Time Flies By So Fast…
Remember when Best Buy announced last February that they would stop selling CD (compact discs) in their stores this summer. Just last June 30, was the final day that people were able to purchase CDs from the store. However, Vinyl will still be available.
If you didn’t know CDs, — they’re highly processed, quantized to 16b, and sampled at “only” 44.1 kHz. Okay, back then when they were first introduced to the market, they were somehow “GOOD,” but now, they’re not that great anymore.
But the real question — how will people consume all of their favorite music? You can’t just enjoy music with low-quality speakers or earphones for that matter, not in a quiet room, or you won’t appreciate the subtleties lost just because of bad formats and high compression.
Change, of course, is constant in life, and it’s sometimes necessary in order for us to survive. We need to evolve, but how do we do that? — To evolve we need to adopt new things, happenings, or techniques. There’s no arguing that the extinction of CD is quite saddening, and it’s inevitable. There are only a few people left who buy CDs, as everything is now available through online and the online medium is much resourceful now.
There might be a few stores selling CDs, but in the near future, it will be extinct for good, and various entertainment mediums will be available to everyone. Mostly everything is now available online movies, shopping, services, etc. Hopefully, there are still few people who will stock up all their purchased CD collections and maybe show it to the next generation and be in a moment of nostalgia. And if you are one of those people who is collecting CDs and stuff, don’t you ever throw them away, especially the classic ones!
CDs definitely contain more data information that makes them sound better. Purchasing music online are certainly highly compressed which results in a greatly reduced bit-depth. The very reason why people still choosing CD over online purchased music is they have a bias against “lossy” file formats the likes of MP3, the most wildly popular music formats. Yes, CDs are going extinct, and music industries are abusing it and considering it as a new opportunity to step up and embrace a much better way to sell music. Why? — Because today’s online market is more CONCERNED with CONVENIENCE over quality!
Thankfully, Vinyl will still continue to be supplied.