Audio pundits have a bad habit of jumping to conclusions. Seeing that digital downloads have increased by X percent, and sales of physical CDs have decreased by Y percent, some commentators have concluded that the compact disc will go out of production sometime around right now.
That’s silly. Compact discs aren’t going away any time soon. Numerous factors contribute to their continuing relevance in the marketplace. Digital downloads join physical media as yet another outlet for recordings; nothing has to replace anything else. Recorded sound is all around us and in many different formats: broadcast radio, satellite radio, Internet radio, YouTube, streaming services, downloads, CDs, LPs, tapes, even 7-inch 45 RPM singles and musty old 78 RPM shellacs.
CDs are likely to resist their own termination for quite a while. There are plenty of reasons for them to hang around, not only for their advantages, but also due to certain disadvantages in downloads that have yet to be fully addressed and eradicated. Let’s attend to downloaded audio’s shortcomings first.
Compromised Audio. That so many digital downloads are sonically compromised in the interest of faster download speeds is a serious objection for downloads to achieve parity with physical media. Uncompressed, full-quality downloads are available from an increasing number of vendors, but the two dominant players in retail downloads (Amazon and Apple) continue to trade file sizes for sound quality. It’s true that many listeners don’t really care about that, just as in previous eras listeners didn’t really care about the lousy sound on their transistor radios or el-cheapo record players. Nevertheless, a sizeable chunk of the market does care about sound quality.
Download Speeds. Even on a reasonably fast Internet connection, downloading an album in high-quality audio takes more time than it should. That’s why uncompressed audio remains out of reach for most folks; it’s just too dang inconvenient. High-res downloads, such as are available from outfits such as HDTracks or Linn Records, require more download time yet.
Discomfort and Unfamiliarity. A lot of people aren’t comfortable with using a computer (or media server) for audio playback. Even an iPod is terra incognita for many folks. CDs are simple and proven. You take them out of their case and put them in your player. Techie types such as myself may have the whole in-home network thing worked out, but we’re in the minority.
Tagging and Cataloging. Another overlooked hassle with digital downloads is the necessity of keeping proper track of them. Certainly audio tagging has gotten a lot better over the past few years. Nonetheless, it’s a rare download that I don’t need to re-tag.
Protection. It’s critical to take care of a digital audio library. Hard drives can crash. Hard drives will crash. Stuff can get lost. So backups are an absolute must. Not all that big of a deal, you might think—but just as a lot of folks are uncomfortable with using a computer as a media server, so are they unfamiliar with backing up their computer data. Set-it-and-forget devices such as Apple’s Time Capsule are a wonderful step forward, but they’re still restricted to an itty-bitty corner of the computer-using world.
Now onto the advantages of physical media.
Bulk purchases. I recently purchased the complete Arthur Rubinstein collection—all of the beloved pianist's recordings in one gigantic box set. I don’t even want to think of how long it would have taken to download that sucker. But more to the point, I love the big box with its high-gloss bound book, the reproductions of the original jacket art for each CD, and the general sense of happy exploration that comes from opening the box and pawing around inside. Ditto other recent collections, such as the Heifetz complete set, or the monster box of Toscanini’s stuff that is due to arrive fairly soon.
Insurance. Change is the norm in the computer world, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that a file format that is standard this year will also be standard five years from now. (WordPerfect, VisiCalc, and DBase files were ubiquitous and universal not all that long ago, remember.) Even if such popular digital audio formats as AIFF or FLAC or Apple Lossless hang around for a good long while, newer formats might come along that offer superior performance to today’s standards. Or a virus could wipe out your collection. Anything could happen. You might have to re-rip your entire CD collection someday. In fact, I did that just a year ago, to clean up a lot of older stuff that I had saddled with inferior file formats. That’s why I have stubbornly kept all of my physical CDs, even though I have them all ripped to my server in lossless formats.
Convenience. One of the reasons for the compact disc’s success is simplicity. You put it in the player and push Play. That’s it. No needles and discs to clean, no record to cue, no tape to rewind or fast-forward. Just a button on the remote. That ease of use remains unchanged. Not everybody can figure out how to navigate iTunes or a custom media server’s front end. But everybody knows how to use a CD player.
Pretty Stuff. CDs offer cases with pictures, and booklets with liner notes, artwork and translations. To be sure, those were a lot better back in the LP days. But the micro-printing on a CD booklet is better than nothing, and sadly, that’s typically what you get with a download. Even if the download does include the booklet, you need a computer or tablet to read it.
Secondhand Magic. Digital downloads exist in a timeless realm; present, past, future do not really exist for them. But a CD is a physical thing that was manufactured at one particular point in time. It just might go out of print. In fact, a lot of CDs go out of print, just the way almost LPs have, and all 78s have. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing of worth on those discs—in fact, there might be a lot of magic sitting on that forlorn little reject there in the bin at Amoeba Records. Until the day comes in which every single recording has been made available in uncompromised digital audio—and that’s a very, very long way off—used CDs, just like used LPs and their ilk, will remain compelling.
No Legalistic Shenanigans. CDs do not come with any kinds of restrictions as to digital rights. Some downloads do. All DVDs do—they’re pestered with that horrid region-coding stuff. Ditto Blu-Ray. Even though the Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) format offers higher quality audio than Redbook CDs, SACD is crippled by anti-copying restrictions. But a CD is universally playable, just as were its predecessors, the LP and the 78 RPM disc.
In short, CDs aren’t going to vanish any time soon. Whereas Naxos, EMI, and Universal Music offer uncompromised downloads, Sony Classical restricts downloads to iTunes and Amazon, in sonically compromised audio. I suppose they’ll come around sooner or later. Nonetheless, although I certainly take advantage of full-resolution downloads, the bulk of my audio purchases remain physical media, as they always have.