September 2024
Each month, Stereophile magazine opens with an opinion column called “As We See It.” Usually editor Jim Austin writes the column, but occasionally he gives the space over to a guest writer. For the August 2024 issue, contributing editor Tom Fine joined Austin to write about the demise of the Compact Disc. They begin with a firm prognostication: “When the CD is gone, and it will be soon, we will miss it.”
Time will tell if that prophecy is fulfilled. Keep in mind that in the late 1980s, people said the same thing about the LP—and if you weren’t paying attention, it appeared for a while that the LP had indeed disappeared. In fact, LPs continued to be pressed, if in ever-diminishing quantities. Cartridges and styli were still available. Online retailers sold vinyl to people who remained loyal to the format, and enterprising LP fans found new and used vinyl in record shops and online.
LP lovers were lucky that hip-hop and DJ culture kept vinyl alive, too. When vinyl started to make its comeback around 2007, there was an existing infrastructure to support it. Pressing plants were still around, turntable manufacturers that had kept the faith were doing well, and cartridge makers were even introducing new lines.
LPs had been circulating for nearly 40 years when CDs came along to supplant them. Columbia Records introduced the LP in 1948, but it wasn’t until the early ’50s that the format began to catch on. Classical music, jazz, and soundtracks to Broadway shows sold well on LP, but it was the increased popularity in the ’60s of rock music in album form that fueled record companies’ profits and solidified the LP’s prominence.
When Columbia Records released this 1954 pressing, the LP format was only six years old
CDs started appearing in some record stores around 1983, but, as with the LP, it took a few years to push the old format out of the marketplace. The LP had been the dominant long-playing music format for a long time, and when CDs were introduced, vinyl was already losing some ground to cassettes. CDs were the preferred format by 1990, but they reigned supreme for a much shorter time than vinyl. Take a look at this chart on Statista.com, a Germany-based company that collects and tracks data about various industries.
CD sales peaked in 2000 and have been steadily declining since then. And, as with the LP, something was taking its place. By then, electronics and record companies had tried to market other digital physical formats, including the Digital Compact Cassette, MiniDisc, and Super Audio CD. All of them stiffed, as did DVD-Audio and Blu-ray Audio.
People were unlikely to switch to another format quickly. They recalled their closets full of VHS tapes that had given way to DVDs. They didn’t want something else to store. In addition, they didn’t want another physical medium to carry around. They wanted something portable that had more capacity for storage than any physical format could provide.
The cassette had already allowed music fans to tape their LPs so they could play them in the car. When Apple introduced the iPod, people had a way to store music on a small device about the size of a cassette. They could carry a large chunk of their music collection with them, listen to it on headphones, or play it through their car stereos. Soon, their smartphones offered that same convenience.
At first, people ripped their CDs to the iTunes app on their computers and moved music to an iPod or phone. In time they began to download music, at first illegally through sites like Napster, then through pay sites, including iTunes itself, which started selling digital music in 2003. Amazon Music began selling music downloads in the MP3 format in 2007, and in 2008, HDtracks began offering music downloads in higher resolution.
For a brief moment, downloads looked like they might be the new thing. When I interviewed Chad Kassem in 2014 for an article about Quality Record Pressings (QRP), he was excited about Super HiRez, a new download service affiliated with Acoustic Sounds, which owns QRP. By 2020, Super HiRez was gone. “Several factors have led us to make this difficult decision,” the company announced. “As streaming continues to eclipse downloads, sales have steadily declined.”
HDtracks continues to sell high-resolution downloads, and Qobuz has joined them; however, Qobuz is still primarily a streaming service, and HDtracks plans to introduce its own streaming service in partnership with Lenbrook. Streaming, of course, now accounts for most music industry revenues. This chart from the Record Industry Association of America shows sales trends in music from 1973 to 2023. Note how briefly downloads showed any significant activity, how little income they generated even in their peak years from 2008 to 2016, and how quickly they dropped to a trickle.
Streaming and downloads offer convenience. I’ve bought downloaded music myself because I wanted to have a recording but didn’t want to add to the growing number of unfiled CDs on my office shelves. I have a BluOS module in my NAD C 368 integrated amplifier. It lets me stream music through my Amazon account or via an external drive attached to my laptop. I have an iFi Audio Zen Stream in my basement setup, with a second external drive. I have a third external drive that I carry with me in my laptop case when I travel.
Note that all three of my external drives contain the same music files. I want to be sure my music files are backed up. Any music I bought from Acoustic Sounds HiRez isn’t available to me because the site is no longer active. HDtracks told me in an email that albums I purchased from them remain available for download as long as they still sell them, but some albums I bought four or five years ago are no longer showing in my account because they’re not currently in the HDtracks catalog.
My LPs and CDs are mine permanently. I don’t have to worry about a computer glitch or user error accidentally deleting them. If such a thing were to happen, even if I could get to all the music files I purchased, I dread the hours it would take to download them and move them to a drive again. Hence, backups. Consequently, I think of that music as a convenience. I listen to it when I’m cooking or doing something else, or I stream it in my sunroom, where my office is. I enjoy it, and I can envision a time in the future when I will stream a lot more, because going up and down the stairs to retrieve an LP or CD is more work than I want to do.
But I don’t think of downloaded music as a permanent part of my music collection. Or as a collection in the normal sense at all. Same with books on Kindle. I buy a book for my Kindle so I can cart it around more easily or read it on my phone, but if I want Salman Rushdie’s newest for my actual book collection, I buy it in hardback.
At one point in their article, Fine and Austin talk about the tendency of record companies to release anniversary editions of classic albums, which replace previous versions. They use Rhino Records’ recent 50th-anniversary reissue of Deep Purple’s Machine Head (1972), which Dweezil Zappa prepared for release, as an example. “Now that Dweezil’s stereo mix exists,” they ask, “will you still be able to access the original mix, by Martin Birch, years into the future?”
Not if you get your music through streaming, they tell us. Both streaming and downloads usually offer only the current version of a recording. For example, if you want to hear the Rolling Stones’ post-Decca recordings in good sound, you’ll need to look for the CD versions mastered by Bob Ludwig in the 1990s, or for the original LPs. If you’re streaming those albums or downloading them, you’ll be stuck with the crummy-sounding masters that Universal Music currently owns.
In other words, you’ll be in better shape to enjoy music if you own something that plays physical media. If you don’t want to wrestle with vinyl, fine. Buy a CD player, or at least buy a CD drive for your computer so you can rip a CD and have the version of a recording that sounds best. Transfer it to an external drive and play it through a streaming unit with a good-quality DAC.
Oh, for crying out loud—just buy a CD player. There are billions of CDs out there and they’ll remain in circulation on Discogs, eBay, Amazon, and tons of other places for decades to come. Audio manufacturers will continue to make CD players, and if we push them, they might even continue to improve them. Smart audio companies will likely do that anyway.
I doubt the CD will go away completely. The LP didn’t, and CDs still sell in large-enough quantities to justify making them available. The history of recorded music in digital form is out there for us to enjoy, in all its variations of mastering, mixing, and presentation. With a CD player, you can at least explore how music both old and new sounded when it was issued on the new medium in the late ’80s.
If you want to hear how George Martin thought Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band should sound on CD when he supervised its release in 1987, you’ll need to buy that edition of the music. You can compare it to the 2009 CD release and the 2017 remix. You can also track down the mono CD that’s part of the 2009 The Beatles in Mono box set.
I checked Amazon and Qobuz, and you can stream the 2009 stereo version and 2017 remix. If you want to hear the other two, you’ll need to buy them on CD, and you’ll need a way to play them. You get a bonus with all the releases on CD: The booklets included will tell you how the recording was done and will give you the lyrics to the songs. They also have great photos and colorful artwork. No booklet is included with streaming, and if you get one with a download, you’ll have to read it on your computer.
The same thing applies to many, many recordings released in our lifetimes. With streaming and downloads, you cede control, giving it over to something ephemeral and less stable than we all would like. Fine and Austin are right. If the CD goes, we’ll miss it.
. . . Joseph Taylor
josepht@soundstagenetwork.com
