CD Players turn 40!
 

Is it time for a comeback?

CD players turn 40: Do music compact discs have a comeback left?

:wave:

I recall exactly where I was when I heard a cd played on the radio. I was in a place where I lived in 1980 and 1981.

Interesting, because 2022 was the first time in decades where vinyl outsold CDs...

I remember first CD that was mastered digital I think was The Police -- Synchronicity

CDs are digital -- I can get digital on a download. Now vinyl cannot be downloaded -- all analog -- all the good sound and the bad clicks and noise. That's what AM radio was -- the ability one's ear had to sort out the content from the noise floor. My ear is real good at that. FM is no fun.

I didn't know CDs had gone out of style. I have a CD player in my car and a couple dozen CD "albums" that I listen to when I'm driving. One was never available any other way, and was a "specialty" purchase at Starbucks, a curated compilation of Genesis songs that I bought the same year I went to their concert a bunch of years ago.

My Miata has a cd and cassette player. Still use a boom box cd player on the porch. I have 8 tracks in the attic. 45s and albums in the closet. Darn I'm getting old.

I like CDs. But, I got rid of all of them and stored my music in a lossless format in the cloud, about 1500 albums. So, I can make a perfect CD copy in about 5 minutes to play on any CD player.

My first CD player (1984) developed a problem and I took it in for repair. When I phoned to see if it was ready for pick up I couldn't get the assistant to understand that I'd brought in a compact disk player, not a trash compactor.

I still use CDs. Along with radio where I enjoy hearing a little blah blah. So yes, I'm old fashioned!

Just ordered a Bose Wave Clock Radio yesterday to replace the one we bought 26 years ago.

The sound is magnificent and it is easier for my wife to operate because it’s just about the same as the original. She really enjoys the music and doesn’t feel comfortable hunting through the computer for our music library which is extensive.

I bought her the Queen Greatest Hits 3 pack and when we tried to play them we were heartbroken that our first purchase together croaked. She’s going to kill me for buying it because of our age. I don’t care, I’ve been killed before. Lol.

I’ve been an audiophile for many decades. CDs played thru any CD player sound terrible. What you need is a good DAC (digital to analog converter) to get the best sound which can cost a couple thousand $$$ up to $100,000.
Vinyl can sound good too but you will need to spend some good money on this setup (more than what a DAC costs) to get as good of sound quality as digital.
I have thousands of CDs that haven’t been played since I ripped them to my server. It was proven almost 20 years ago that a cd ripped to a hard drive will sound better than the original cd. I have been streaming music either from my local server or from hi-res streaming services like Tidal for almost 20 years.
I setup music servers which allows you to play your music to any room in your house from your iPhone or iPad. (Check out Roon). I have access to millions of tracks of music from my iPhone/iPad (check out Tidal, Qobuz). This setup also streams hi-res music in formats like flac/dsd/MQA. If you have an Apple CarPlay system in your car, there is now an app so you can access your music server in your house and stream music to your car anywhere, so there is no need for Sirius/XM any longer.
The trend for many years is to stream music from many places like apple, Amazon, tidal, Qobuz, Spotify, pandora, and others, so if you want to compare revenues from purchased digital music vs vinyl (analog music), apple and Amazon alone sell more music in a month than vinyl sales for a year, digital music streaming brings in many billions of $$$ a year whereas vinyl brings in a billion a year.

I still have about 400 CDs in my guest room closet. Maybe half are also on my iPad, laptop, iPhone, etc. I don’t often play one. But in the past couple years I’ve listened to 4 CD sets of The Delmore Brothers, the Louvin Brothers, and Reno and Smiley on CD in my car and found a number of songs I now perform. Also important, these CDs came with song lists, liner notes, the names of composers and players, photos, bios. That isn’t easily available online. I use YouTube a lot for songs and pay $15 a month so it doesn’t have ads. That’s good for single songs and sometimes whole albums. But while SiriusXM has the SiriuslySinatra channel, and that’s delightful, I can’t find the specific song I want. If I go to Spotify as ask for a specific band, I’ll also get lots of other bands or singers. CDs are nearly dead, but I’ll miss them. That said, when I buy a new “album”, it’s usually from iTunes and not a physical CD.

Cd's
 

Sold my 100's of cd's when purging to move here to TV and moved to the cloud/music library, so can listen to favorite classic rock anytime. And download when needed. Never used my car cd player.

Same here..I kinda miss them though

Joe