Goodbye CD's

I'm sorry to see Borders selection diminishing! In retrospect, I've probably contributed to the problem. Of the approximately 180 CD's I bought last year, only about 30 of them were from Borders. I'm sure there are lots of folks like me who predominantly purchase music CD's through online channels, often directly from artists themselves. I'm sure that's the main issue for Borders, not so much the emerging market for downloads (dominated by iTunes).

Regarding downloads, I don't think Borders ever had the youth market. The kids never seemed to buy their CD's at Borders where I live, they were buying them at the mall CD stores. Most of the teens in my life have iPods full of downloads, and haven't bought a CD in years. So the cutback is more likely to be a response to loss of business among traditional Borders customers, rather than new customers they never had.

Not that I'm representative, but I know I'm buying more music than ever. So far, electronic music storage hasn't reduced my purchasing of CD's. After a Christmas bonus, I invested in a ModWright Transporter, and my music listening has been accelerated! It's the best digital I've heard in my system, and I've had some fairly high-end CD players from Resolution Audio, Musical Fidelity, McIntosh, and Lector. It's been an encouragement to me to buy even more CD's, whereas the majority of my listening used to be vinyl. Not that my case is typical: how many people are only now discovering CD's can be high quality, like me? Talk about the tail of the curve!.

Anyway, IMHO High res digital downloads are still just a wish, for the most part--at least I haven't found much music to buy that I want. Also, despite having ripped over 1,000 CD's to hard disk, I still like to have the insurance of the CD as an archival medium. I'd love to see my favorite music via high-res downloads, but I still like to have the CD too. Maybe I just don't want to believe that people can really live with MP3 quality for all their music??

A long-winded way of saying I think it's the internet CD business, not electronic downloads that's killing the Borders business.

Not for me...

Vinyl, CD's and cassettes all have great sound and the joy of owning a PHYSICAL PIECE OF PROPERTY! Nothing wrong with downloads but the day will come when your hard drive becomes corrupted and crashes and/or your flash drive too becomes corrupted and all that music you (report-ably) bought will be lost. Now of course you can make hd backups but who's to say the backup wont fail especially if left sitting unused for the most part.

Something about having piece of carbonate plastic (for CD) beautiful 12 inch black disc (for vinyl) and the simple hand held magnetic tape (for cassette). Yes, these formats can all suffer through age but if properly stored especially vinyl and then CD and even a nicely stored and occasionally exercised cassette can last a lifetime if not longer. I even have CDR's that are over 10 years old and still play perfectly, vinyl can last forever and I have some cassettes that are over 20 years old that still play well even if not stored perfectly.

Downloaded music may become unplayable with a future operating system or for whatever reason.

I'm not against HD music and even portable MP3 players etc. but I will not ONLY trust my music to these. There is something also about paying for something you have no physical copy of that I don't like. Yes I can have a CD go bad or and LP and cassette but not my whole library at once. HD downloads are fine and can sound great but WHAT IF!?!?!

Not even close to replacing my cd's,,all the more so with the most of the music that comes out today is trash,I mean one or two good songs out of 50 mn of music.

On this topic, can someone explain to me if we're now getting past MP3 file types for downloaded music and moving on to high resolution files? Are these not compressed like MP3 files are? Are high rez files available today and are they on the same par as a CD you would purchase at a retail store? What are they called? Sorry if I sound naive on this. Can you give the entire picture?

Well Pdn..yes there have been downloads with higher resolution than MP3 for some time now. And it is growing by the day.

Are high rez files on par with CDs bought in store?..Yes.
In some cases they have more resolution than a store bought CD.

For example, you can download a CD quality file in Flac.The file sizes vary depending on the sample rates and recording lengths.

We'll use the "Just like a woman - hymn to Nina" by Barb Jungr download from Linn records as a reference.

Let's say you have a standard redbook CD of this recording. That's 16 bit 44.1 kHz. That file size is 293.00 MB. The Studio Master sampling rate of this file is 24 bit 88.2 kHz.The file size of that same recording is 1,053.1 MB.

So as you can see we have a downloaded recording that is more than 3 times the size of a store bought red book CD.
After all a standard CD will only hold up to 700 MBs of information.

Just as the difference in sound between MP3s and red book are undeniable. The same goes with red book verses the Studio Master.

A downloaded Studio Master or Hi Rez is similar to 2 channel SACD.


Here's a few sites you can look over.Try some of the samples on both sites. Even with basic computer speakers you can hear the difference in quality.

Itrax
Linn Records
Here's a totally free site of thousands of live recordings from venues all over the country.Some of the recordings are HiRez as well.
Etree.org.