an A.V. Club Q&A poll: what will you miss about CDs?

would you like 2 cds

The ability to buy music for someone as a birthday present (or whatever)

- cds as frisbees
- microwaving them

The ability to buy music for someone as a birthday present (or whatever)

so true, hardly even makes sense to buy dvds for presents anymore... books books books.

Probably 'tidily arranged jewel cases'. There's some OCD-ish part of me that gets a lot of enjoyment from organizing my collections of ______. Wrt music, that's largely shifted to obsessively organizing my iTunes playlists, so at least there was something to fall back on.

I listen to a lot of jazz and classical music, so informative and detailed liner notes will be missed. There's nothing quite like lying on the sofa, listening to a new CD and reading the liner notes. I guess they'll keep on doing them in digital form, but I don't like reading long texts on my pad/phone, so the experience won't be the same.

http://www.kotta.se/prodigy/pics/jiltedart.jpg

giving/lending them to someone
running your finger across the shelf to find something to put on
not having to make backups
not having to burn CDs to play them in the car or on the stereo
having a little (or big) part of you on display on the shelf, "this is what I like/am"
cool booklets
finding out what's inside the case

No "most of the above" option?

because all of these

insert booklets
a good used-CD section
an album-centric experience
playing them in the car
you have to actively try to destroy them
sharing music
making mix CDs
tidily arranged jewel cases
visually striking color options

are just some of the reasons I still buy (and will continue to buy) CDs.

You also forgot "because new CDs now cost a fraction of what new (digitally sourced and frequently shitty) vinyl costs and you can buy up entire artist catalogs for literally pennies on the dollar"

You also forgot "because new CDs now cost a fraction of what new (digitally sourced and frequently shitty) vinyl costs and you can buy up entire artist catalogs for literally pennies on the dollar"

Yeah, new vinyl is a colossal ripoff -- $20-$30 for something digitally sourced, with pressing problems/errors (off-center, sibilance, inner-groove distortion), and lately some labels are forgoing the download code cards.

I generally only buy vinyl if it's something I can't find on CD or (as is rarely the case) if the vinyl is cheaper than the CD. Just picked up a bunch of cheap Elvin Jones used vinyl over the weekend because the CD versions are crazy-expensive imports.

No one making jokes about "stream these nuts".

I miss not having "Whuuuuttt? You still...buy CDs?" conversations with dickheads.

I really miss used CD stores just because they are such a great place to kill weekends. Brooklyn used to have like six robust places that I could walk to on a lazy weekend and now most of them are gone or focused on records.

That's one thing I like about living in an uncool place - places like Hastings and Half Price Books and McKays and Peddler's Mall and shit. Bargain CDs all the time. Sucks if you're looking for a LITA reissue or Trojan comp or something though

I was in one of the many Oxfam 'records and books' specialist shops at the weekend. Vinyl pricing in these shops is magnificent - £12 for a Tears for Fears record that looked like someone had vomited on it; £29 for the Twin Peaks vinyl that had a scratch so deep in one side, you could pop a 20p piece into it.

I did, however, get Supreme Clientèle and Tical CDs for 99p each.

gave up on CDs eons ago so i voted for the one CD-specific experience that does bring back some nostalgia - listening in cars. i recognize that you can listen to things in cars with many other formats, but there are specific warm memories about cruising around in warm cars whose upholstery never entirely stopped smelling of cigarettes, pulling CDs from up behind the passenger-side sun shade thing, flipping through a little 12-CD binder, picking out what's next. terrible for the CDs but not a bad setting for listening to music, with friends.

Yeah, something weirdly 'social' about CDs that neither prior nor subsequent formats really offer

I guess tapes were similar in that way but not really since I've been alive

Half Price Books

the country's best record store

cheap, voluminous, and here's the best part, nobody who works there knows anything about music

so much easier to smuggle back into the home under the noses of concerned others

you have to actively try to destroy them

lol im having flashbacks of buying new CD, opening it up, and having the little plastic teeth holding the CD in place already broken and falling.

fuck CDs. piece of shit disposable format.

lol im having flashbacks of buying new CD, opening it up, and having the little plastic teeth holding the CD in place already broken and falling.

Replacing a jewel case tray is a hell of a lot easier than replacing an album cover that's split along the spine, or the top, or that gets water damaged.

the sounds of the physical CD-case format hitting others of its kind - what? are you serious? this is a low bar. do you also get excited when you see/hear jingling car keys?

insert booklets - didn't really ever look at these after the day of purchase. due to the shitty make of CD cases themselves i got into the habit of taking booklets/liners out and keeping them separate.

a good used-CD section - good music was mostly made before CDs were invented. that music is still out there and some of it is life-changing. used CD files on the other hand tend to be musical wastelands.

an album-centric experience - they did sell full albums before the CD

playing them in the car - don't have a car. iPhone is more convenient. also don't have to worry about bumps in the road making your CD skip or your car not being able to read that brand of CDrs.

impressing the world with both the quantity and quality of your music library - impressing the world lol ok good luck w that

you have to actively try to destroy them - give me a fucking break. revisionist history.

cracking open a CD case - and trying not to break it at the same time? and peeling off the multiple skinny stickers, leaving sticky sticker shit on the case? oh what fun.

sharing music - pretty sure sharing music has been a thing since the invention of music.

making mix CDs - yeah this was actually cool. except it is was more fun to make a mixtape and you can get far more creative.

tidily arranged jewel cases - yawn

visually striking color options - yawwwn

the chance a musician has hidden something behind an opaque CD tray - this happened maybe once. was it anything special? i don't remember.

the box set - ok these were cool. the best argument for CDs as a decent medium. packaging and liner notes especially made it worth it.

disposability - this is what i voted for! how many CDs have i thrown in the trash over my life vs. tapes or records? easily many times worth.

the fact that CDs make perfect, colorful, convenient coasters - ok kind of neat but have you seen a vinyl popcorn bowl? way cooler.

The generic empty jewel cases we owned always felt flimsier and more awkward than the ones major-label CDs came in, I dunno. The CDs themselves were ridiculously easy to damage, I'm with Adam on that one.

god yeah peeling off the stickers, that was shit.

at least you could peel off the stickers without ripping the sleeve

Being able to listen to a range of albums at a quality of over 1411k/s without it taking up too fucking much space on a HD.

Yeah, how is sound quality not on this list? Wasn't that the whole point of CDs?

Making mix CD's. I hadn't even considered that that would be an option here. But most computers & laptops don't even have disc drives anymore. Infinite digital mixes are no fun. Having an 80-minute limit is fun!

Pretty sure the "death of the CD" is only in North America. My understanding is that it's still the dominant format in Japan and Europe (though less so in Europe than Japan).

Nah, they seem to be losing popularity here too, and laptops without built-in CD drives are becoming increasingly common.

i think the box set is the main thing I'd miss, were CDs actually going to disappear. especially since the vinyl box sets that now come out are prohibitively expensive. but it seems like CD box sets are still coming out w/ regularity.

mix CDs and mixtapes are both amazing experiences for different reasons. the last mix CD i made for myself or a friend must have been over 2 years ago. i've since returned to mixtapes because my current car has a tape player instead of a CD player. drawing on the CDR with sharpees was cool.

the ability to really quickly cue up songs with a tangible object is also pretty cool.

flipping through CD binders was really fun.

opening up a box from columbia house with 12 CDs inside and screaming "i'm rich beeyotch."

i also stole 30-40 loose CDs from a shady pawn shop once because I didn't like the owner and because I assumed they were stolen from someone's car anyway. it was extremely easy.

The extended run time of a cdwhile it led to many albums being perhaps too long was a good format for reissuing music. I still like making road disc comps on CDR.

It is pretty funny how the vinyl/CD pricing has completely inverted from the early mid 90s. I used to buy a bunch of punk and indie vinl back then as the Lp would be like $6.50 new and the CD $12-15.

the only thing here that's actually worth being sad about is liner notes.

the rest of this "oh i like the way my fingers feel leafing through the pages" materialistic crap is abominable.

i discovered way way way more music through friends via AIM than sharing CDs

disposability

is this a joke?

the rest of this "oh i like the way my fingers feel leafing through the pages" materialistic crap is abominable.

Despite the digital music boom, there's still a whole lot of music that isn't available online, or it's available only as lossy MP3s, and/or buying it as files costs more than buying the CD. As long as these remain the case, I'll keep buying CDs, as materialistic as this is.

My stock in Crayola Green Magic Markers is unlikely to recover.

lots of new LP's have liner notes, mostly reissues though

laptops without built-in CD drives are becoming increasingly common.

USB CD drives are a lot easier/cheaper to replace than ones built into the computer, so I see this as a net gain

In defense of jewel cases, they can act as a nice reflective surface while you're lying in bed listening. You can merge a faint image of yourself/the room with the album art!

having a stack of CD's ready for a roadtrip is fun. somehow i don't think any of these things are going away

So how many of you actually give a shit about sound quality, then?

So how many of you actually give a shit about sound quality, then?

Well, not vinyl people, obviously.

So how many of you actually give a shit about sound quality, then?

I was thinking cd vs. digital, not cd vs. vinyl, so sound quality was irrelevant as you can get it in FLAC if you want

PONO or GTFO

I will miss the possibility of a well-flung disc decapating a dumb AV Club writer.

a good used-CD section

I still dream of this joy sometimes though now the dream is mostly of shelves of nonexistent books rather than racks/piles* of nonexistent postpunk rarities

(* all the best record shops had piles of jumbled CDs under the racks and in any other space they could be crammed into)

being in a new town, checking out all the second-hand music shops, buying armfuls of CDs in the knowledge that they would all fit in your luggage and arrive home safely (good luck fitting 20 LPs in a rucksack with a week's worth of clothes and getting them back out of hold luggage unscathed)

on the other hand I don't miss the liner notes at all, such a pain to get the inlay out and back in, and half the time you opened it up to find just blank white space or some abstract b+w closeup of a corner of the cover art or something, so I mostly gave up on it and probably a third of my CDs I've never even looked in the booklet

similarly "the chance a musician has hidden something behind an opaque CD tray" hmm nope, chances of tray shattering or dropping teeth everywhere outweigh chances of treasure by approx a billion to one iirc. should I really start lifting those things out just in case?

Stuff hidden under the tray was a relic of the early to mid 90s, iirc. Like the hidden track, the novelty wore off fast.

never know what's hiding behind the CD trays of albums you find in goodwill stores

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/83/The_Mystery_of_Al_Capones%27s_Vaults.jpg

One of the things that kinda killed Used CD shopping in (certain) shops for me was the bright idea to do away with a separate used section in favor of mixing them in with the regular stock. I was in a Hastings many years ago right after they'd done the changeover and overheard the shift manager explaining the reasoning to another customer--basically the idea was to favor folks looking for specific titles by giving them the easy option to go used if they had them used. Good on paper, but really killed off the spontaneity and surprise of a good used shopping trip.

similarly "the chance a musician has hidden something behind an opaque CD tray" hmm nope, chances of tray shattering or dropping teeth everywhere outweigh chances of treasure by approx a billion to one iirc. should I really start lifting those things out just in case?

but you could be missing out on cool stuff like this

http://www.actsofvolition.com/include/feature/radiohead/page6.gif

So how many of you actually give a shit about sound quality, then?

― // 166,000 W A N K E R S // LOVE (Turrican), Monday, March 7, 2016 4:46 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

couldn't care less about sound quality tbh

I was thinking cd vs. digital, not cd vs. vinyl, so sound quality was irrelevant as you can get it in FLAC if you want

― moans and feedback (Dinsdale), Monday, March 7, 2016 5:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Um...aren't CDs digital?

yeah... obviously I meant cd vs. mp3/flac files or streaming

Sorry, that was annoying of me. It's just that when articles like this differentiate between digital and, well, digital, it sometimes muddies the points being argued.

Has anyone ever had a double CD case that didn't break? I HATE those things

The big chunky ones weren't too bad, the ones that fold in so they look like a single CD pack were a bit annoying.

i had Zaireeka for a long time but i lost the booklet, the jewel case is still in one piece tho. most of my rarer CDs i have held onto but never listen. it is easier to search on youtube than go through my boxes.

it would be interesting to look at fluxuations between media. i feel like a cassette tape is a cassette tape, you know? it always plays in a tape player, you never get a tape that skips. but there were periods where they recycled vinyl and even now sometime i will buy something new that already skips. still, a Beatles album released in 1966 sounds pretty much the same as a good quality vinyl made 20 or 30 years later. when CDs first came out my mom bought the Hootie and the Blowfish album and it wouldn't play in the CD player. like at all. so we brought it back to Media Play and got a new one. never had a problem since then honestly, for the most part CDs are high quality products.

the problem with digital is it took a while to develop the software and hardware and worldwide internet infrastructure to make it feasible. so there are different eras of different media and different bitrates being used. i wonder what bitrate a lot of 80s production was done at, does anyone know? there are serious sound issues that can come up if you use CD-quality bitrate (44khz) vs. higher bitrate. things that can come up during mixing that can perhaps over-emphasis digitizing elements by the use of a lower bitrate.

i really don't care about sound quality though. obviously if i are listening to a song you have heard a million times and the cymbals are all washed out like a crummy mp3 i will be upset. but the performance is really all that matters.

i don't really think sound quality IS an issue these days now that production technology has gotten to this ubiquitous point. CDs were part of that, and i did love the ability to burn my own, though i felt cheated by the fact that CDrs never worked 100% like the commercial RIAA-approved CDs (DIY tapes being a better solution for the home musician due to better compatibility and quality of medium), hence not really feeling bad about ditching them for the infinite ease of purely digital. as a maker of music digital has been the most amazing, freeing, democratizing thing to come to music ever. i have recorded albums by sending music over the internet, shuffling MIDI files and WAV tracks back and forth. but i think the digital thing got its start in tapes: just look at the early synths, they are all tape loops.

I still love my old-fashioned stereo setup — the soundstage, the physical waveforms or whatever vs. listening through headphones. For that reason, I'm still attached to CDs as reliable sources of high-quality audio. Though I also stream, buy occasional used LPs, etc.

I have a feeling that CDRs changed people's perceptions of CD albums, from musical objects to storage media. No one talks of vinyl LPs as just a file storage medium.

how am i gonna miss my CDs? They're still in the boxes from when i moved almost 8 years ago.

oh, u mean new music HAHAHAHA

No one talks of vinyl LPs as just a file storage medium.

The way most people talk about LPs you have to quickly glance down to make sure their hands aren't shoved down the front of their pants while they're talking to you.

Hahahaha!

I still listen to music on vinyl, but it's certainly far from my go-to medium for sound quality. When you really think about the way it works, it's such a crude medium and I'm endlessly surprised that it works as well as it does.

What are you insinuating? Sometimes people have to pee really bad

X-post

I hope that's not how you deal with it yourself

thats the only way I can get it to not fall off before the tinkle monster takes it

Do the people sitting next to you on the subway have to ask you this or do you just go right out and tell them anyway?

I respect people's intelligence enough to let them come to their own conclusion

I'm very very proud of this digression btw

It's "needle drops" that really get me, at best the resulting digital files reveal the inherent limitations of the source material, at worst you get some idiot encoding at a crap bitrate and thus obliterating the point.

Wax cylinders or gtfo imho

Resale value! Which admittedly was often modest, and is extremely low right now, on average. But there were more than a few CDs I sold for more than I paid for them, or traded for something more appealing.

O that thing where they sound better

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i'm starting to not miss CDs at all. I made the transition to digital only when my stereo crapped out and bought a decent pair of headphones and now this is my preferred way to listen. and when I use Amazon prime sometimes I'll buy the cd if it comes with an mp3 copy so I can play the cd in the car rather than have to stream through my phone through stereo.

no more worrying about having to rebuy anything. on principle I buy all my shit cos almost all my purchases are for metal bands that probably make dick in sales, though often use Spotify to listen to music I bought on cd that I can't find anymore.

the booklets were a fetish item as a kid in that i loved reading lyrics, nowadays I never even read the fucking things, and half of cds are digipaks without em now.

Our local phone exchange has died and several streets, including ours, have no phone or internet access for the next couple of weeks. Very glad I have all my CDs and not relying on the cloud.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

http://i.imgur.com/zkMGQcV.png