Is Physical Media Still Relevant?

[FrantzM]

ACtually, for me, CDs are more a focus than ever before. Why? I am buying every single album i ever wanted remastered, FIM, MFSL, you name it...for an average of 3-8 bucks each. Its just cheap compared to almost any other medium i can find. And while i could sit here and optimize by going 24/96 on the 'relatively few' albums i would want from the selection...i choose to enjoy my system which plays (imho) very musically satisfying redbook (Zanden). And for 3 bucks, I cannot buy the MP3 for that!

Plus, I tend to play albums thru start to finish anyway, because i tend to work while listening all day, so i enjoy a straight hour of an album and 'migrating' over the course of the day from quartets thru concertos thru symphonic to large scale choral, thru guitar thru blues to chill, to hip hop, to jazz.

loydelee21

I have been buying CD on the used market too and they get the same treatment .. They are promptly ripped. I,also, like to listen to albums in their entirety and there on your HDD there is no contest... I am willing tobet that Gary's "Music Server" on the cheap will surprise you..Give it a "spin" that could be the best $350 you would have spent for such a high level of quality.

@Micro

I have qn IPad and it is my "remote control". It controls foobar and i can get any information i wish on the piece I am about to listen. I would have liked the liner notes but the Internet has most if not all the information one would ever need ...so

 

[lasercd]

As an owner of 4 CD labels you can take my comments with a grain of salt...

Just as vinyl is still alive, CDs will still be with us for years to come. I've taken the hi-res plunge. It sounds amazing. The only problem is the user experience is terrible. Conceptually its wonderful to have your entire music library on a hard drive with instant access. In practical terms it doesn't work so well. There are too many competing approaches - none of them work exceptionally well. Sure they all DO work but not in a cohesive, bullet proof way. So you spend an eternity ripping your collection to flac files....then you open up the files with a computer. Artwork? Where the hell is the artwork? Forget liner notes and lyrics...you are lucky if the cover art appears and the song titles are accurate. If they aren't maybe you have to rip the files again or "simply" edit the metadata or add a jpeg or two or three (BTW - ask a friend what metadata is and look at the expression on his face). Once a computer is in the equation the average consumer blanks out. Until Apple flips the switch, 24/96 is not on the conscience of anyone other than a small subset of audiophiles. I'm a member of the Philadelphia Area Audio Group. Very few of the members have any interest in dealing with downloads. They don't understand it. If anything they are very much vinyl-centric. I recently tried to create a discussion on various forums that I frequent about the possibility of making our releases available in lossless 24 bit formats and what possible form of delivery it might take. On the surface the comments would be comical except you realize that this represents "the average Joe" and they can't wrap their heads around the concept. They simply didn't understand what I was talking about.

CDs still represent a significant amount of income to the music industry. It might thin out but it won't go away in the immediate future. For hi-res audio to really take hold in a material way, it will literally take Apple to offer it in a fool proof, easy to digest fashion. I'm sure that isn't a day that HD Tracks is looking forward to.

From the tactile perspective CDs took a lot away from the experience of listening/collecting vinyl. Everything shrank! Now how about we take it away all together and we just have a small jpeg on our iPad or laptop to stare at? Someone will figure it all out - probably Apple - and they will figure it out relatively soon but it won't be tomorrow.

I've been to the dark side and it isn't all its cracked up to be.

Ken Golden

 

[jazdoc]

Well I'm a dedicated vinylphile, but have to admit that high end vinyl is a PITA that makes computer audio seem like kid's play. Between cleaning records, optimizing set up and the expense of a phono preamp, sometimes I feel like spilling pig entrails and chanting before putting on an LP! Let's not forget the inevitable breakage of a $5000 cartridge stylus... Furthermore, it has been my experience that many high end set ups are not optimized; indeed many are way off and the owner has no idea of what the medium is capable of. Yes, I do think vinyl is worth the trouble, but I think that streaming and downloadable music is the wave of the future. My 11 and 17 year olds have no problem downloading and cataloging their music (and frequently help their mother).

I have always thought the music companies really screwed up packaging CD's. Jewel cases are awful. They should have used an LP like jacket with a smaller inner jacket for portability...my $0.02

 

[microstrip]

(...) @Micro

I have qn IPad and it is my "remote control". It controls foobar and i can get any information i wish on the piece I am about to listen. I would have liked the liner notes but the Internet has most if not all the information one would ever need ...so

Frantz,

I would love that you were right in this question but unhappily it is not rue in classical or jazz. Most small companies produce excellent liner notes. I have found that the internet is rather poor and not reliable about most classical - mostly opinion and taste driven, but not factual (are you remembering something ? ) Other than in WBF, experts do not write for free ...

Unless you have the same preference as the millions who buy recordings from the big labels , you will not find find the equivalent of liner notes in the internet. A few weeks ago I was listening to a collection of jazz LPs I bought from Soul Note and Black Saint labels. None of the excellent small texts are available on the net. Try get something about the recordings of Harmonia Mundi, AliaVox or ECM.

 

[NorthStar]

No matter the physicality of the musical medias, or music downloaded from our PCs (Internet),
at the end it's all about the quality listening experience from high res audio recordings,
and with the less distortion & jitter possible.
Be it a 12-inch album, a 5-inch disc, a Blu disc, a USB stick, a PC based Music server, etc.

A Live Classical music concert in a great hall?
The total distortion and amount of jitter there, is natural and of no concern any longer.

 

[Ron Party]

As an owner of 4 CD labels you can take my comments with a grain of salt...

Well, I for one take your comments to heart, particularly since you (like me) are a prog head.

...The only problem is the user experience is terrible. Conceptually its wonderful to have your entire music library on a hard drive with instant access. In practical terms it doesn't work so well. There are too many competing approaches - none of them work exceptionally well. Sure they all DO work but not in a cohesive, bullet proof way.

Ken, I spend what I suspect is considerably more time than most when I rip to my server (which is related to the next part of your post), and as such my system works perfectly every time. I use both JRiver for serious listening and Sonos for casual listening.

So you spend an eternity ripping your collection to flac files....then you open up the files with a computer. Artwork? Where the hell is the artwork?

I'm always amazed when I read or hear about people ripping hundreds of CDs in no time at all while they are doing something else. I rip carefully, using dBpopweramp, go on line to get hi-rez cover art instead of that which dBpoweramp gives me, and correct any errors (of which there usually are many) even to the point of properly capitalizing titles, renaming albums, correcting artist names, etc. I'm too anal to just go with whatever the rip gives me. As a result, however, my server gives me cover art and correct metadata every time. Liner notes? Now that's a different story.

 

[amirm]

I rip into WMA Lossless with WMP and it gets me high fidelity album art with no need to edit anything. Sometimes I get a rare title and it doesn't have it but that is 1 out of 100 if that. I do not worry about accurate rips and such. I have done some testing and find no variations so I don't worry about it.

 

[Ron Party]

Amir, what rez cover art does WMP get you?

 

[lasercd]

Bob Katz turned me into a Mac guy 20 years ago and I never looked back. Even getting a Mac Mini was more than I wanted to deal with in order to get hi-res into the Bricasti. I went with the Bryston BDP-1. Sounds wonderful. Software? Not so wonderful - whether its Mpad or Mpod or Bryston's own Max front end. I do get artwork - occasionally the correct one. I can spend lots of time working on the metadata making sure that everything works flawlessly but frankly I don't want to expend all that time and energy. For the meantime I'm OK walking over to the MB Tech UMT, popping in a disc and kicking back. When I need to hear hi-res I use the Bryston set up.

All I'm saying is that we aren't there yet. It's inevitable that physical media will be greatly diminished but I think practically speaking we are 5-10 years away. Despite rumors on blogs, labels big and small keep releasing CDs.

 

[amirm]

Amir, what rez cover art does WMP get you?

WMP is low res. But Zune fetches higher resolution ones it uses as screen saver when playing the tracks.

 

[mep]

Ken-I am much more pessimistic about how much longer CDs will be sold. Itunes and other sites that offer downloads have damn near killed off CDs already. It’s getting harder and harder to find any store that has much of a selection of CDs beyond the current top 10 on the charts.

As for comparing holding a CD to seeing a picture of the cover of an album on your touch screen of choice, that doesn’t matter much to me. You can’t read squat on the liners of a CD without a magnifying glass. There is no joy inside those *jewel* boxes.

 

[NorthStar]

The true content is read from the ears anyway. :b

* And if you wanna get real info about it, it's all on the Internet.

 

[fas42]

Ken-I am much more pessimistic about how much longer CDs will be sold. Itunes and other sites that offer downloads have damn near killed off CDs already. It’s getting harder and harder to find any store that has much of a selection of CDs beyond the current top 10 on the charts.

The shame of it is that apparently you don't have anything over there with the vitality of JBHiFi. I would challenge anyone on the forum to walk into one of their stores down here, and not walk out with an armload of CDs ...

Frank

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I ripped everything to HD a few years ago and never looked back. I sitll buy CDs, but immediately rip them. Seldom have much trouble with album art and don't care much when I do. Liner notes? I've got your liner notes right here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Round_About_Midnight

and here:

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=18404

and here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td3SE3zEVP0

and here:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupre...or-two-miles-and-monk-at-newport-1955?print=1

They're all in my remote control. May not be everybody's favorite way to listen, but it's shortcoming have been greatly exaggerated.

Tim

 

[Roger Dressler]

I ripped everything to HD a few years ago and never looked back. I still buy CDs, but immediately rip them. Seldom have much trouble with album art and don't care much when I do.

I too found ripping my CDs to HDD was a liberating experience, which helped me enjoy long-ignored discs. And on some very rare occasion where a track has bothered me for years, I can now just load it into Adobe Audition and "fix" it. Like the 8-sec fade-in on Eva Cassidy's "Autumn Leaves" or the over exuberant bass (but only at 60 Hz) on Jennifer Warnes' "Way Down Deep." A little nip and tuck can work wonders.

Back to the album art matter, a lot of my CDs are apparently too old to automatically pull in the cover art from iTunes, but by ripping them as AIF instead of WAV, it makes it dead easy to copy/paste an image into the cover art window. Just find it anywhere on the internet or even scan your own disc insert and it's good to go. I see you are ripping in HD so maybe your tool's cover art issue is something different than iTunes', but just throwing that out there as a possibility.

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

I too found ripping my CDs to HDD was a liberating experience, which helped me enjoy long-ignored discs. And on some very rare occasion where a track has bothered me for years, I can now just load it into Adobe Audition and "fix" it. Like the 8-sec fade-in on Eva Cassidy's "Autumn Leaves" or the over exuberant bass (but only at 60 Hz) on Jennifer Warnes' "Way Down Deep." A little nip and tuck can work wonders.

Back to the album art matter, a lot of my CDs are apparently too old to automatically pull in the cover art from iTunes, but by ripping them as AIF instead of WAV, it makes it dead easy to copy/paste an image into the cover art window. Just find it anywhere on the internet or even scan your own disc insert and it's good to go. I see you are ripping in HD so maybe your tool's cover art issue is something different than iTunes', but just throwing that out there as a possibility.

Best program I ever used when I was needledropping. Wish I could find another copy.

 

[Wasatch]

I still like physical media.

 

[Roger Dressler]

Best program I ever used when I was needledropping. Wish I could find another copy.

You cannot find Adobe Audition?

 

[NorthStar]

I still like physical media.

The ritual? :b

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

You cannot find Adobe Audition?

yes, but not at the price I want to pay.