Are CDs Making a Comeback?

While we pay monthly subscriptions to listen to playlists over and over, there's a small, but growing audience of people who have realized this and found that having the actual music on a physical medium is more endearing—and perhaps, more becoming.

Most of us are just fine streaming music content and there's no complaining about the convenience of playing not only an entire music store's worth of music on a portable device, but many thousands percent more music that could never be sold in music stores because they're too independent or just obscure or unknown. I cannot stress enough about the compelling shift of the entire music industry to make releasing new music by anyone and how accessible it's become. In fact, it's made engineers like me find more and more clients without having to work for a major-label mastering house.

However, with streaming services, you can only rent the music online for a monthly or yearly payment. It's not automatically yours for safekeeping until you die and pass it on. You can't easily put away a streaming album on a shelf and then, years later, pop it back into a player and experience it again EXACTLY as it was long before. Worse, if the label decides to re-mix the album, they may pull down the previous version and you no longer have access to hear that older version. I suppose you can download the music after purchase but now you have to be concerned with music storage and organization.

I'm a Star Wars fan, I won't deny it. My Legos micro-fighters in my mastering room demonstrate that. Dating myself, I can say I experienced the old Episode 4, 5, and 6 in theaters before George Lucas was compelled to fix something that wasn't broken. Now, if you watch these classics on Amazon Prime or another movie streaming service, you're more likely to experience them with all the frilly, gratuitous CGI updates that were added years later. The only way to see them in their original form is to dig up the old original VHS tapes. You may never know what made the originals so honest and compelling if you see all the latest effects.

Albums on CD, vinyl , or cassette are also that way that they can preserve the original sonic quality indefinitely, but here's where CDs are unique: They don't degrade in quality by playing them over and over. Vinyl and cassettes can degrade the more they're played. CDs, not so much. Digital form is superior in maintaining new-like quality of playback. But what's driving a resurgence of CDs? Probably somewhat the same as vinyl. It survives because people love the classic glass medium with a label printed on it, and there is a sense of pleasure you get from shutting down your life and enjoying a spinning platter and that "threaded" needle of joy.

With physical media, you also get the artists' long lost photography and artwork most will never see, lyric sheets, credits(!), and maybe some other extras. Granted, CDs don't exhibit the exact same generosity in pleasure during playback as vinyl because the discs are inserted into a drawer, not to be seen while played unless your player has a window on top. Still, there's something satisfying with that. And it's simple. And collectible.

CDs aren't the highest resolution audio available. They are only 16-bit, 44.1kHz, which, in today's climate is nothing compared to 24-bit, 192kHz, right? But streaming platforms often convert music to each playback streaming service's format. That could mean lossy compression, maybe lossless hi-resolution, but how do you really know for sure? MQA was a big question mark in the industry, wasn't it? Not to shine a poor light on MQA (personally, I thought it sounded great), but I understand it wasn't completely lossless. There was some clever trickery involved, although the outcome sounded fine.

Here's the funny part. Yes, CD's are only 16-bit, 44.1kHz, and it's fine!

Audiophiles will fiercely defend the uncompromised quality of DSD with sampling rates upwards of 768kHz. Some might even suggest that sampling rates in the Megahertz (MHz) range is worth every phrase of debate. It's true that higher sampling rates offer greater precision in number of samples used to measure the audio waveform, but honestly, it highly depends on your converter, and practically, only can benefit those with the hearing capabilities of a bird. That's my experience and I promise you, I'm not remotely alone. Maybe there's some archival benefits to much higher sampling rates and bit-depth, but who will really benefit from that?

Bit depth is another argument. 24-bit depth (and even 32-bit floating-point) offers much greater dynamic range. The brutal truth is, most recordings we listen to don't exhibit anything close to that range. Most every mix and master is dynamically compressed for comfort and portability. A modern pop artist often isn't concerned with maximum dynamic range. A true dynamic range between silence and 150 decibels is profound on earbuds or a set of at-home full-range loudspeakers, but none of these systems offer such dynamic range to begin with. If I played a recording to you that was 24-bit, 192kHz, you might be impressed—until I told you I lied and the recording was 16-bit, 44.1kHz. Discovering that, you might look at me with disgust for fooling your ears. But isn't that what many snake oil peddlers in the audio industry thrive on?

"This cable offers night-and-day improvements in your system. For $70,000 you will experience an improvement like no other." (but only if you've already spent hundreds of thousands on all other components first.)

Vinyl has less dynamic range than CDs, believe it or not. It can't be completely silent, because you'll hear the needle scraping the vinyl acetate surface of the LP. A CD, on the other hand, can silence the system by playing back all zeros (0). Vinyl can't play back anything more than 55-70 decibels difference from silence or the player's tone-arm/needle would be ejected off the record my any transient or sounds that loud. CD can host up to a theoretical 96dB of dynamic range. That's quite a lot!

Seriously, what's all this worth?

A CD is a medium by which you own and can safely put away. A CD has enough bit-depth and sampling rate resolution that you would not demand anything higher on a wide-scale market. Does anyone still buy DVD-Audio or SACD? They're higher resolution after all. But where are they? Used bins at a vintage components store? They just never caught on.

Personally, selfishly, I love CDs because of its power to be technically better than vinyl or cassette.

• You can only squeeze a maximum of 75-83 minutes of music on a disc. This adds some discretion and artistic decisions to be made if the artist recorded 25+ songs, spanning over 110 minutes.

• The medium is rather small, but it's precise. It's read by a laser, so it will never deteriorate outside other environmental factors, which DVD-Rs were sometimes prone to.

• The presentation is as close to a vinyl LP, meanwhile, still can fit into your coat pocket. Artwork and inserts give the album some added flesh onto which the artist can tattoo their logo, concept and taste. You get a bigger picture of what the artist is presenting in many cases. Sometimes, it's a nice prank.

• Mastering for CDs, and while this was probably the worst or best medium for the longevity of the loudness wars, offers one factor which is great for engineers: predictability. When I master for CD, I never ever have to worry about whether it will be automatically turned up or down.

Now, while I suppose CD masters are sometimes the worst-sounding hyper-compressed masters in mass-markets, the medium itself is still quite good. If the master sounds great on CD, playing a CD will sound excellent. It's really that easy. If a great master doesn't sound good, the problem is in the player—not the streaming service. If the only medium we had was CD, we could qualify throwing punches at engineers who ignore it's better sonic capabilities.

What's my opinion of this topic of CDs?

Personally, I'm ok with it! If I love a streaming master, I'm more likely to purchase the CD, not only so I can reverse-engineer it's wonderful sonic playback, but because I can enjoy what we did back in the 1990s when we paid $17 per disc and complained about that. We were so cheap! Now, we pay $17/month ($200/year) to listen to the same playlists we always love to hear, but would otherwise fit on a USB thumb drive or our phones and playback in full quality to CarPlay. For a one-time charge.

But I loved getting the CD at the store or in the mail and breaking it open to see the artwork on the disc. Didn't you? Didn't you find a thrill to see how drastically and surprisingly different each album appeared from the last one? Wasn't it cool to find TWO discs in the box?

I'm over-hyping it, perhaps, but here's one area we can't argue with much:

The artist gets paid more by selling physical albums.