Compact discs and players

Glen_Lee

Glen_Lee

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As a family we have spent the last few days holed up with Covid. Queue my 14 year old daughter taking an interest in the boxes of CD's that we had forgotten about.

We had a great time rediscovering the CDs and got me thinking about the format. I have to be honest I have been swept along by streaming services. I have a turntable, amp and decent speakers too. I find this bit of a faff, and dont really bother with the few vinyl albums that I have. What I don't have anymore is an actual CD player. My daughter used a DVD player to play the albums. I'm quite nostalgic about CD's, having really got into music in the early 1990s.

I know it is a sensitive subject to discuss which format is better than another - curious, if the CD is still a popular format? I'm now thinking of either picking up a separate unit and connecting to my amp - plenty of cheap second hand units out in the wild. Or, looking at more of hi-fi system including a DAB facility which is very popular in this house.

Had funny staring down a new rabbit hole ;)
 
The best bit is spending time rediscovering all that music! I would guess CD isn't much of a popular format any more as so many people sacrifice quality for convenience (and it is another rabbit hole figuring out just how much is being sacrificed).

I use a Meridian 596 DVD Player to play my CDs. Or rather I used to until I got an Innuos Zen server-streamer which I now tend to use as it has all my CDs and other digital music on the internal drive and also allows me to stream and get Internet radio. So yeah I have also ended up going for convenience. I also have a good vinyl setup and enjoy getting that spinning from time to time but although I prefer the sound, and some of my stuff is only on vinyl, I do find I need to be in the mood for sitting down and properly listening rather than having it on in the background. Vinyl almost forces you to actively listen which makes it more engaging once you overcome the laziness hump of choosing, cueing up and enjoying the music.

I still have the Meridian but I just tend to use the innuos as the music already on there. Occasionally I'll play it straight from CD but I can't really discern any difference between ripped CD and original. I guess some would say the ripped CD might be better as it's been reclocked and goes through a DACmagic instead of whatever Boothroyd Stuart put in the 596. Then again I think the Meridians had decent DACs in them, they seemed to be well thought of at the time.
 
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I still proudly play CDs. I think I’m one of very few still holding a torch for them. I don’t want my playing of music to be reliant upon an internet connection.

I know a lot of people love vinyl and fair play to them, but I’ve heard so much on music chat forums about problems with brand new vinyl, people repeatedly sending LPs back, etc, to me CDs sound good (obviously depending what you play them through) and are more practical in that you can do things you can’t with a LP, such as play them in the car. I realise not all cars even come with CD players now, but when I last changed car I ruled several motors out just because of that.

Again, I doubt many do this anymore, but all my CDs are in my iTunes library and on an iPod, one of the last generation of Classics with the click wheel, not the Touch ones that look like a phone. I use my iPod out and about a lot, and love that I’m not reliant on the Internet for it. Also my iTunes library is backed up on an external drive, so if my laptop dies it’s not a problem restoring it all

Get those CDs out of storage, proudly display them (if you have room) and play the heck out of them.
 
I also have a car that's 12 years old and has a CD multi changer in the head unit. But if you have put your CDs into iTunes (which is what I did) then you could have put them all on a USB stick and plugged that into most head units that came after CD drives were deemed old in car audio. I think my car stereo takes thumb drives and CDs. However I also use an old 80 GB iPod with the LCD screen and thumbwheel straight into the Aux socket in the central armrest.
 
Tivoli Audio Model One, my favourite way to listen to the radio. Not a big fan of CD's as I find YouTube has literally every album in existence. Not an audiophile either so no problem with low bitrates or encoding etc.

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Still play CD's, but most of mine are ripped, as i have for a long time just ripped them as soon as i got them. Newer ones at 192 or 320, but some older ones still at 128. I like the convenience of digital and also have a Spotify premium account.

I also still have a turntable and other hifi gear in storage, but have no interest in going back to vinyl. In the house i play CD's / Mp3's via my DVD player and Sonos Beam and they sound just great. My car has a CD player, but i rarely use it as i have a memory stick into AUX and can play music via BT from my phone, so Spotify or PowerAmp.

Even back when i was a bit of a hi-fi head, it was more about the music than the medium, so i have never gotten that stressed about ultimate sound quality. I could bore about the technical merits of mp3 vs vinyl and could make as many arguments FOR digital over vinyl (which has many inherent failings), but really i just like to enjoy music and films at reasonable playback quality.
 
I am a bit of a dinosaur I’m afraid to say. I still have Hi-Fi separates and enjoy listening to cd’s and vinyl. I’ve never streamed music and to be honest wouldn’t know to do it as I’m not technically minded. Most of my separates were bought secondhand, Marantz amp and CD player, Yamaha cassette deck, Cambridge Audio tuner, Thorens TD160 turntable and Dynaudio speakers. It sounds great to me and as good as my mates £20,000 Naim setup to my ears. You could probably get a bargain CD player as most folk go for streaming systems these days.
 
NeilJ said:
I am a bit of a dinosaur I’m afraid to say. I still have Hi-Fi separates and enjoy listening to cd’s and vinyl. I’ve never streamed music and to be honest wouldn’t know to do it as I’m not technically minded. Most of my separates were bought secondhand, Marantz amp and CD player, Yamaha cassette deck, Cambridge Audio tuner, Thorens TD160 turntable and Dynaudio speakers. It sounds great to me and as good as my mates £20,000 Naim setup to my ears. You could probably get a bargain CD player as most folk go for streaming systems these days.
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20k steup?o_O
 
Glen_Lee said:
20k steup?o_O
Click to expand...

That’s nothing in the great scheme of HiFi things, you can spend that on a DAC, or indeed on 1 meter of cable.

Going back to your original point, be slightly wary of older CD players, some of them have lasers and mechanisms that are no longer available if they go wrong.

Marantz and Cambridge Audio (Richer Sounds) make decent new CD players at not stupid money.
 
Oh yeah it's easy to spend far more than 20k (if you have it lying around lol!) I've seen "Silent Wire" mains leads for 920EUR and that's not even their speaker cables! I routinely translate reviews for stuff costing way more than 20k. Naim gets expensive because of all the extra module upgrades like TeddyCaps and assorted PSUs etc. I've distanced myself from that world apart from helping out with a translation here and there because it's all a bit mental and I would prefer to listen to what music I like on the kit I've got than marvel at exotica.

Also it's not such a chilled and gentlemanly world to join forums about. A bit like watch forums (which I'm also not on any), people stick stakes in the ground, declare themselves experts based on the number of posts they've read and regurgitated, and will die in a ditch or flame war over the minutest of arcane technical truisms. Life is too short to be a serious or wannabe audiophile gear head. Plus you need pretty deep pockets.
 
I think CDs are still popular with people who don't want to be subject to whims of recording companies and their deals with streaming services, as well as those who have a bunch of CDs already.
I ripped all of mine into lossless files for the convenience.

There are services like Quobuz and Tidal that offer higher than CD quality streaming, but it's likely redundant. If I recall correctly, tracks sampled at 44.1kHz, 16-bits per sample were been chosen because most people couldn't tell the difference between that and higher sample rates/more bits per sample.

The bit rate for a CD is 1411 kbit/s, and I don't think there's any compression applied to the data (not even lossless compression).

I'm not sure how many people blind tested themselves whether they can tell a difference between a CD-quality file and e.g. a 320 kbit/s MP3, but I doubt there'd be many.
Besides, the speakers/headphones are generally going to affect the sound a lot more than the medium, unless the medium is a very compressed file.

Still, collecting CDs could be fine if you're inclined to collect.

Like @Zorro, I care about the music, rather than the medium, though.
 
In my experience, mp3 @ 320Kbps is noticably "better" than say 128, which in turn is noticably "better" than 64. However, these differences are only really discernable in a quiet environment where you are concentrating on the music

Digital is inherently sharper and clearer than vinyl, but it needs the top end rolling off to soften the jangly trebles often found on older conversions . The upside is that bass extension and control is way better on digital and the overall clarity and separation is often at at a level vinyl can only dream of.

I dont really buy into the argument that "vinyl is better" because that only happens, imo, on relatively complex and expensive equipment.

We used to be perfectly happy with FM radio and cassette walkmans which were at a quality level comparable to 96kbps mp3 (or less)

Always loved my Minidisc recorder with Sonys ATRAC3+ compression.
 
I have a Pioneer stacking hi-fi system, which I received for my 18th birthday. My parents paid a considerable amount of money for it. It certainly paid off because, all these years (and decades) later, it is still going and sounds almost as good as when I first had it. I also have a Panasonic personal CD player, which I play through headphones. I bought that with my own money from Curry's, before they closed here. Both of these could now be regarded as "antiques", lol.

I still buy a lot of CDs, and I listen to music on CD quite regularly. I haven't bought vinyl for decades, even though my hi-fi has a turntable, and despite the alleged surge in the popularity of vinyl. I believe this to be bullshit, because I never see anyone in my local HMV looking at or buying vinyl. I do still see plenty of people buying CDs, though. I think this is bullshit from the record companies, fed to the media, in a vain attempt to boost the sales of vinyl. It hasn't worked out that way in my town, anyway.

I think that CDs usually sound much better than downloads. I have never streamed or downloaded music in my life, and never will, but I have heard downloaded music many times, and it usually sounds flat and tinny. I guess some may think that I am a technological luddite for staying so loyal to CDs, but I don't think that the format is as dead on its arse as some may think. While CDs are still available, I'll still buy them. Vinyl belongs in the past, as far as I am concerned.
 
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