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Interesting that CD's would take over the world. They did, and then there was Napster and streaming.

Now there is retro market back to vinyl LP's.

I guess the millenials and Z'ers will never the joy of being able to walk into a record store, buy a 12 inch LP and actually be able to read the liner notes, without a magnifying glass.

I really loved CDs for data once it got to the point that you could burn your own. At the time, a 650MB backup device was freaking awesome, even if it was effectively a worm drive. I still have some ancient data archived on CDs. Even better was writable DVDs, for obvious reasons.

For music and stuff, CDs were the bomb. Early ones were pretty well made. I still have the very first CD I ever bought (Dark Side of the Moon). Still works fine. I've tested it, and it is still error-free. More modern disks are a bit more iffy. Like everything else, cheapness of manufacure = crap.

Sound quality of CDs is excellent. I'm not one of those guys with 'golden ears', so I really don't care about the differences between analogue media, i.e., vinyl LPs. A touch of tinnitus doesn't help that much. I rip all of my music and generally use high-quality mp3s (384bps+) rather than a lossless format like flac, because mp3s are pretty much guaranteed to work in any device. Back when you could still get a car with a CD player, most of them actually would play mp3s on a data CD. At the time, I was ripping at about 128-256bps, so I could fit almost 11 hours of music on a CD! When on a trip, I'd have a few disks with different types of music on them. It was excellent.

With the exception of computers I am always late to the party when it comes to new tech. Didn’t get my first CD player until 1005, and my first smart phone until 2022.

Bought a Timex Sinclair 1000 computer in 1983 and programmed some work calculations in basic.

My very first CD was Tschaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The back of the jewel case had a big red sticker that warned that the disc contained a DIGITAL RECORDING OF REAL CANNONS that could DAMAGE YOUR SPEAKERS if played too loudly.

The warnings were silly of course, but it did help hype the new technology.