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I'm doing a paper on the impact of CDs. I want to know what were you all experiences with CDs before and after they came out.
SHRUG........it's just another media to use, to have available.
I still buy LP's and cassettes as well. I have the capacity to store them all on computer if I need to and, conceptually at least (haven't tried my procedures for a while), I have the equipment and procedures to make any collection of music I please. It won't be one to one perfect in all cases, but it can be sufficient pleasant to my ear.
To put it another way, many of the methods we used 40 years ago can work fine in this day and age.
It's interesting to me that some people are writing to say that the LP-CD transition was meaningless to them. If you have no reaction to a phenomenon, why respond to a thread about the phenomenon?
Although I guess that the existence of people who just go with the flow, not even noticing the flow, is something. They're probably the happiest of all.
Probably a more interesting transition is the one from hard media to ethereal media. Easily stolen and copied, and largely rendering the music business obsolete.
CD's offered a measure of convenience----you could locate a song easily and play it over and over seamlessly. Many of my friends, in order to protect their records, would record them to cassette, which actually lessened the fidelity. With CD's the fidelity remains true unless the CD player has a problem.
I remember having to walk barefoot in the snow, 4 miles, uphill both ways, to the turntable to flip the album over. Kids these days just don't realize how easy they have it.
Yes, I remember how labor intensive it used to be when you had to flip the cassette tape over to listen to side B. Auto reverse was introduced in the 80's and it was a LIFE CHANGER !
I won't even go into how Dolby B changed the world, we would have to start a whole new thread for that.
Digital Audio Tape. But it was still a tape; like "normal" audio tape, it could stretch, tangle and break. Introduced 3-4 years after CD and never really took off.
There was also a format called Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). This recorded digitally in a lossy format on regular cassettes. It was even less widespread than DAT (which actually got a lot of use for mastering albums and for recording live concerts, although it never took off as a consumer format).
DCC was meant as Philips' rather oddball answer to the Minidisc. Funny, neither format gained wide acceptance (I understand DCC was pretty finicky and unrealiable-- imagine that) but some rather interesting tech advances came with it. Like ceramic anisotropic magnetoresistive playback/record heads. Really is too bad the AMR head never took off, either. A client recently had an unusually large number of cassettes for me to transfer. I would have killed to have a machine with heads whose only required maintenence is the usual periodic swab-down with 99% iso. No relapping, no need to demagnetise.....
Despite using lossy compression (384 Kb/s MPEG-1 audio layer type I [MP1] PASC), DCC recordings could at least sound halfway decent compared to conventional FM audio cassette recordings. Certainly better than the bulk of woefully over-compressed MP3 files/streams in circulation today.
Quote:
"Dolby B/C do not sound good to me. I always leave mine OFF when listening to cassettes as it sounds best!"
Dullby.
Last edited by ratchetjaw; 11-17-2014 at 12:35 AM..
From my recollection, it went something like this:
At first, it was for the more serious audiophiles. The only dependable cd players were home system components and cds, as other people have mentioned, were nearly $20, more than twice that of cassettes and records. Car audio people were in a real pickle. Early auto cd players weren't all that great, there was quite a bit a skipping. I can only imagine how someone who had put a lot of money into a cassette-centered system felt when cds came out.
I recall a brief period when you could find cds, cassettes and records all in the same store. Although I had heard about how cassette technology might yet surpass cd technology, it soon became clear which way the wind was blowing. After a while, portable, relatively dependable cd players went down in price and I got one as a gift and slowly began rebuilding my music collection. As others have mentioned it wasn't easy at first. It wasn't like there was an amazon or something you could buy cds from, you just had to go out and get them and the selection wasn't that great. Mostly new mainstream releases and some classic rock staples (I recall seeing the Beatles albums in those long cardboard boxes that cds first came in). If that wasn't your thing, you waited, held on to your cassettes and kept buying more cassettes until cds really took off after a few years and the selection widened considerably.
If you're a music fan as I am, it was kind of interesting in a way. Considering you had limited funds at any one time to spend on cds, you began to kind of rank the music you had taken for granted earlier because inevitably, you'd be faced with a tough decision whenever it came to buying a new cd as you slowly began to replace your collection while at the same time buying any new releases you might be interested in.
I grew up in a family that listened to records and bought quite a few myself in the early 80s as a kid when I first started to get into music. But as I got older and cassettes took over, cds came as a bit of a shock. I had forgotten how clear a clean record sounded and how much hiss cassettes had and how they were mixed to make music sound a bit more bland for putting on cassette. Cds were a return to higher fidelity sound and in a way, and they were a lot like small records, especially in how you had to be careful handling them and how instead of rewinding and fast forwarding you simply could play the next song (but of course, no flipping the record).
My parents are boomers and it seemed to work like this and I would bet other people could relate: when I was a little kid, there was a lot of music in the house. My parents bought records and played them a lot. As they got older, and cable tv came into its own in the 80s, music wasn't heard as much except in the car (on a tape) and tv took over. The records became kind of neglected by the time cds came out, so they weren't as crystal clear as they were back in the late 70s-80s, they had been scratched over the years. Cds, due somewhat to their novelty, at least in my own family, kind of brought music back. My dad had a top-notch system built of components he chose himself that would have been outstanding by late 70s-early 80s standards. By about 1990 it hadn't been used much in a long time, but then he got a cd player, added it to the system and started playing the I guess about 10 cds he got initially to play (Led Zeppelin IV, L.A. Woman and Rubber Soul were three I remember for sure). Basically, I think cds brought sound quality back, and ushered back in the high-fidelity sound movement of the 60s-70s which had been largely dormant accept for the most devoted audiophiles when cassettes came to the fore. I think that listening to music on ipods, phones and using streaming services has sort of taken things back in the opposite direction again.
I'm doing a paper on the impact of CDs. I want to know what were you all experiences with CDs before and after they came out.
Before CDs we wore out cassette tapes (and were totally bummed when we did). If they were still somewhat OK, we had to rewind with a pencil.
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