Comments on: CDs: in memoriam

By: Me

Me — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:03:40 +0000

I’m never comfortable leaving my computer on at home due to a combination of worry about electrical hazards and energy savings. Which is pretty ridiculous considering that I have absolutely tonnes of electronics I happily leave on in my lab. It’s probably more about force of habit.

More practically we don’t have a PC in the living room. If we did I probably would leave it on as a dedicated media server. At the moment I have to lug my laptop over to the speakers, make sure the power cord is in, unplug the speakers from the TV, etc, etc. It’s definitely too elaborate to do casually.

Oh yeah, and we totally had some 78s… no wait, we didn’t we had 33.3 and 45 rpm records when I was kid. I remember being fascinated by the sleeve art and “Nipper” the HMV dog. Those sleeves were sexy. That’s the sort of format I’d like for browsing through my music collection.

TD: Thanks for that. I too have all my old CDs lying around (well, actually sorted semi-neatly into binders. How anal.) but at some point in the last year or two I completely stopped using them. There’s no way they’re leaving the house yet though. It still feels a bit perverse buying stuff purely electronically, even if it all ends up the same way.

By: JonJ

JonJ — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:24:59 +0000

Well, I think this sort of sentiment is basically a function of age.

I started listening to music on my mother’s 78s. If you don’t know what “78s” were, you can probably look it up on Wikipedia. Comparing what either hard-disk-stored music or CDs sound like, and the convenience of using them, to that experience is a difference greater than night and day. So today’s audio experience doesn’t bother me at all.

Besides, my computer is already on most of the day every day, and I usually leave it on over night. So what’s this “boot up” problem? If it’s not on, or I’m away from it, I probably have my iPod with me, and I can just stick the ear phones on and mash the little wheel to hear anything I want (out of a library so huge I couldn’t have dreamed of carrying it around on my back in the days of LPs, or even with CDs). It’s the next thing to heaven, as far as I’m concerned. (And since I don’t believe heaven is real, that’s no problem either.)

By: Terminal Degree

Terminal Degree — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:34:11 +0000

“Before you could just get it on with the music, now you have to take it out to a movie and dinner first.”

That’s about the funniest thing I’ve heard lately. Thanks for the chuckle.

I, too, like my iPod but sometimes wish for the convenience of a CD. Although I have a good portion of my library on my hard drive, I won’t be getting rid of those CDs any time soon.