The Further Demise of Physical Media
Continuing the saga of the slow demise of CDs is this poll of the online readers of Stereophile magazine, indicating that only 45% use CDs or SACDs as their primary method of listening to music, compared to 50% who use either an MP3 server or iPod.
I was previously unaware of Stereophile magazine, but it’s one of those magazines targeted at people with more money than sense audiophiles, which reviews things such as these $2999 interconnects using language like:
Silences and spaces between notes and sonic “images” weren’t even black: They were just dead-empty. Tunefulness, rhythm, and musical flow were all superb.
Although to be fair, the author does blatantly point out that it is a ridiculous price.
Regardless of how prodigal the publication is with their praise for expensive audio, the point is that their readership is well-biased toward the audio snob — not the casual top-40 downloader — and these guys are now more inclined to play via hard-disk than CD. I think with both of these ends of the audio listening spectrum covered, storable-audio is well on the way to completely wiping out physical formats.
In fact, the only time I use CDs these days is in my car stereo… and those are only for storing MP3s on. I kinda miss the collection browsing, but don’t miss the dust and taken up space. How about you? Do you still have a collection of CD jewel boxes cluttering up the shelves?