Another nail in the coffin for CDs

What else could explain the song “Ledge” but a great big hill of blow? That fuzzy bass played at crazy speeds just gets my heart pumping every time.

I have 1975 Kef Concertos for my main system. OK, it is really just the guts from them in transmission line enclosures, and they have the much better Radford crossovers, but they are still ancient British speakers. So far, Thank God, every time I return from a show I fire them up and they still sound as good as anything I have heard there. Saves me a bomb.

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What blows me away is the number of people who only seem to listen to music via YouTube. Every time I get a link that takes me to the terrible band photo or album cover while the song plays in the background makes me roll my eyes. My son tells me that’s how his peers share music. That and Spotify. And that nobody keeps music ON their phones anymore, just playlists of hundreds of songs on their streaming service of choice (Spotify) without any reference to bands or albums. It’s so foreign to me with my 256 gig phone.

I subscribe to Apple Music for the kids to use because they love it and the friction is low. I HATE it. Aside from not streaming soundtracks, it doesn’t get albums right. When streaming “The Trinity Session”, it drops in a live version of “200 More Miles” from God knows where. And that’s BAD. Not to mention the debacle that is Siri.

I have a HomePod (which sounds great, believe it or not) and I’ll try siri. “Play ‘The Boxer’ by Simon & Garfunkel.” and it plays some obscure version from one of their many live albums. Try and play a soundtrack that has lots of popular songs like the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks. It won’t work right. You’ll get odd versions, the wrong songs, etc or a messed up playlist because the record companies are evil. It’s terrible.

I also have Tidal for Roon usage. (Tidal gives a military discount, Qobuz does not) Better, but my Olivia Newton John playlist got nerfed because of some rightsholder change. “track no longer available, skipping”. Even though the album was STILL THERE. It just sucks.

That’s why I hoard. Because the record companies will NEVER work in your interest. Only in their own to extract as much as they can from you. Once I have my CD, they can’t touch it.

My kids grew up listening to music and in my opinion love music. They don’t own CDs and see no need to. Good or bad that is todays generation.

If my missive came off as damning that wasn’t the intent. It was meant as observational. They’re just different.

Nah. If they don’t do it my way, they’re wrong. As are all-of-y’all. :wink:

No it didn’t come off that way.

I want to die in a small place filled with records and tons of audio equipment like Fremer or Gutenberg seem to have in their videos.

Yeah - but that’s not hard😝

My son is a musician and uses YT primarily AFAICT. My daughter, and her roommate both love vinyl. They both owned LPs before either of them had a TT!:man_shrugging:t2: Though they certainly don’t listen to vinyl exclusively. They have music on their phones and laptops and BT tunes to the Sprout.

My daughter used to have CDs, but abandoned them AFAICT. Don’t think my son ever bought any.

Sprout BT is great until he starts walking between rooms. Then I want to kill him. He did that playing Christmas music this year and I had to make him turn everything off.

Maybe it’s a factor of growing up listening to vinyl records and then CDs, but when music drops out, I want to claw my ears off my head. I can’t stand dropouts.

Feel that. Way better when you’re not in the room though : ). Been using my old Transporter in the 2nd system to stream Qobuz, and it is essentially at most a 24/96 device. So sometimes it chokes on higher bitrate streams. Not entirely sure what causes it, as it doesn’t always happen, even with the same high res record (a number of possibles I won’t bore you with).

Though one of those possibles is the crap internet in my new place, which - particularly over the holdays, would simply crap out altogether, requiring at least a reset of the modem😡

Was down most of the morning yesterday while they did “repairs” in the 'hood. Fingers crossed.

Whenever it goes down, I fear for the Cyber War to come. We’re more vulnerable than many societies, I’d imagine.

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“I may download a lot of music but I always burn to physical media to play.”
That’s Silly.

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Depends on your rig.

I’m all discs. I like it that way. Others can do what they like. Even if new discs aren’t made, there’s enough used to last my hunting urges the rest of my life.

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“That’s silly”

Which part? :joy:

The sales figures for classical music show markedly different patterns to those for pop/rock. See this article: https://www.musicweek.com/talent/read/classical-cd-sales-up-streaming-soars/074951 . One interesting quote is “While overall CD sale are in decline, the rise in demand for classical music in 2018 was partly driven by a 6.9% jump in classical CD sales, which still account for nearly 60% of classical consumption.”

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Get a sales job at a high-end audio store. There’s almost always a back room like you describe. I don’t recommend that you die there, however.

I have an optic cable running from my bluray player audio out to my SGCD to play CD’s. I wonder if others do this as well. I rarely listen to CD’s anymore. Streaming is just too easy and it does sound better to me. Sad to see CD’s going out though.

This is my CD rack. I burned all of my CDs to my NAS about 8 years ago. That was the last time I really used CDs. I do have a few that I take when I go to listen at dealers but even now the dealers tend to have Tidal/Qobuz.

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“They DO stream (who doesn’t?)” = I don’t LOL