What's amused you today? XD

Candy Gal · Oct 11, 2020

Meanwhile in Scotland!

Candy Gal · Oct 11, 2020

TrudginAcrossTheTundra · Oct 11, 2020

Noserider said: ↑

A CD could certainly handle being played over and over better than a tape. Played a thousand times, it sounds as good as the first time you played it. But for that to happen, you had to treat a CD like you were moving the Mona Lisa around. A tape meanwhile could be sat on, stepped on, dubbed over by stuffing cotton into it, and generally physically abused, and still come out functional.

CDs were the better tech, but they were very fragile. Tapes sounded like shit, but they could take a beating.

Either way, streaming HD music now is the greatest.
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Well, everything's relative and everything's a product of tradeoffs. Plus consider there's subjective experiences and there's objective reality.

If you think CDs are delicate, then you weren't an audiophile through the vinyl years. Yes you have to respect the playing surface of a CD if you care to preserve its playing integrity. But that requires very little effort compared to respecting the playing surface of a vinyl record! It would be an eye opener to see all we had to go through to get and maintain high quality sound with that medium. It was surprisingly time consuming and exacting. Then the CD came along and we could play it without cleaning and even leave it in the player when it finished. Putting it away was simply snapping it into a case, no need to carefully slide it into a plastic lined sleeve while Uber careful not to touch the playing surface with anything. Forget the high precision mechanical technology needed to extract the signal from the grooves with high bandwidth and low distortion and noise. CDs and their players were indestructible in comparison. And cheap. Dirt cheap.

Cassettes were never considered a medium for critical listening. They had other uses like portable field recording and automobile listening. The CD, despite early player deficiencies, were an alternative aimed at critical listening. And now with current playback technology they far exceed vinyl and also exceed the magnetic tape used to make those records, when it comes to clarity and accuracy. So, CDs vs cassettes is like comparing apples to oranges, if you will.

Streaming may be the "greatest" in terms of convenience or background music, sure. It is great to be able to ask your system to find and play a song. But it's not a contender for critical listening. I mean, it COULD be, with today's internet bandwidths, it would be possible if they were to shoot you the WAV file. But they don't. They compress the file to preserve bandwidth in the process reducing definition. For "regular folks who might wear tennis shoes or the occasional python boot" it's probably fine or even great. Especially compared to cassettes. But not for critical listeners. When I listen, it's 100% concentration. I sit still in one spot eyes closed and focus. I hear way more than regular folks who go about doing other things with music playing. So my criteria reflects that.