Is the death of the CD looming?

[St Enigma]

I still have 3000 cassettes packed away. I've replaced most of the necessary ones on cd

Right, cassettes won't store well. I have saved a crate full (about 100) of cassettes from 70s and 80s, but last time I played a few of them all tapes were suffereing from the magnetic copy-through syndrome where you can hear the previous layer on the spool playing silently under the actual recorded track which makes the old cassettes quite worthless.

Like TwistedJesus I have replaced most music I had collected on cassettes in the 80s with CDs when they were available cheap. I do still prefer buying new CDs, (until now I have bought only one CD from a download shop, ever!) open the sealed case, read the booklets while listening to the music for the first time, then play them a couple of times before ripping the tracks at 320 kbps on my harddisk for adding in the music library. After that the CDs will mostly remain untouched on the shelf, except the booklets occasionally have use for checking some details of lyrics.

I just can't really wrap my head around people being able to tell the difference between CDs and high quality mp3s, when soundwave for soundwave, they're EXTREMELY similar.

There have been a number of debates over the years about the lowest mp3 packing rate which can be recognized by human ear. Most clinical blind tests have shown that most peole can't make a difference between a 160 kbps and CD and only one or two out of 10.000 people can separate 192 kbps from a CD signal. At 256 kbps and over the human ear can not make any difference.

Most of the bad experiences about mp3 quality are due poor listenign equipment. It is mainly cheap speakers and earphones which ruin the music because they can't reproduce the sound as it should be.

Of course most CDs today are by default compressed for ripping to mp3s and listening with portable players. Even the best hi-fi equipment can't save the music from those records. It's a pity.

.

 

[eppst1]

1) MX Machine - Manic Panic


Why?? These were never released on CD. Everything else I have replaced with CDs.

Holy crap! I haven't thought about that band in a long, long time. No wonder I could never find it on CD when it came out. I guess I didn't realize it was never released on CD. I also looked them up on Metal Archives and they seemed to have reformed with only the singer/bass player being left in the band.

 

[skyrefuge]

Just use apple lossless .... I use High-end klipsch headphones and I can tell the difference between lossless and anything less. I actually did a graduate research paper on the difference.

Cool, do you have a link to your paper?

How reliably could you detect a high-bitrate lossy file? Every song you tried? Very specific samples? What did your ABX tests look like?

I buy CDs and rip them all in ALAC. I have a 2TB mirrored hard drive for storage.

If you use a portable player, what do you do for that? Have a separate library of lossy-compressed versions? Convert-on-the-fly? Or just transfer the big files all the time?

I have DL'd a few things as an MP3 and later went back and chased down the FLAC file and there is a noticeable difference, but once again, its personal choice.

Once again, no, noticing differences is *not* a personal choice. Yes, the ability to hear differences does vary from person to person. But for each person, their ability to hear differences is scientifically measurable. If I can't hear a difference, I can't make a "personal choice" and suddenly start hearing differences. An ABX test will prove that I still can't. If I *can* hear a difference, then I can make a personal choice to care or not care about that difference, but the ability to hear a difference is not up to me.

If we could reproduce the warmth that an LP has and not have to deal with the pops and scratches we would have the ultimate solution. LP's just sounded so much better, but I'm sure there's a million people that can't hear the difference and therefore will comment that I am on crack.

No, you're not on crack, your opinion is just unreliable until you do a controlled test. I don't trust my *own* opinion until I've tested myself, so you shouldn't feel offended that I don't trust you.

But in the case of vinyl vs. CD, or analog vs. digital recording, the paths from the music studio to your ears is entirely different, so noticing differences between those sources is much less surprising than noticing differences between CD and lossy compression. Then, once you can detect differences, deciding which one you prefer *is* a personal choice! Vinyl/analog may actually do a poorer job of accurately reproducing the in-studio sound than CD/digital, but if you prefer the artifacts of the analog process over the artifacts of the digital process, that's totally cool by me.

There have been a number of debates over the years about the lowest mp3 packing rate which can be recognized by human ear. Most clinical blind tests have shown that most peole can't make a difference between a 160 kbps and CD and only one or two out of 10.000 people can separate 192 kbps from a CD signal. At 256 kbps and over the human ear can not make any difference.

Yeah, so it's quite remarkable how, even though this thread has way less than 10,000 participants, a lot more than 1 or 2 are sure they can tell the difference. What are the odds of that? Maybe the PPUSA forum should pool their cash and buy a bucket of lottery tickets!

Neil

 

[TribunalRecords]

I have TWO cassettes left.

1) MX Machine - Manic Panic
2) Sound Barrier - The Speed of Light

Why?? These were never released on CD. Everything else I have replaced with CDs.

the SOUND BARRIER is #2 on my original list of reissues to land for Divebomb. from what i have heard is there are no masters in existence and the rights have reverted back to the band. i have tried to contact Spacey T about a deluxe set of all their material but have heard nothing back, ever. which sucks. i hate not getting anything back from bands, i don't ever mind a "no thank you" because at least that means they are usually working on a reissue on their own.

so i just hope for us fans they get this going and get it back out there because i have been waiting long enough!