will CDs eventually become obsolete due to no CD transports surviving?

[pablolie]

DVD-RW drives are all over the place for desktop computers, so no, CDs are not going anywhere yet. Neither streaming services nor digital HD stores are yet ready to replace media for true music lovers, IMO. We need album art.

 

[jsrtheta]

They were ridiculously bad, I hated them even while I used them.

When I heard my first CD on my system (Crowded House, Temple of Low Men) I was ecstatic. A sound man I knew happily took my vinyl (nearly blowing out the suspension on his car when he loaded them into his trunk) and I never looked back.

 

[pablolie]

They were ridiculously bad, I hated them even while I used them.

When I heard my first CD on my system (Crowded House, Temple of Low Men) I was ecstatic. A sound man I knew happily took my vinyl (nearly blowing out the suspension on his car when he loaded them into his trunk) and I never looked back.

While I echo the experience, and ditched my Tech 1200 ages ago, I believe in the premise of letting others enjoy whatever they enjoy. There are people there collecting stamps in an era where I don't think anyone sends letters or postcards anymore. I would not be surprised if postcards make a comeback though.

If anyone tells me "vinyl is much better and sounds better because it is true to the original" i'll LOL and will spit out whatever wine I am drinking, but if someone is happy with the sound and simply enjoys the ritual, nostalgia and larger album art - hey, more power to them.

 

[Robin L]

"Horrible" compared to what?

Cassettes, in particular commercial prerecorded cassettes, were horrible compared to a decent LP.

Truly?

Truly. I've made thousands of cassettes. Anyone paying attention would hear the loss of high frequencies, the wow and flutter and the early onset of audible distortion.

They were era correct and quite good!

Cassettes were of the era, and there were a lot of subpar LPs being produced in the 1970s and 1980s but let's not kid ourselves. When CDs appeared in the mid-1980s, it was game over for those "era correct" formats.

Our baselines - for comparisons - have changed, along with the technology.

Whatever, I managed to get ten CDs I really like for $12 today, they are all in perfect condition. I do not mourn the passing of these inherently flawed audio formats.

 

[TunaBug]

Most of the responses in the thread seem to be related to whether CDs will be obsolete, whereas the title of the thread has "...due to no CD transports surviving". I think that the human race will eventually stop messing about with CDs, but I think it will not be because of lack of hardware to read them.

Does anybody produce any products on 3.5" floppies any more? Because you can still buy drives to read them, even new ones, so regardless of why 3.5" floppies are obsolete, it is NOT because drives are no longer available. And I think that market forces mean drives will be available long after CDs cease to be produced. Actually turntables would be a good example: before the current renewed interest in vinyl, when LPs were actually pretty much obsolete, there were still many companies producing turntables.

While I own physical media for almost everything in my library, for the past 10-ish years playback for me has been only from lossless rips. New purchases are never "played" from media, just ripped. Hopefully I'll never have to rip them again, but I thought that in the 90s the first time I ripped everything to mp3. Although since everything is now lossless I think it's reasonable that the only thing that might change is the compression/container format, and then I would simple do a one time lossless conversion on computer to convert everything. So from that standpoint the music on the discs will always be accessible, as long as I'm alive, and as long as my heir(s) care to mess about with it.

 

[pseudoid]

Cassettes, in particular commercial prerecorded cassettes, were horrible compared to a decent LP.
Truly. I've made thousands of cassettes. Anyone paying attention would hear the loss of high frequencies, the wow and flutter and the early onset of audible distortion.
Cassettes were of the era, and there were a lot of subpar LPs being produced in the 1970s and 1980s but let's not kid ourselves. When CDs appeared in the mid-1980s, it was game over for those "era correct" formats.
Whatever, I managed to get ten CDs I really like for $12 today, they are all in perfect condition. I do not mourn the passing of these inherently flawed audio formats.

I don't recall owning any 'pre-recorded' cassettes, but I had the pleasure of nerd-ing out with Nakamichi and HK cassette recorders.
Hundreds of TDK SA60(90)/SA-X100... simply because I could not take my LP music collection on road-trips; and lacking alternatives, before trans/portable 'era-correct' media, as the CDs. I also dabbled with the DAT recorders/players and also ended up losing that fight to the 'Hooligan B*st*rds and their Shenanigans'.
There are even some "collectors" of DAT paraphernalia. [link]

 

[pablolie]

Most of the responses in the thread seem to be related to whether CDs will be obsolete, whereas the title of the thread has "...due to no CD transports surviving". I think that the human race will eventually stop messing about with CDs, but I think it will not be because of lack of hardware to read them.

Does anybody produce any products on 3.5" floppies any more? Because you can still buy drives to read them, even new ones.

While I own physical media for almost everything in my library, for the past 10-ish years playback for me has been only from lossless rips. New purchases are never "played" from media, just ripped. Hopefully I'll never have to rip them again, but I thought that in the 90s the first time I ripped everything to mp3. Although since everything is now lossless I think it's reasonable that the only thing that might change is the compression/container format, and then I would simple do a one time lossless conversion on computer to convert everything. So from that standpoint the music on the discs will always be accessible, as long as I'm alive, and as long as my heir(s) care to mess about with it.

That would mean no one is producing CD/DVD/BlueR transport anymore, of which there's zero indication right now. Due to the backward compatibility and the fact there are billions of music CDs out there that can be bought for little and -if well recorded- provide utter accuracy... plus come with album art, it is premature to talk about the death of CDs. Sure the numbers have come down, but music lovers continue to buy them.

There will be plenty of CD transports for time being. For heaven's sake, where do all the cassette players that are somehow going through a revival coming from?

When I go through my music library at times, to me it is interesting. I kept (and still keep) buying CDs from my favorite artists, but sometime around -when was it?- 2005 digital MP3s versions started to come out, and due to the fact I loved the convenience of digital, I started buying more and more. I still come across popular music at th time that was sold in 128k or such formats. A few years later it was 192k. When I come across those in my library, I am sometimes tempted to go get the stuff in a more 2020s appropriate format but then... why? How often am I really going to listen to "In Da Club" again? :-D Nah it's fine at 192k.

 

[Robin L]

I don't recall owning any 'pre-recorded' cassettes, but I had the pleasure of nerd-ing out with Nakamichi and HK cassette recorders.
Hundreds of TDK SA60(90)/SA-X100... simply because I could not take my LP music collection on road-trips; and lacking alternatives, before trans/portable 'era-correct' media, as the CDs. I also dabbled with the DAT recorders/players and also ended up losing that fight to the 'Hooligan B*st*rds and their Shenanigans'.
There are even some "collectors" of DAT paraphernalia. [link]

I worked at Tower Records in the mid 1980s, first in the classical cassette department then later in the accessories department where blank cassettes were sold. Prerecorded cassettes are the worst and the majors sold tons of them. I made plenty of cassettes on good tape, the best being Sony metal tape in ceramic housings. I had a Nak deck but my best deck was a three-headed, dual capstan Yamaha deck with adjustable bias - you could hear the effect of trimming the bias via the playback head. DATs suck because the tape was too fragile and the transports really couldn't be fixed, only replaced. I had about four of those diabolical devices.

 

[Sal1950]

When I got my first CD player (Magnovox 560) and played my first CD (Dire Straights - Brothers In Arms) I knew it
was all over for the LP but the scream'in and the bleed'in. I couldn't wait for the day I could replace all the noisy, distorted, track skipping,
short playing time, POS in my collection. I never would have dreamed of the musical nirvana I live in today with multichannel
high resolution Blu-Rays, downloadable files and streaming.
Listen to whatever trips your trigger, but compared to todays digital, all else is gaslight.

 

[deweydm]

Plenty in my collection are over 40 years old already...

Have at least one over 40 years old. Big Country - The Crossing. Didn’t buy it back in ‘83 though. (Couldn’t have afforded anything to play it with then.). Thrifted for a few bucks. Still plays perfectly.

 

[pseudoid]

I worked at Tower Records in the mid 1980s,

TowerRecords - in early 1970s - had the NYC-metro audio-market captive. Then, came CrazyEddie (mid-70s) with dirt-cheap prices, for both hardware and media (...'software' was not a thing, yet).
CrazyEddie was known to have deceptive AND aggressive sales techniques and he blitz the NYC-metro AM/FM radio w/his annoying "Oh, noooo! Iiiitzz Crazy Eddieeeeezzz..." ads.
But his 'novice' sales-force was no match for educated consumers around NY-metro audio marketplace - 1st stores in Syosset and GreenwichVillage - of that era.

 

[pseudoid]

When I got my first CD player (Magnovox 560) and played my first CD (Dire Straights - Brothers In Arms) I knew it was all over for the LP but the scream'in and the bleed'in. ...
Listen to whatever trips your trigger, but compared to todays digital, all else is gaslight.

Hey @Sal1950, what do you think of MQA?
j/k

 

[Sal1950]

But his 'novice' sales-force was no match for educated consumers around NY-metro audio marketplace - 1st stores in Syosset and GreenwichVillage - of that era

It's a shame, like almost everything else retail, the mom & pop record stores disappeared only to be replaced with ever bigger and more heartless
superstores. Sure, due to their buying power you could save a few bucks but the soul disappeared out of the buying experience. Whether LP/CD or
the Bakery, Butchershop, etc, it's a different heartless world out there.

 

[Sal1950]

Hey @Sal1950, what do you think of MQA?
j/k

It's already in my signature. LOL

 

[theREALdotnet]

In the UK, copying for any purpose is illegal, whether you keep the original or not.

 

[TunaBug]

In the UK, copying for any purpose is illegal, whether you keep the original or not. So you might as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb.

That's a shame. I have an impression that common sense prevails more frequently in UK legal system than US, but that's certainly not the case on this matter.

 

[restorer-john]

That's a shame. I have an impression that common sense prevails more frequently in UK legal system than US, but that's certainly not the case on this matter.

So you have bought thousands of Compact Discs, which come with the baked-in right to be able to play them in your home, your car, wherever and with most new cars not coming fitted with a CD player, it is perfectly reasonable to transfer those digital files of discs you own, to a compatible format able to be enjoyed in your car. Nobody is gong to jail for that.

 

[Doodski]

So you have bought thousands of Compact Discs, which come with the baked-in right to be able to play them in your home, your car, wherever and with most new cars not coming fitted with a CD player, it is perfectly reasonable to transfer those digital files of discs you own, to a compatible format able to be enjoyed in your car. Nobody is gong to jail for that.

In Canada at the last word I had on the legalities of collecting/file sharing music/movies it is legal to collect and make copies/not illegal to file share music tracks but movies and such are illegal to file share. Lots of flexibility there for sure. For example I had ~34k music files and that was legal but no movies on file.

 

[pseudoid]

image removed

We all belong in the looney asylum and the Brits are not the only ones.
Bureaucrats in EU cannot figure it out and neither can the capitalists in the US.
For certain, none of the three have been able to stop technology.
I asked google:

'consumer music copyright laws in Europe'

Third google hit explains it well, in a 2page pdf. [link]

...Sadly, most of these exceptions and limitations are optional and Member States remain free to implement them or not into their national set of rules. This has led to a huge divergence of authorised uses of copyrighted content in the form of exceptions across the EU. While one action can be legal in Sweden (i.e., covered by an exception and thus permitted without the prior authorisation from the author), the exact same action can be illegal in France...
...In 2016, the European Commission published a proposal to modernise EU copyright law. This proposal is unfortunately a missed opportunity from the consumer point of view. It focuses on the commercial battle between platforms like YouTube and the music industry. At the same time, it does nothing to fix the uncertainty consumers experience when they want to share content online, leaving consumers in a state of uncertainty about the content they share online...

It appears that not much has changed for consumers in EU since 2018, as the report by the BEUC (The European Consumer Organisation) discusses.

 

[GD Fan]

So you have bought thousands of Compact Discs, which come with the baked-in right to be able to play them in your home, your car, wherever and with most new cars not coming fitted with a CD player, it is perfectly reasonable to transfer those digital files of discs you own, to a compatible format able to be enjoyed in your car. Nobody is gong to jail for that.

Agreed. Outside of the Metallica / Lars vs. Napster debacle (Metallica was right, although Lars was a d-bag) it's hard to think of a single instance where anyone would ever know, or probably even care, about it.