*I should have expected there to be an avid CD-hater out there.
Please share your wisdom. Expound on all the “lies about CDs”. I’d love to read about how horrible they are, especially in comparison to what they replaced: Reel-to-reel, Vinyl, Cassette and 8-Track tape. *
Don’t forget the wax cylinder...or the 78s which broke if you dropped them.
CDs never were able to live up to the hype but each format that preceded them was just worse. It’s nice that there are some who are content to listen to vinyl still in this day and age, but let’s be serious, just like audiotape, you are slowly eroding the media every time you listen to it—no matter how well you take care of it. Does that make any sense?
And yes, in the future everything will be digital, lossless and totally portable. [by the way, I’d like someone to compare the actual weight of 4TB of Flac audio versus the equivalent of vinyl] Some people will still complain about the loss of their precious album cover art, how the sound isn’t as warm, etc, but people probably complained when the buggy whip was replaced, too.
In my experience, they absolutely lived up to it.
The only possible exception is in regard to scratches, skips, etc. Early Sony players were able to deal with scratches just fabulously, but later, cheaper models not so much. I suspect that the error-correction circuitry is relatively expensive, and so was dropped or scaled down for consumer-priced models.
Still, they handle scratches far better than vinyl, and the hot interior of a car far better than cassettes. Also, a CD can be resurfaced for a couple of bucks and returned to like-new condition. How about the scratched LP's?
I think CD's are and were everything I'd ever heard of or hoped they would be. But maybe that's just me. ;-)
“you are slowly eroding the media every time you listen to it—no matter how well you take care of it.”
And you are INSTANTLY destroying it when you -oops- scratch that delicate surface. Just like the phonograph. Everything old is new again.
At least cassettes can take a tossing to the side easily and don’t have to be carefully placed back in their precious holders.