15 reasons why I STILL BUY CDs

This episode is brought to you by the creators of the legendary Analog Interconnects AudioQuest series, click the show notes link for more information. theorizing or hypothesizing here i live this thing you can see behind me i have a lot of vinyl not vinyl vinyl true what you can't see is here in this corner i have three ikea gannetby towers full of cds i have two over there and two over there that's a bunch of cds now why am i reviewing this issue this week two

reasons

the first reason is the cd the commercially available cd turned 40 last week the second reason is i am reviewing a cd player this week but yeah you're thinking who the hell is listening CDs.

I have news for you. I researched the subscriber base for this channel and asked if they

still

listen to CDs. 48 said yes. my friends emailed me to point out but 48 almost half of you

still

listen to cd's i think it's significant i did the same poll on my patreon and i think almost 60 percent said yes to keep listening to cd's , but if you I'm still thinking about who the hell listens to the CDs. I know that in Germany, the CD is still the number one physical format, but if we look at the world figures or the United States, we know that people are buying even more CDs. buying vinyl records is still the number one physical format worldwide and in 2021 in the US CD sales are finally back up after 20 years of decline now that could be due to the pandemic but it could be that people just aren't ready to let go of cds yet i certainly am not that's why i built this collection in the last three or four years but also last year in the middle of the pandemic as we were in lockdown i did a video called 10

reasons

why i still listen to cds or 10 reasons i still buy cds but when i played that video yesterday i looked at it like i was like oh this is a little weak thats not how i would present it nowadays , but this may confuse some viewers is that I have another wall that is full of cds so in this video I'm going to redo those 10 reasons why I'm going to represent 10 reasons why I still buy cds so you can think about this video as a cd remaster however there's more I'm also going to add five more reasons why I still buy cd so consider this as an expanded remaster so number one reason is with a cd I still get my kick of physical format so I'm still hands on handling a format that allows me to play music properly so I have the music in my hands reason number two is related to that is we get a booklet the booklet has I guess , what we would basically call cover art and it has in a lot of cases, the lengthy liner notes and those liner notes and a lot of the photos in the flyers and the info and the credits are not on the streaming services, the layered metadata really just has the info cover maybe you'll get a whole music review or an album review from somewhere else but you won't necessarily get what's in the booklet right now the vinyl people will go ok yeah john still we get that from vinyl and it's much bigger and you're right, it is. much bigger however number three when you buy a CD especially when you buy it over the internet and it arrives at your door using traditional mail services a CD is less likely to be damaged in transit it's much less likely, I mean, I buy records and I get the corners banged up, the seams split, sometimes the record gets scratched, you know, it moves around inside the packaging repeatedly during transit, that almost never happens with a CD, the worst thing that usually happens if someone doesn't pack it right it's the little spindle in the middle that holds the cd in place sometimes the little pins in that break but that's replaceable not as easy as it used to be but still replaceable can't replace an external case vinyl if divided is divided for a good reason number four is that cds are much much cheaper than their vinyl counterpart so if i go to my local cd and vinyl store there is a great bookstore down the road called dussman and it has a vinyl section and a CD section and generally CDs start at maybe 8 euros. to around 20 if it's some kind of deluxe edition, but vinyl starts at 25 and goes up to 40 and 50 if it's a deluxe edition, so I'm saving money when I buy new CDs compared to new records. and its the same on the thrift market i buy a lot of used cds on amazon and discogs now you see these are really cheap i know a lot of people like to talk about thrift stores and i guess charity shops and stuff so there really isn't much of a thing here in berlin so i'm not really exposed to that but definitely on the internet on discogs cds yes of course conventional cds from 30 years ago cost like a euro or two most of them are considerably cheaper than I don't know the record you'd otherwise buy, especially stuff released in the '90s.

Actually, there's one exception: some of the darker electronic music I was listening to in the early naughty years if I try to trace any of it . on cd i can be paying up to 30 bucks a cd sometimes 40. that monolake cd i featured in our last video on dynaudio speakers that cost me something like 40 bucks because it's out of print but that's generally very unusual if you think about vinyl , a lot of 90s stuff is still out of print, inaccessible or inaccessible to someone with sort of a normal income, I mean, I'm not going to spend 200 euros on a record, I've thought about it, but I won't.

I'm going to do it and if I look at the CD and it's like 20 euros with no contest a great example actually is the latest Orbital release which I think is a seven vinyl set and you get the same tracks on the two CDs the set of seven vinyls. it's a hundred bucks the two cds 20 bucks i bought the cds thank you very much the number five cds are so much easier to store like i have them stacked here here and here while my record collection is behind me but i also have some kalax on my kitchen now with records in them because I just don't have any more space in my living room.

This will be especially important when I move house because I keep CDs in boxes and take them to a truck. it's going to be a lot easier than packing up my records and hauling them to the same truck because cd's are smaller and lighter they're easier to keep in your life i think one of the reasons people are buying cd's still or maybe maybe there's been a spike in buying cds because people like things like nowadays it's so easy to have all your music on a hard drive all your photos on a hard drive your books on a kindle and then your house is empty true it just has furniture and there is no kind of meaning of who you are your identity well at least for me it is based on my love of music anyone who comes here can definitely see that i like music and really just i see the other youtubers who like music number one steve guttenberg because he talks about music holds records holds cds i have a connection there to that reason number six is ​​actually one of the reasons i think cd really took off in the beginning The 80s and that's the absence of surface noise because if you want people to support a new format you have to capture the classic crowd and the CD really did that because I think classical listeners listened to vinyl records during those quiet passages. if it's clicks and pops and worse rotation clicks there's nothing worse than a rotation click the cd allowed classical listeners to dispense with that frustration overnight so deutsche gramophone i think released a lot of their stuff on CD in the '80s and it just sold a lot, so I think it really got people into it like there was no noise on the surface. things through roon like streaming services know I've played that and that's helpful for them to build a picture of who I am as a listener so they can provide me with appropriate playlists but it also means that everything I listen to is being tracked One thing I love about listening to a CD is that it's completely private.

I put a CD in the CD player here. Close the drawing. Press play. No one knows I'm listening, except maybe my neighbor. vinyl streaming of traxxas cds is no reason number eight has become a hot topic around here these days in uh idk oh not really one of my readers emailed me about that, but in general 99.99 cd players play the cd content without gaps, it's very important if a track is designed to blend seamlessly with the next track, you don't want your playback hardware to insert a small gap of silence between that because it has to finish playing the first track before it can buffer the cd players second track to a cd, it's actually one continuous track, it's not 12 tracks or eight tracks, those are artificially generated by the table of contents which is stored at the beginning of the cd so when the track advances a cd player it's just some kind of virtual track advance but what the laser is actually tracking is just one continuous track so we get gapless playback guaranteed every time the 9th reason i keep buying cd's this is especially true when i buy band camp stuff is the artist gets more money from me when i buy a cd even when i buy it on amazon they still get more money or on my local bookstore dusman the artist still gets more money and i like that idea i like to feel that i am rooting for the artist a bit more because as we know when we stream an album the artist gets paid a little bit of money and that is not true with a CD.

I don't know the exact amount, but I do. I know when you buy a CD the artist gets more than a share of that 10th purchase. The tenth reason I keep buying CDs and this has been confirmed again by the CD player I reviewed this week is that CD players CDs play. only slightly better than streaming in the equivalent price ranges, so if you have, say, a thousand dollars to spend on a transmitter or a thousand dollars to spend on a CD player, the CD player will generally give you better sound and that is true at two thousand euros three thousand euros the difference is not huge but for nerdy hifi people like me it is very important now that we come to the bonus tracks so reason number 11 is that my cds are always here? what do I mean by good for example if Neil Young wakes up in a bad mood and decides for some reason that he doesn't like that streaming service on there and decides to pull his catalog off of that streaming service if he was just using that streaming service i couldn't play neil young anymore i have my cds here i can always play neil young and neil young is not the only person who has pulled, even temporarily, his catalog or part of his catalog from streaming services seems to happen quite often frequency i think it happened to radiohead for a while it happens due to contractual disputes or i don't know just general reasons we are probably not aware of so the cds are always available to me here and they never go away like neil young doesn't run into my house taking all his cd's off my shelf and then run away again that would be insane so i love cd kind of certainty reason number 12 relates to remasters so when an artist remasters an album and then you release it and it comes out on a cd but also streaming services what some streaming services do is just remove or remove the original master so you're only left with the remaster available on streaming services now that's a problem because I'd say most remasters were made since 95 certainly not all of them but a lot of them don't sound as good as the original master they're mostly too dynamically compressed so yeah they really sound on the radio they play through your hifi but tiring to listen to and that bothers me now not saying the original master is better in every way than the remaster it doesn't have the punch and maybe a bit weak in dynamics and sometimes it's a bit thin but I'd rather have dynamic range from the original than the more limited dynamic range from the remaster and if that original is no longer on streaming services then I need to find the original CD, per which many of the cd's i have here are usually when i bought them. the choice of the remaster or the original and unless there were bonus tracks i bought the original if there were bonus tracks i would buy both to have the original to play and then the newer expanded remaster with the bonus tracks i know thats super nerdy, but because cds are so cheap it's not too much to ask to do so, in fact in most cases i can buy both the original cd and the remaster and still get ahead of buying a number 13 vinyl copy, the cds they can often be a great source of darker content, there are some artists who release stuff, they release music and some of that happens tothe streaming services but not everything and i'll give you an example so cherry read the label just reissued the entirety of the house of loves it out or a major record label outing on a hcd box set now that includes three main albums and five CDs of b-sides and live cuts the three main albums are already on streaming services and always have been the box itself is not a remaster but the five additional CDs of b-sides and outtakes and cuts live on the non-streaming services similarly cherry red also reissued a children of the bong album a couple of months ago again that was a 90s electronica album and the version that's on the streaming services has two, maybe three, maybe four bonus tracks but the cd is a three cd affair it has what maybe 10 or 12 bonus tracks so sometimes you get extra stuff on the cd that just isn't on the streaming services .

I think more labels should do this, especially if they're releasing expanded remasters. a limited release on streaming services number 14 cd or cd play doesn't require an internet connection this one is really a no brainer but if my internet goes down i can still play music i can still play digital music so i can pull anything from the shelves around me here i put it in the cd player and i'm good to go i don't need to rely on the internet to stream from a streaming service and then lastly number 15. and this really has to do with the listener engagement we all have that one friend where you like them on the streaming app and tell them to play some music and they'll play some and then i'll go no no i shouldn't want to play this and then another box will go oh no, i'll play that and you end up hearing snippets of songs because everyone is so impatient to get on to the next thing and they won't let the song that's playing run its course properly and then we do it at home, right?

Sometimes we sit there with the ipad. and we're streaming stuff like oh no next thing next next I'm not that type of listener with streaming but I think a CD is really good for that type of listener because it forces us to commit to an album or an ep . for 20 minutes 40 minutes 60 minutes we put it on we press play that's all we hear for the next while and there's no skip button that can take us to another artist or album at a time as it is with streaming so I like the commitment that cd's force us into when listening to music so there are 15 reasons why i still buy and listen to cd's but wait i have one more and this relates to the environmental impact of various music playback formats and this was brought up again by robert henker he is the man behind ableton live and monolake this is why i held up the monolake cd in the dynaudio review because i knew i would get this video right and basically i was saying i will read it to you , I'll read it with what he said on Facebook because this made headlines around the world in some of the biggest hifi and music publications because Robert Henke is obviously a very well-respected figure in the music world and he said that he still I love physical products, but manufacturing large plastic plates and shipping them all over the world is a huge waste of energy and resources.

He's talking about vinyl in a time of global warming and dependence on cheap. energy from countries like russia or saudi arabia i consider no more vinyl releases but fully embrace cd the latest big innovation in physical media is talking about cd with a better signal to noise ratio better channel separation better frequency response than the end in a smaller package, oh really, and he says cd, you're underrated and you'll always have a place in my heart. I'll put a link to robert henker's full statement in the description box below so you can read it for yourself. i thought that was pretty cool too and if you think streaming is the most environmentally friendly music format then i have a link for you too in the description box under one final thought as people who presumably care about quality of sound if that's you Watching this channel, you presumably care about sound quality like I do.

I think we owe an enormous amount of gratitude to the CD. Let me explain why obviously in the 70's the number one music format was the vinyl record, but during the 80's the popularity of the cassette. tape really went up and up and up and up up to around 8788 it became the most popular format on the planet and if it wasn't for cd it would have kept raining and kept putting out records so cd in the 80's didn't it killed the vinyl it didn't the cd it actually replaced the cassette tape with its inferior sound quality i know cassette tapes are a nice little fetish item nowadays i know people who love them but let's not pretend for one moment make them sound as good as a cd so cd essentially saved us from the dominance of cassette tapes so yeah this is my sort of remastered expanded version of why i still buy cds why i still listen to cds why I still collect them why do I love them if you love them too.

Please consider giving this video a Like below if you like my attitude towards hifi audio and music, yes I'm not one of those pretentious jerks who say I'm not an audiophile, I'm a music lover. no i'm an audiophile but i'm also a music lover right and i don't really discriminate between formats i stream a lot i buy a lot of vinyl i buy a lot of cd's sure i do everything so if you like that please . please consider subscribing to this channel and as always thank you so much for watching