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Damned audiophiles

dropzone said:
Good D/As help, too. My CD player is an 18-yr-old Revox that cost a former boss an arm and a leg in '92 and i
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I still have the first CD player I ever bought, back in the days when there were only a few CDs available - a Marantz CD45 (the basic one, not the audiophiled one). When it got retired, the audio was still good (even my ears were still working properly in them days!), but it had got mechanically noisy. Shame.

ETA: It cost about £200 in them days - a lot of money a the time.
 
I remember when the first Orange Book audio CD-R recorder hit the professional market. It was made by Studer and cost $25,000.

A couple of years later I attended a SPARS function to promote the launch of a new professional CD-R deck by Marantz- they had got the price down to a mere 7 grand, and blank discs down to only about 10 bucks apiece.

Now, of course, that technology is essentially obsolete, while the wrangling about digital sound quality will never be obsolete.

It reminds me of the first-ever LED digital watch (cirac 1971). It was made by Hamilton and sold for $1500- of course it was a very nice watch with a lovely gold case and band- but within two years you could buy a product with exactly the same function in a dpeartment store for maybe 20 bucks.

Sometimes "early adopter"="happily offers buttocks to be bitten".
 
rsaavedra said:
It is so critical that it almost seems like a flaw in the design of the CD, to have such a sensitive surface with so little protection.
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In retrospect, I have to agree, but keep in mind what they were replacing. Vinyl records not only have two completely exposed data-storage surfaces, but to read the data from a vinyl record, you have to scrape a pointy metal thing across it! (okay, usually a pointy metal thing with a sliver of gemstone glued to the end, but that seemed too wordy).

And I won't even go into the whole warped-record problem.

So - when you're coming from that perspective, CDs looked pretty robust.
 
Aitch said:
Came across this on another board; has it been mentioned before?
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In other forums I've seen them commented on before. Kimber's "Black Pearl" cables are known to be one of the most ridiculously expensive cables ever. IIRC, they hold (held?) the record of most expensive.
 
TheDaver said:
My advice is that for any very valuable and/or often-used CD you own, you should burn copies, and use the copies rather than the originals. Keep the originals in a safe storage place so you still have a perfect source for new copies when the old ones degrade. ;)
<snip>
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Will the unused CDs deteriorate in quality over time? Or will they be playable in 100 years time? Assume they have not been used in that time and they are stored in normal house conditions.
 
rjh01 said:
Will the unused CDs deteriorate in quality over time? Or will they be playable in 100 years time? Assume they have not been used in that time and they are stored in normal house conditions.
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CDs degrade with time. The time is shorter is direct sunlight is involved.
 
rjh01 said:
Will the unused CDs deteriorate in quality over time? Or will they be playable in 100 years time? Assume they have not been used in that time and they are stored in normal house conditions.
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I’ve seen the figure of 30 years thrown around, but I think the real answer is that we don’t know for sure. To me, 100 years doesn’t sound unrealistic. On the other hand, some CDs from the 1980s had bad lacquer and started yellowing after just a few years. That problem has been identified and solved, though. These days, as far as I know, deterioration with age is much more an issue with recordable media (e.g. CD-R, DVD+R) than it is with pressed media (e.g. CD, DVD).
 
Your best bet is to go the pc route... I have a professional-grade audiocard capable of AMAZING sound (zero ground floor, distortion, etc). You can buy one for less than $100. Then, simply rip your cds into flac files (perfect copies if you check for error correction). Next, buy however many hard drives you need to house your collection.

If you really want to save yourself money on speakers, go the headphone route. Grado's are great headphones for the money. I have a pair of Grado SR80's ($100) that are perfectly matched and are rated at 0db across every frequency range. I've tried $900 cans (with preamp) and couldn't tell the difference.

And of course, you need a leather recliner and mood lighting...
 
I have grado 125s as replacement for my wearing-out 80s. Grados rule man.

But we need a speaker setup for watching movies and playing music when we have people over and playing games.
 
macdoc said:
chuckle :rolleyes:

quite the koolaid there....:garfield:
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The koolaid tastes fine where I'm sitting ... I can show you some spectral analysis if you're interested. A simple M-audio card beats anything I was using in the recording studio twenty years ago.
 
Halsu said:
It's very similar to the Film vs. Digital discussion when it comes to photography (both stills and video). People associate the imperfections of film with "quality".
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This is not quite accurate. Film is still capable of higher resolution, wider tonal range, and better Dmax than digital; although the difference is increasingly narrow.
 
TheDaver said:
I’ve seen the figure of 30 years thrown around, but I think the real answer is that we don’t know for sure. To me, 100 years doesn’t sound unrealistic. On the other hand, some CDs from the 1980s had bad lacquer and started yellowing after just a few years. That problem has been identified and solved, though. These days, as far as I know, deterioration with age is much more an issue with recordable media (e.g. CD-R, DVD+R) than it is with pressed media (e.g. CD, DVD).
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A properly constructed CD will last for well over a hundred years if the plastic is protected from UV light. It's UV that causes the degredation. Extremes of temperature are also best avoided.

Recordable CDs use a dye-based substrate, and are far more prone to degradation. Keeping them stored properly -- cool with minimal temperature variation, minimize exposure to light of any kind, particularly the Blue-UV end of the spectrum -- will extend their lifespan considerably.
 
luchog said:
This is not quite accurate. Film is still capable of higher resolution, wider tonal range, and better Dmax than digital; although the difference is increasingly narrow.
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With 35mm the differences are mostly theoretical, DSLRs like Nikon D3X or Canon 1ds3 and 5Dmk2 have surpassed film in almost every practical application. You may be able to squeeze a bit more resolution and dynamic range from an perfectly exposed and developed, ultra-slow B/W film like Kodak Technical Pan, but for most purposes digital gives technically better results.

That is not to say there is no place for 35mm film anymore though. It still has certain aesthetic qualities that are difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce digitally, and there are still many photographers who prefer it as a creative tool. And of course large film formats still reign supreme, when it comes to ultimate picture quality.
 
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