Nathaniel
Is what someone like my aunt would say. I like physical media. I like owning the products I like to watch and listen to. Films on 4K Blu-ray will always look better than if they're streamed on a streaming service, and default settings on most streaming services opt for low bitrate lossy compressed versions of the songs. I also just prefer not having to pay for subscription services. I did sign up for Apple Music back in 2018, and when I did, all of my iTunes store music purchases were wiped. I lost the right to at least four albums and numerous songs that I had paid for with my own money. I'm sure this is mentioned somewhere in the agreement, but I was (and still am) pissed. No company is coming to break my CD collection because I signed up for their streaming service.
The funny thing is I rarely actually play the discs I own. Due to the way I rip these discs to my music library, I end up with a perfect copy of the audio data from the disc, which I then use to listen to the songs. I do own a CD player, which does get some use, but not as much as you'd probably think of someone who's written a page highly praising the format.
Music streaming services also solely provide the absolute newest versions of songs the record companies want you to listen to. An exception to this at the moment is The Dark Side of the Moon, which has its 2015 and new 2023 remastered versions available on Apple Music at the moment, but I predict the 2015 version will be removed soon. The same for The Beatles, since it seems Universal Music wants the original versions of the albums that have received a remix by Giles Martin to go away. If you try to look for Abbey Road for instance on Apple Music, you'll usually be redirected to the 2019 mix.
Now, not all remasters are inheriently bad. Death Magnetic by Metallica is a good example, but most remasters seem to suffer from several issues not present in the original versions of these discs solely to make them compete with contempoary music releases. Kraftwerk is a good example, where the 2009 remasters of their catalogue are much louder than the original discs, with a bass boost and compression applied to make the songs as loud as possible and still fit within the limits of the CD. The waveforms of the two remastered CDs I own (The Man-Machine and Computer World) don't go as far as produce any clipping, but they're still bad.
Soon.
No. While a good sounding record will always sound great if you take care of it (and play it on quality equipment), on paper, the CD is miles better than the vinyl record. The thing is, the master on the CD (the audio data) also needs to be done properly and not done for the sake of being loud. There are some CDs that are regarded as the best way to listen to these albums. Going back to artists I've mentioned, both The Beatles and Kraftwerk have CD releases of one of their albums (Abbey Road and Computer World respectively) that are flat transfers of the original master tapes, which results in a sound identical to what you'd hear if you were ever to listen to those tapes. This is because the CD is capable of reproducing every sound the human ear can make out. A good sounding CD will always sound better than the same music on a vinyl record.
From what I've seen, 1980s CDs seem to be the best in terms of sound quality. This is when mastering engineers actually tried to make these discs sound good. Excessive loudness also seems to only affect popular music. The worst offenders I've seen are Hip-Hop and House. Genres like Classical and Jazz seem to be immune. But then again, the only classical music piece people my age are listening to is the Toreador March because of the funny robot bear. Beethoven's 9th was pretty good.
CDs are at their all time low when it comes to prices, and due to the abundance of them, I think it will stay this way for a long time. The CD was our dominant way of listening to music for quite some time, there are billions of the things.
I wish it was as simple as that. Death Magnetic mentioned earlier was loud for the sake of loud on the original CD release. Other discs have issues such as crap mastering, or dropouts, where there is a momentary loss of audio data in one or both channels. This is especially noticable with headphones. Try listening to the title track of the original Polar/Polydor CD of ABBA's Super Trouper, and you'll see what I mean. So that means for some albums, you need to do a bit of research to find the best CD version. Unfortunately, sometimes the best sounding discs are rare and/or expensive. I don't condone piracy *wink*.
I wouldn't call myself that. I do own a dedicated desktop amp (The FiiO K5 Pro ESS) and a pair of Sennheiser HD 600 headphones, but I'm perfectly happy with this setup and am not looking to change it for something more expensive down the line. If I don't want to use the headphones, I use an iPod Hi-Fi speaker for desktop audio. It sounds fine to me.
You haven't heard of losless compression. The codec I prefer is FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). FLAC keeps the audio data losslessly compressed, which means when the data is unpacked, the resulting output is exactly the same as what went in. I also use a CD ripping program with AccurateRip support to make sure the extracted audio data from these CDs is bit-for-bit identical to what's stored on the disc. This is purely for archival purposes but it allows me to keep a perfect copy of the disc.
File compression isn't the same as audio compression. In the world of music, compression means to lower the volume of parts of the song to prevent clipping or overload.
P.S. I'm aware iTunes and Windows Media Player (or whatever both are called nowadays) have their own lossless compression algorithms, but I prefer FLAC for its openness and has better compression in some cases. The audio player I use in Linux also supports FLAC without gstreamer's "ugly" plugins pack installed.
In some cases, yes it is. But for most discs, you insert it into your computer and press a button. Even if using AccurateRip. Some very early discs are a pain because of pre-emphasis, but these discs are extremely uncommon. When loslessly ripping a CD, it can take some time, as the computer how has to read the entire CD instead of lazily ignoring most of the data. But the good thing is once you have a losless, accurate copy of the CD on your computer. It stays that way, it's your files, and you decide what to do with it. I keep my music library backed up on my laptop and my phone, as my own personal streaming service. I don't use any mobile data playing music when I'm out and about, and no company knows what I'm listening to.
2. Dynamic Range Database. Good place to see what sort of dynamic range your discs have. A good comparison is between the original 1985 and 1996 versions of Brothers in Arms.