10 reasons why I still buy CDs - YouTube

hello hey john yeah the sponsor  of today's video is audioquest  

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one of the biggest stories in the  streaming world last week was that Qobuz  

announced that they would  now be servicing scandinavia  

and australia and new zealand the reason people  are excited about kobas is because it gives us  

cd quality streaming across the board so for a  library of 70 million songs i think it is now  

having cd quality is just fantastic  because the jump from say 320 to cd quality  

for me is the most important jump in source  quality that you can make as an added bonus around  

seven percent of those 70 million songs on kobos  are available in 24-bit high-res audio now i use  

kobas at home i use it integrated inside roon  alongside tidal i also stream with spotify  

soundcloud i also have a wall of vinyl as you  saw from my last video i love playing records  

but and this may confound some viewers is  that i have another wall that's full of cds  

so what's up with that so i want to step through  10 reasons why i still buy cds and still collect  

them reason number one is i still get the hands-on  experience of physical media reason number two is  

that in that physical experience i still get  a booklet with artwork and liner notes and  

very often that artwork and liner notes is not  available in the extra metadata layer that comes  

with roon now the vinyl people right now probably  going well john you get all that from vinyl and  

you do but here's the difference so reason  number three is that cds are far less likely  

to get damaged in transit and even if they do it's  usually just a dual case that gets broken which is  

easily replaced reason number four for cds is that  they are generally far more affordable than vinyl  

especially on the second hand market with things  that are you know long out of print on vinyl  

you can get them on cd pretty easily although  some some of the more obscure 90s electronica  

that i like you know the cd copies are  almost gone on disc gogs and they're  

yeah they're going for about 30 euros which is the  price of many new vinyl lps so reason number five  

cds are easier to store than vinyl and that  really matters especially when you're moving house  

for my cd storage i use ikea's gannetby storage  towers those are now discontinued reason number  

six this is a big one for all digital audio  enthusiasts but for me you know if we're  

talking about cds versus vinyl i hate that kind  of adversarial attitude but if we're gonna do it  

there's no surface noise on cds there's just none  they're deadly quiet for number seven we come back  

to a comparison with streaming so if i play a  song on any streaming service that streaming  

service knows that i've played it they can build  up a profile of my listening habits which i guess  

feeds into the algorithms and generates  playlists for people that like that kind of thing  

i'm not so much of a fan of that but if i play a  cd at home my cd player is not networked it's not  

connected to my router no one knows that i'm  listening to on cd nobody knows that only me  

it's private cds are private again another  cd advantage over streaming in many cases cds  

playback gaplessly now a lot of people kind of go  what's gapless playback like why is that important  

so it's for when songs or movements in a symphony  are designed to blend seamlessly into one another  

and you don't want your streamer or your  playback system inserting a gap as it makes  

a transition from one track to the other  but many upnp implementations still do this  

some media players still do this this is called  gapped playback because as we move from file a  

to file b as we're going through the album you get  gaps between tracks and with cds we don't get that  

the technical reason why is that on a cd  there's only one track when you see the the  

track number advance that's read from the table of  contents at the very start of the cds data layer  

so cds are gapless we know that vinyl is gapless  even cassettes for gapless streaming and also  

to a lesser extent portable media players are the  sort of the first formats i guess in history that  

are not gapless in many cases number nine this  one should be obvious to most people but it's not  

so often talked about is that if you buy a cd  the artist gets paid according to their original  

contract and they earn more money than they  would do than if you just stream the same album  

and this is especially true if you're buying stuff  from band camp where the artist gets 90 percent  

of the cd sale price that can be  quite a lot of money when they sell  

a lot of cds and this is why i'm kind of still  buying cds because it's sort of in my small  

way how i can best support the artists that i  really like but of course you know i can't have  

a wall of millions of albums which is what  essentially what streaming services like cobbers  

offer they basically bring the cd store home  right because most of its cd quality like 93  

of its cd quality so imagine having millions of  cds in your house no that's just not feasible  

so the range is more limited in my  cd collection than i'm streaming but  

here comes number 10 and this is a little bit  controversial for some people but generally  

speaking in most cases i am generalizing here  but this is generalizing my own experience  

cds sound a little bit better now that may  not be true for you but it's certainly been  

true for me over the last few years i know  srijan at six moons has also found that out  

recently and i've been crapping on about this so  much to michael lavonna at twittering machines  

that he has finally decided to investigate cd  transports and cd players to find out for himself  

so i would urge you to do likewise i know many  of you do find cds sound more satisfactory  

than streaming so some of you'll be thinking okay  old man like i still want to stream you know what  

the hell is cd's got to do with me but here's the  thing that often gets lost is that if you buy a cd  

you can still rip it to a hard drive and  then stream it you can do both so they're  

not necessarily a mutually exclusive choice all  of my cds that i own are ripped to the hard drive  

that's connected to my roon and plex server so  i can access them from anywhere when i'm not  

at home or not in the mood to play a cd because  i'm not always in the mood to play cd sometimes  

i just want to stream things because it's quicker  and easier but sometimes i kind of want the sort  

of the deluxe experience you know go and pull  a cd off the shelf and put it in the tray and i  

push play and i'm sitting there it's just me  and the music and no one else knows about it

yeah not a lot of tea

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