CDs

On a tangent - always been bewildered by others' talk of "charity shop hauls", where they miraculously find the Electronic Panorama boxset or a crate of first edition Burroughs books for 25p. My experience of these places has universally been: brown leather jackets and stonewash dungarees; scratched-to-fuck '90s Mixmag 'Ibiza Anthems' CDs; dusty, tanned copies of 'The House Plant Expert' and 'Killing for Company; some cardboard box stuffed with old knitting periodicals; and an insane old woman who smells of cat's piss and looks like she murdered her husband in 1984.

I think the only thing I ever bought in one was that PiL 'Live in Tokyo' cassette, for £1, and I binned it straight after playing it cos it was shit.

martin said:

On a tangent - always been bewildered by others' talk of "charity shop hauls", where they miraculously find the Electronic Panorama boxset or a crate of first edition Burroughs books for 25p. My experience of these places has universally been: brown leather jackets and stonewash dungarees; scratched-to-fuck '90s Mixmag 'Ibiza Anthems' CDs; dusty, tanned copies of 'The House Plant Expert' and 'Killing for Company; some cardboard box stuffed with old knitting periodicals; and an insane old woman who smells of cat's piss and looks like she murdered her husband in 1984.

I think the only thing I ever bought in one was that PiL 'Live in Tokyo' cassette, for £1, and I binned it straight after playing it cos it was shit.

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yup...well, that's 98% of them, but every once in awhile...

i've had most of my decent hauls from flea markets or used record stores where the proprietor doesn't know anything about the genre (or discogs) and puts good stuff out for cheap. used to happen more often, in the pre-discogs/ebay years.

martin said:

Are you referring to the 'Selector's Choice' CDs?

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Yeah. A fucking atrocity.

Matthew said:

two greatest hauls ever:

this for 50p in a car boot sale
https://www.discogs.com/Rammellzee-K-Rob-Beat-Bop/release/1190926

and this for £15 in the old reckless in camden by the lock
https://www.discogs.com/La-Monte-Yo...Eternal-Music-Dream-House-7817/release/655646

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Shit! That Beat Bop Discogs top-end price is INSANE. Very cool find. I wish someone reissue that La Monte Young one and the Black Album on CD, as they're conceptually similar and it'd be nice to hear 'The Volga Delta' without all the low-bitrate MP3 distortion on the copy I scabbed from Mutant Sounds blog...

Re: Droid - Glad I avoided them then. I had an earlier Jammy's comp double-CD on VP (can't remember the name, had a picture of his studio on the front) and remember the volume being seriously low, plus tonnes of early fade-outs (presumably to squeeze as much content on as possible), so wondered if those Selector's Choice CDs might be a suitable replacement...obv. not...

martin said:

Shit! That Beat Bop Discogs top-end price is INSANE. Very cool find. I wish someone reissue that La Monte Young one and the Black Album on CD, as they're conceptually similar and it'd be nice to hear 'The Volga Delta' without all the low-bitrate MP3 distortion on the copy I scabbed from Mutant Sounds blog...

Re: Droid - Glad I avoided them then. I had an earlier Jammy's comp double-CD on VP (can't remember the name, had a picture of his studio on the front) and remember the volume being seriously low, plus tonnes of early fade-outs (presumably to squeeze as much content on as possible), so wondered if those Selector's Choice CDs might be a suitable replacement...obv. not...

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Theyre super compressed, really harsh with no dynamics.

Actually, theyre great. I have a few for sale if your interested...

droid said:

Actually, theyre great. I have a few for sale if your interested...

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Phew! Thanks, appreciate it. £25 each OK?

Just to further derail this - when is ANYONE going to comp that Lovindeer answer to Echo Minott's 'What the Hell' where he plays a copper who gives Echo a beating in return for knocking his g/f around?

I bought that LP just for that tune.

The Lady June response is on this excellent compilation - double CD well worth a purchase:



Love the Tiger as well:



And have been seeking a version of the firehouse cut for years:

And a wickerman I never knew about!

One of the Greensleeves Scientist vinyl reissues (poss. World Cup) even had the Compact Disc brand logo on the cover, which pretty much indicates the source material. Incredible nobody at the label spotted it before it got pressed, or maybe they couldn't be arsed to change it.

Also, Island has somehow fucked up LKJ's digital material - it's about half the volume of the average release.

I expect it's fairly easy to tell apart a $25 and a $250 CD player by ear, but to tell apart the latter from once costing 100 times as much, A) how much do you have to spend on the amp and speakers, and B) just how good do your ears have to be? I'm reminded of those expensive 'super audio' CDs that you used to see in music shops, always of very well established, multi-platinum classics like Ziggy Stardust or Nevermind or Bad or whatever - well, I say 'expensive', they probably went for about what you'd pay for a good quality new vinyl LP these days. But how many people had the audio equipment at home to notice the difference, and also the actual auditory sensitivity to appreciate it?

I mean, in principle you could create a digital audio format with arbitrary bit depth and sampling rate, but beyond a certain point no human being is going to be able to tell the difference with each increasing step of resolution.

I remember this monster from ads back in my teenage years.

If ever an album was meant for 16-bit/44.1khz it was MBV's Loveless, starting with the over-quantized snares thwacking off the plastic, three seconds after you slide it in. I thought the point was that you could almost hear the bits - a graph-paper version of lushness. Anti-nostalgic rock for the Akai era. And yet:

My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields Dissects His New Loveless Vinyl Remaster said:

That was part of Shields’ task for the new vinyl reissue—to create an analog master that didn’t have a single digital stage. But it was only one part. From there, Shields had to find a disc-cutting apparatus that didn’t have a digital process, a rarity in the current landscape.

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It seems like CDs have been making a big resurgence too because as has been said the cheap second hand prices, even compared to digital downloads which seems ridiculous considering the extra value of liners etc you get.

Matthew said:

HOWEVER part of this inflated price is specific to markets. in the *audiophile* (audiofool) market people are conned into paying much higher prices. the same, equivalent or even better DACs are available for PCs/Macs made by the *recording* market. the trick is to buy in the recording market. simpler still to just play off a PC with a DAC.

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+1 on this.. additionally I'd urge anyone considering spending big bucks on audio equipment to do proper A/B testing before any purchase, if you don't pass it your wasting your money. I'd wager a huge amount people who would call themselves audiophiles would fail a test between a 320kbps and a lossless format, even 320 - 192, very experienced professionals can have difficulty with 320 to lossless and the differences in a half decent DAC to a very high end one are much more subtle imo.

Late to the party, but I have to call out the need to acquire £25K CD player in order to 'hear all the bits'.

This is demonstrably wrong, take a good quality CD drive in a computer (and by good quality we are talking less than £100) and you can accurately rip an audio CD bit-for-bit to a WAV file, and then verify this against the accuraterip database. Try it yourself with a program like XLD.

So what are you getting in a £25k CD player? You are getting an accurate jitter-free data feed, very high quality transport and output components, and a high end DAC. That's about 10% of the cost, the other 90% is the audiophile koolaid.

Any modern dedicated CD player around £1k is going to give you everything you need to extract the digital data from your CD. You might want to add a better DAC to it, but for anyone in their 40's, your hearing isn't going to notice the difference.

Instead, spend all your money on the amplifier and the speakers... this is where you are going to notice a difference for your money.

But this then leads on to the next logical question; if you can reliably and easily extract the original WAV file from a CD, why bother with the CD any more?

Invest in good network storage (you can get 6TB drives for pocket money these days), ensure you have RAID backups, maybe offsite backup in case your house burns down. Get some good streaming software like Roon that ensures you have an accurate bit-perfect feed from storage to output device. Run that into the best DAC you can afford, and away you go. CD-quality output every time, without the need to maintain those flimsy silver discs.