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The case for CD over streaming, by Cyrus

Well, some sources of bias there: a manufacturer of CD players wants you to buy a CD player (recognizing that Cyrus also sells streamers), and a record label makes more money from selling physical copies than from streaming their catalogue.

As for the difference between streamed bits and his home-ripped CDs, we don't know the providence of either of the files. Did he confirm that his rips are exact, bit-for-bit replicas of the CD? I would trust that the label puts a bit-perfect copy in the streaming platform before I trust that he ripped them 100% correctly.

I don't buy the unsubstantiated argument that identical files streamed from different services will sound different. That needs a lot more explanation / evidence before it's believable.

Agreed about catalog availability. Agreed, to an extent, about the tactile pleasures of physical media.

Counter-arguments: physical media is wasteful and resource heavy. They take up a lot of space. They're also more fragile with the only recourse being, yep, ripping them. Also, playing a CD requires the coordination of mechanical devices in addition to the electronics of the DAC, so lots of room for failure and, in the long run, the problem of hard-to-source parts.

I'm saying this as someone who has bought more CDs in the past year than in probably the past 15 years combined. I'm finding a happier medium in buying lossless downloads and preferring to listen to those over streaming services (in short, due to the better control I have over managing my library and to give the artists I like more of my money). I only buy a CD when it's roughly the same price or cheaper than a download.
 
I think there should be a law that there should be a man with a red flag walking in front of every streamer.

He presents no actual evidence that CDs are superior to allegedly inferior streamed music. Years ago I tested my own rips of CDs against the download from the record company, and found them to be bit identical. There is no reason to suppose a cd is of any better provenance than a download - think of all those iffy “best of” compilation albums, or “remasters” on labels you’ve never heard of. There is no reason to suppose an artist gets much from the sale of a cd; much goes on distribution, record company fees and so on. Right enough, the payout for a stream is tiny, but then again Amazon HD have 50 million subscribers, at £120 or whatever a year that is potentially a lot of money to distribute to artists and not people who make plastic cases. Paying per listen is inherently fairer, supports a wider variety of choice, and new possibilities of live concert streams are also starting to appear. CD is legacy technology, it wasn’t a very nice medium, you couldn’t even read the sleeves, let it go.
 
Given I’ve been making the same argument since before streaming was a ‘thing’ I obviously agree! The two points are:

a) Mastering > format, every time. This is far more important than anything later in the chain, e.g. differences between phono cartridges, DACs etc. I am not prepared to let others select for me any more than I’d let them pick my loudspeakers!

b) If you care in the slightest about the artist and their ability to go on creating then buy the physical media, ideally the high cost limited vinyl straight from them. Same goes for the custodians of musical legacy, e.g. Blue Note, Impulse etc, even though they are all major-owned they preserve the legacy and are actually releasing much interesting new music at present.
 
I have a big collection of vinyl. I still play it but I don’t buy it anymore. I have some old and rare vinyl that preserve performances that are great performances but they don’t sound great.I love to listen to them though. Some of the vinyl sounds excellent. It’s the same for my cd collection. And it’s the same for streaming. Sometimes I hear a recording that is just breathtaking. Sometimes they are ok.
I know there are some outstanding recordings on vinyl but it’s not necessarily the music I want to listen to, nor pay for.
My main focus is the music.
One if my very favourite CDs(and I have it on vinyl) is Otello conducted my Toscanini. It is in mono, it has dry sound but it is riveting. I’m moved every time I hear it.
And some of the most engrossing music I have heard came through my FM tuner via the BBC.
For me it is the music first. I love a variety of genres. That’s what moves me. If it’s a great recording, great.
The point I’m making is that the comparison between all of these delivery vehicles is moot. A great performance is a great performance and it transcends the delivery source. The recordings of Callas, Vickers, Richter etc are not state of the art recordings but they still deliver again and again.
 
The case for cd. A good cd player can in fact be jolly good. A CD player is ideal for those, like me, who really cannot handle the thought of streaming, and the endless permutations to achieve this, and the pure terror of something computer like in the equation. A cd, in its case, whilst not quite the same as an LLP, in its sleeve, is tactile.
 
AndyU said:
I think there should be a law that there should be a man with a red flag walking in front of every streamer.

He presents no actual evidence that CDs are superior to allegedly inferior streamed music. Years ago I tested my own rips of CDs against the download from the record company, and found them to be bit identical. There is no reason to suppose a cd is of any better provenance than a download - think of all those iffy “best of” compilation albums, or “remasters” on labels you’ve never heard of. There is no reason to suppose an artist gets much from the sale of a cd; much goes on distribution, record company fees and so on. Right enough, the payout for a stream is tiny, but then again Amazon HD have 50 million subscribers, at £120 or whatever a year that is potentially a lot of money to distribute to artists and not people who make plastic cases. Paying per listen is inherently fairer, supports a wider variety of choice, and new possibilities of live concert streams are also starting to appear. CD is legacy technology, it wasn’t a very nice medium, you couldn’t even read the sleeves, let it go.
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The technical arguments for CD or streaming being better are not really the issue, and not the focus of the argument.
With streaming you pretty much get what you are given, with zero choice.
Also the way these services work is to take songs and form them into albums, so often you get the same version each time regardless of the album issue.
With CD (and vinyl) you have a far wider choice and you know you're getting a lossless file, certainly from older CDs.
I have no way of knowing if the high res file I'm streaming started life as standard res or even lossy. Then there are utter disasters where the wrong playback eq or noise reduction systems are used. I recently streamed a track where some muppet had captured a single channel panned to both channels and lost half the content of the stereo mix in the process.

It can be a real crapshoot.

I do stream, I use Amazon lossless HD service but I'm under no illusions that what I get is sometimes far from lossless.
 
Robert said:
With streaming you pretty much get what you are given, with zero choice.
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How is having the choice of dozens and dozens of versions of the Bach Matthew Passion “zero choice”?

Right enough, if you’re in some kind of collectory time-warp still trying to get Dark Side of the Moon to sound like it did back in the day, then you may fall victim to iffy remasters, but for the vast majority of decent recordings streaming from a decent supplier like Qobuz offers an almost overwhelming choice of extraordinary quality. Amazon is iffy because you have no guarantee of getting the stated resolution; they reserve the right to downgrade the stream and you also have to get it out of Windows unmolested. But Qobuz is pretty straight, and junk compilation albums are easy to filter out, just as “Best of ..” CDs were easy to avoid.

CDs are over, finished, end-of-life, have no future, a thing of the past, a distant memory. Sales have ceased.
 
AndyU said:
How is having the choice of dozens and dozens of versions of the Bach Matthew Passion “zero choice”?

Right enough, if you’re in some kind of collectory time-warp still trying to get Dark Side of the Moon to sound like it did back in the day, then you may fall victim to iffy remasters, but for the vast majority of decent recordings streaming from a decent supplier like Qobuz offers an almost overwhelming choice of extraordinary quality. Amazon is iffy because you have no guarantee of getting the stated resolution; they reserve the right to downgrade the stream and you also have to get it out of Windows unmolested. But Qobuz is pretty straight, and junk compilation albums are easy to filter out, just as “Best of ..” CDs were easy to avoid.

CDs are over, finished, end-of-life, have no future, a thing of the past, a distant memory. Sales have ceased.
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Classical has always been a special case for choice, regardless of the medium. I have zero interest in the Bach Matthew Passion, so for me it's zero choice ;)

CD doesn't need a future. There are millions of discs out there to collect. You can research them, buy the version you want, the mastering you prefer, and you know t will be lossless. Cheap too.
FWIW I think ripping them is fine, and I don't think a rip need sound worse than the CD, might even be better.
 
Much as I love CD's, that guy sounds anachronistic. Just like the people 35 years ago who rubbished digital sound and clung to old fashioned analogue.

And in 35 years from now he'll sound even more quaint and hilarious.

Back in the sixties my uncle clung to his mono amplifier and just the one speaker.
Each to his own!
 
AndyU said:
Vinyl isn’t a copy! It is a compromised approximation that is irretrievably degraded every time you play it.
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And as Roy Gandy puts it, a turntable is “a vibration-measuring machine.”

The primary job of said machine is to feed an amplifier/transducer system that generates enormous levels of vibration within the same room that the turntable typically resides.

Uh, anybody see a problem here?
 
AndyU said:
CDs are over, finished, end-of-life, have no future, a thing of the past, a distant memory. Sales have ceased.
Click to expand...

In 1990 I heard the same arguments about vinyl.

At the end of the day there are always going to be people who want to own physical media, it will be a small minority, but it will always be there. SDE is a site fully focused on box set/limited edition physical media and is doing very nicely. There is a market.

Yes streaming is great until, like me in lockdown 1, you lose your broadband connection for 12 days. I think a happy mix of old and new is fine. I have vinyl, CDs and stream occasionally when working, but I prefer CD overall.
 
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