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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

My daughter got a record player for Christmas last year and it caused me to think about my relationship to music. After she got the record player, I've taken her to the record store a few times and it was like stepping out of a time machine. I loved everything about it (Waterloo Records in Austin is pretty fantastic).

I ended up buying a CD player and pulling my collection out of the attic. I had forgotten how good music from a CD sounds on a big stereo.

These days, I'm mostly listening to entire albums (even when I use a streaming service). I've also started buying CDs again. When I stopped buying CDs, they were usually between $15 and $25. In the past four months I've bought a bunch and haven't paid more than $8.

I know CDs are dying and now that I'm back into it, it kind of makes me sad. It's shocking to me to think the format was defined 40 years ago. The Philips and Sony engineers did a fantastic job.

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I had a similar experience last winter when I popped a CD into my desktop. Probably the first time I had heard music with a bitrate higher than Spotify’s 320kbps in a few years. Within a day I was off buying my favorite albums on FLAC and making a CD wishlist. Made me remember why I bought nice speakers in the first place.

And I’ve thought this for a while: With gigabit internet connections spreading, video streaming services that soak up bandwidth (10-20+ Mbps all day), WHY are companies stingy about audio bitrate? My connection can stream multiple 4K videos, yet audio is the same (or worse) bitrate than what I burned on CDs in 2003.

Tidal offer a "CD quality" 1411kbps option. I tried their trial but I honestly couldn't tell the difference vs Spotify when I got the other half to test me. And at twice the price I couldn't justify it. Perhaps that says more about my ears and my audio setup but that's just my findings.

I think the bitrate stingyness comes from the fact that people tend to watch Netflix at home over wired internet and they listen to streaming music over a more expensive wireless connection, often on crappy headphones.

There are higher bitrate services out there. Deezer will stream FLAC and there are probably others.

Where are you buying FLAC files from? For now I'm still happy with physical CDs although I have ripped them to ALAC. I'm not sure what the difference is, but when I scroll through my library on iTunes there's never anything I want to listen to, but if I look through my physical discs I always find something I want to put on.

I like to get higher bitrate stuff from Bleep and Bandcamp.

I suspect most contemporary CDs are just uncompressed dumps of bitrate/band limited compressed audio.

CDs are so cheap these days, and Amazon has AutoRip for many albums and will retroactively add it if you bought it from them and they add it to Amazon Music later.

I miss longboxes though. It was terribly wasteful packaging but I loved them, especially the ones that had unique art just on the longbox.

I always buy physical.

> CDs are so cheap these days, and Amazon has AutoRip for many albums

I usually buy MP3s from Amazon's Digital Store (I've never bought into the streaming stuff). What's funny is that occasionally, it's actually cheaper to buy the physical CD with AutoRip than it is to buy the same MP3 download-only format Amazon sells. I've had a couple instances where I bought the CD, got the digital downloads with it, and tossed the still-shrink wrapped physical CD on eBay.

The first CD that I ever bought back in 1991 came in a longbox, but I don't recall any of the CDs I got after that coming in them.

The longbox was the original standardized packaging format for CDs, but since the longbox itself was disposable -- the actual CD was stored in a plastic "jewel case" inside, you were supposed to keep the plastic case and throw away the longbox -- there was an outcry against them as wasteful packaging. (See for instance this article, from 1990: https://ew.com/article/1990/04/20/whats-cd-longbox/)

The recording industry loved the longbox, because it supposedly made CDs harder to shoplift. But for an industry that generally likes to consider itself progressive, being the target of protests by environmentalists was a bad look. So by the early '90s they'd given up on the longbox, dropping it completely and just shipping the CD in the plastic "jewel case" by itself.

The longbox CD package format meant that retailers could use their existing LP storage bins to sell CDs as well during the transition period. The CD jewel case was visible above the shelves below it.

As retailers installed dedicated CD shelving systems, the longbox format was abandoned.

I don't think I've ever seen a longbow in person. I love the art on them though.

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