all machines would be on a common reference. I think the drum servo system was always hunting to maximize the read signal from the recorded helical stripes.
> If what a VTR was feeding was not in fact a color video broadcasting chain but the input of a digital CD mastering machine, was there some way for the mastering machine to feed back its own crystal-derived reference clock so that the VTR would send exactly 15750 lines per second? Inquiring minds must know.
I believe (again without looking it up) the mastering unit - eg the PCM-1630 - would always pump out a video signal whether recording or not, and the VTR always synced to that.
Here's the manual for the PCM1630. There's a system block diagram (Fig 1-8) that shows the clocking.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:48 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
Without looking it up, I believe it's because there was enough redundancy in the video encoding of the digital audio, and sufficient buffering (ie play memory) in the PCM unit that there was enough "slack" to stream out the decoded digital audio at the desired 44.1 kHz sample rate. It didn't require a nice integral relationship between the video frame rate and the sampling rate.
> how did the VTRs of the day derive their tape transport timings for playback? Did they look for a color burst in the video signal off the tape and servo the scanning drum speed until that came out to 3.579545MHz, or was there some manual adjustment involved in getting the output field rate right?
Play speed was regulated by video frame rate, which could come from an internal crystal-controlled framerate generator, but more commonly all video recorders and players were fed an external sync signal (usually video black or just the sync pulse) so that all machines would be on a common reference. I think the drum servo system was always hunting to maximize the read signal from the recorded helical stripes.
> If what a VTR was feeding was not in fact a color video broadcasting chain but the input of a digital CD mastering machine, was there some way for the mastering machine to feed back its own crystal-derived reference clock so that the VTR would send exactly 15750 lines per second? Inquiring minds must know.
I believe (again without looking it up) the mastering unit - eg the PCM-1630 - would always pump out a video signal whether recording or not, and the VTR always synced to that.
Here's the manual for the PCM1630. There's a system block diagram (Fig 1-8) that shows the clocking.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:48 PM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
Nice! Thank you.
That clock generator section shows that the system was switchable between two master clock oscillators, one at the NTSC color carrier frequency of 14.31818MHz for use with 44056Hz audio sampling and the other at 14.3325MHz for use with 44100Hz sampling. There's also another switch that selects between that local master clock oscillator and a phase-locked loop fed from either an external word sync input or a video composite sync input, which will be that external sync signal you mentioned.
I'm guessing that "word sync" would have been a pulse train at the audio sampling rate (44100Hz or 44056Hz). "Composite sync" is standard terminology for the sync portion of a video signal, which consists of a pulse train at the horizontal line rate, with bursts of pulses at twice the line rate between fields.
posted by flabdablet at 6:03 AM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]
That clock generator section shows that the system was switchable between two master clock oscillators, one at the NTSC color carrier frequency of 14.31818MHz for use with 44056Hz audio sampling and the other at 14.3325MHz for use with 44100Hz sampling. There's also another switch that selects between that local master clock oscillator and a phase-locked loop fed from either an external word sync input or a video composite sync input, which will be that external sync signal you mentioned.
I'm guessing that "word sync" would have been a pulse train at the audio sampling rate (44100Hz or 44056Hz). "Composite sync" is standard terminology for the sync portion of a video signal, which consists of a pulse train at the horizontal line rate, with bursts of pulses at twice the line rate between fields.
posted by flabdablet at 6:03 AM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]
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