Click to view our Accessibility Statement or contact us with accessibility-related questions
SpeleoFool
675
Jan 25, 2018
The main value of CDs is that they contain an authoritative, lossless copy of music at 16-bit/44.1kHz resolution. If I can get a digital file with the same standard of quality or better, I'll go for that instead. I won't buy lossy formats like Apple music, etc. I do still buy CDs fairly often, but I try to buy them directly from bands / labels. Here's why:
One complication with CDs these days is that they're not necessarily authoritative. I had to dig for this, but I found a source: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=678549
The gist of the message behind the link above is that certain music, when you order from Amazon, will be burned onto CD on-demand instead of shipped as an official, original pressing: "CD-R Note: This product is manufactured on demand when ordered from Amazon.com"
Which raises the question, burned from what source? If Amazon is ripping to MP3, then re-burning that to CD then they've thrown away musical information and you're not getting the lossless 16/44.1 material. Even if that's not what they're doing, they're not forthcoming about what their process is or whether their on-demand CDs contain the full original authoritative audio files, so the only safe assumption is that they do not.
--
CDs are not without some issues, though--physical media takes up space, and it can deteriorate (scratches, etc). To get past those issues, I use an app called dBpoweramp (https://www.dbpoweramp.com/) to do bit-perfect rips of my CDs (a whole topic of its own), then I archive the discs in CD boxes (e.g., https://www.uline.com/BL_8559/CD-DVD-Storage-Box).
My flow with dBpoweramp simultaneously rips to uncompressed FLAC (archival copy) and several other formats; it dumps everything to a NAS. The bit-perfect rip process ensures I get an exact copy of the music off of the CDs (e.g., no clicks or glitches), which I only need to do once. Forever after I can use the FLAC archive to regenerate all the other formats, which I've done on occasion when I needed to fix metadata errors, etc.
So at the end of the day, I'm all about listening to digital music files via computer (through a nice external DAC). But I still get to that end result more often than not by buying CDs and doing my own careful extraction to lossless file formats.
GodsPee
2
Feb 3, 2018
SpeleoFool16/44 is still info lost. The only way to purchase music with all the sounds in proper time and phase is a vinyl pressing from a master tape. Unless of course you can purchase the master somehow.
Paradiddle74
0
Feb 4, 2018
SpeleoFoolThis is (or was, since I've finished ripping my CD collection) my exact workflow, as well. Also agree 100% about the value of CDs as offering the authoritative, lossless copy of the album.
GodsPee
2
Mar 7, 2018
Paradiddle74How exactly is that possible? Evidence says that this is entirely incorrect. And impossible.
PRODUCTS YOU MAY LIKE
Trending Posts in Audiophile