Are CDs dying because of what once made it king?

Back in the 80′s when the compact disc first became available, there was a debate over which was the better choice: CDs or vinyl. Twenty-five years later, the current king of physical media, the CD, is now being threatened by the latest advancement: digital downloads.

There were two major arguments for CDs against vinyl. First and foremost was the fact that you never had to clean the CDs. Vinyl’s biggest issue has always been its scratches and pops which may appeal to some as giving vinyl its “charm”, but I always found those defects to detract from listening to more quiet music. Second was the portability of the CD. Vinyl albums were 12″ in diameter and required a physical needle to play the music on it. That made carrying them around impractical and gave way to the success of CDs.

What threatens CDs now isn’t even tangible. Yes, you do still need a physical device to play your music, but the music itself has been compressed to a small group of lossy 0′s and 1′s so that you can cram hundreds of albums onto a portable hard drive. Even worse, you don’t have to buy a physical CD anymore, you can download the file directly to your device. In fact, you can use services like Pandora to stream music to your device and not have to download anything at all.

What we’ve learned in these twenty-five years is that vinyl hasn’t really gone away. Purists knew all along that the dynamic range of the analog album was far superior to the lesser quality of the CD, but convenience ruled. Now vinyl is back with a vengeance, but it’s not going to retake the throne of king of physical media ever again. CD sales are declining in the face of what it killed vinyl with – convenience. Today we can go to the iTunes or Amazon stores and download albums immediately. I have to admit that as much of a purist I am, I chose to buy an album on a Tuesday on iTunes rather than go to a store after work because I wanted to hear it as soon as I could get it. I never felt that way before downloads, I always knew that the CDs would be there on the shelf for me later. Downloads feed your need to listen to your music now, and listen immediately. I go for walks at lunchtime which is a perfect time to listen to an album. Unfortunately, there are no major record stores near work so I can’t go out at lunchtime and pick it up then.

There’s one other factor that pushed CDs ahead of albums which I didn’t mention and that’s the “extra track” factor. CDs sometimes had an extra track on them which studios used to entice people to buy the CD instead of the vinyl. It sure worked, I bought a lot of CDs because of that, but I haven’t seen that tactic used until this past week. I had mentioned on Twitter that I finally had a chance to listen to more of Lady Gaga than just “Poker Face”. I generally don’t care about modern music since I feel the old school style of writing a song has been lost, but Lady Gaga’s music had that old school feel to it, so I decided to pick up her album. I found that the track listing on the deluxe version of “The Fame Monster” on iTunes was different than the physical CD in the store. The CD seemed more like an EP companion to “The Fame” so I checked iTunes to see if buying “The Fame” and “The Fame Monster” was a good deal. What I found was that there were two tracks on the iTunes album that weren’t on the CDs. To make matters worse, those tracks were listed as “album only”, so I couldn’t buy the CDs in the store and then buy the two tracks off of iTunes. Without thinking, I decided to press the “Buy Now” button on my iPhone and let the album download over 3G while I looked at other CDs in the store. I had to pause to think of what just transpired. I almost felt guilty that I was buying an album over 3G while standing in a CD store, but by the time I left I had the whole album on my phone and ready to hook up to my car stereo.

The advantage of convenience got turned on its head the next day when I wanted to listen to the album on my home stereo which was never wired for a digital device since I bought most of my music on CD. I had the wiring, that was easy, but I didn’t have a line level connector so I had to do the whole thing in analog without overmodulating the output from the iPhone. I know there are line level adapters for this, but I never had to get one. It was the first time I played a paid-for MP3 on my home stereo and I wasn’t sure that what I bought was worth the money. I could hear obvious limitations in the songs and that the quality wasn’t up to what I expected.

So that made me wonder: is this 1986 all over again? Does the convenience, but lesser quality of MP3s mirror what the CDs did to vinyl? With vinyl coming back, what does that say about the longevity of the MP3?

Personally, I think this is a step backwards. We can download so much so fast nowadays and storage space is so cheap that we should be getting higher quality versions of songs, not lesser. If you think about the steps we’ve been taking compared to the technology out there, we went from high quality vinyl to capped CDs to lossy MP3s. However, we have the ability to listen to quality such as 24 bit/96 kHz audio with lossless compression, and we don’t. Unfortunately, I think that there’s no market for it since most people listen to music with earbuds or in their car, but I think a market of high quality audio can thrive if it isn’t botched with competing formats like the DVD-Audio and SACD issues we had.
Today we have Blu-Ray which has the ability to be a transport for the audio quality we want. It’s an accepted format for home theater, and even if people believe that downloads are the wave of the future, quality should still be the paramount issue.

So before you ditch your CD player for a digital download, ask yourself if the convenience will be worth it in the long run.

Tags: CDs, delomni, iTunes, Music, starman

Category: Entertainment