The Rapid Rise (& Fall) of the CD

I just recently got Cary CAD300 player for VERY CHEEP. I like it the way it is without upsampling or tube output!

@mwinkc:  Yes, people are still buying CD’s, and CD players, but only those primarily amongst the older crowd who grew up playing CD’s. Yes, CD and vinyl, on and off, can become slightly trendy for the young crowd. But, it’s only a passing whim and nothing even close to anything major. Believe me, the young, between the ages of say, 14-40, aren’t out there buying up a bunch of CD’s, or vinyl records. It never ceases to amuse me how us old farts (audiophiles) are constantly trying to fool ourselves into believing that vinyl and CD are going to make some king of a miraculous come back, just because we still love them. It ain’t happening!!! The digital world moved on past physical media like CD and vinyl years ago. Yes, the old and antiquated CD and vinyl record is constantly being resuscitated by the baby boomer generation (myself included), and they both will most likely slowly fade out almost completely, as all us old farts slowly fade out completely. Happy listening.

kennymac. As a side story, when the CD format was developed (as indicated in that video) I had bought a CD player straight away and enjoyed CD sound. I still had a Thorens TT and was spinning albums too. As time went on, CDs were engineered better and I got rid of my TT and albums. I had thought the format was dead. Well it was for 1-2 decades and now it’s back full tilt. I also have two tube amps even the US stopped making vacuum tubes long ago. I guess the point of this tale is that formats don’t usually die, they will come back eventually. To many audiophiles they sound good enough to enjoy the listening experience.

... and CD’s are gaining in popularity again, there are a good many YouTube vids about this; sales are increasing and there are more CD players and CD transports hitting the market along with it....

Oh, there are YouTube videos so it must be true. 🙄 Some perspective: CD shipments had a relatively tiny blip up since Covid but are still down 96% from where they were at their peak around 25 years ago. US shipments peaked at 943 million in 2000, hit a low of 32 million in 2020 and had a brief bounce to 47 million in 2021 but have since steadily declined back to 37 million in 2023. Hardly a resurgence, and in the investment world we call that a dead cat bounce. CDs will continue to decline from here and are the modern digital iteration of the buggy whip, and any talk about an increase in its popularity is just silly talk and wishful thinking.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/186772/album-shipments-in-the-us-music-industry-since-1999/

https://djmag.com/news/gen-z-listen-more-vinyl-cds-and-cassettes-any-other-age-group-survey-shows

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billrosenblatt/2023/01/16/luminate-data-music-report-the-album-is-once-again-a-vinyl-lp/

An excerpt from the Forbes article

"Vinyl buyers are also likely to be Gen Z. The born-digital generation, now teenagers and young adults, is 27% more likely to purchase vinyl than the average listener; yet it’s also much more likely to discover new music on short online video clips. That is, Gen Zers are likely to watch short clips of music on TikTok and then purchase the music they like on vinyl. And they spend more than twice as much as the average consumer on music"