CD box sets are wonderful

Maybe I was too harsh - the warm, compressed sound isn't for me :)

> Also, the art sleeves are nice.

I do absolutely love the size of vinyl art sleeves - I've noticed some friends effectively buying vinyl to display rather than to listen to.

Well, the recent resurgence of vinyl has had a lot people buying substandard all-in-one-decks from online stores. For vinyl to sound good you need to invest a significant amount of money in equipment.

That's the thing. The mastering (and this can definitely affect more recent vinyl releases too) and the compression and loudness wars really ruined a lot of CDs.

I for one, wish SACD had taken off. I never really got that into it (too young to afford stuff but old enough to lust after it at Tower Records and the Virgin Megastore), but the few SACD discs I have are just awesome. The competitor, DVD-A was supposed to be good too, but it didn't really take (I have a few DVD-A discs and I think one way to play them at this point).

That said, while I have bee predicting a CD comeback for several years (b/c nostalgia), I think that CDs lack the thing that makes vinyl (and to a much lesser degree, the cassette resurgence (which is often a pure retro/nostalgia play, which as an aging hipster I respect, but as a wannabe-audiophile, I cringe at)) and vinyl collecting special.

A record takes work to get to play right. You need to care for the vinyl. You need to store it correctly. Configuring and setting up your turntable is a process -- especially if you want to do it well. And then there is the rarity factor. Because only so many plants exist, there are are both artificial and genuine limits on how many copies of an album exist. And then you get the custom colorways (the number of albums I've purchased multiple times on vinyl for the various colorways is too long to mention), the fact that liner notes and album colors are huge. It's just special.

Obviously, they could do this with CDs -- and in the late 90s, we did see some record labels/bands play around with different colors and designs for CD labels, but it still isn't quite the same.

There's also something to be said about the statement piece you have by having a really beautiful record player in your house, that you don't get with a CD player.

I was a really big MiniDisc person (mostly used it as a pre-iPod MP3 player) and I wish that would have a comeback. That format was so dope and so underrated. And the collectibility factor there would be off the charts, similar to cassette tapes, but with good sound quality and a durable product.

Having said all this, I fully expect to see Gen Z carrying around DiscMan players within 18 months.

Interesting - which releases are these? I'm having the opposite problem - recordings like Flight Facilities releasing on vinyl but not CD [1].

[1]: https://www.discogs.com/master/1105473-Flight-Facilities-Wit...

Another reason to own media is that companies like netflix can't change the playback experience. There's already annoying "skip intro" buttons, ads on the end credits and age and strobe warnings whenever you touch the pause button.

These annoyances have the tendency to creep in and I would not be surprised if at some point they include unskippable ads and a permanent Netflix logo in one of the corners. Disney, who are the worst offernders here, already displays a Disney+ logo for the first and last 15 seoonds. Once the bluray and DVD market has died, streaming companies may get a lot braver with this kind of stuff. (Remember when you could watch TV without a channel logo and banners advertising other shows?)

Oh and then there's the SJW patrol that gets streaming services to alter or cancel episodes of shows.

So there's really a good argument for buying the stuff you really like and owning a copy.

The box sets above mostly house the jewel cases in a plastic moulding (which helps them not get damaged). The "Tougher than tough" set unfortunately uses the digipak style of packaging, so when the little plastic fingers in the CD centre start failing, the disks fall out every time you open it up and it can't be repaired. Not sure how they managed to come up with packaging that was worse than jewel cases, but digipaks succeeded remarkably well at just that.

It depends on what you are listening to. High dinamic range (classical music for example) is hit hard by the mp3 compressor.

Time to delete them has come though, funnily it's much quicker to <arrgh me hearties> CDs I already own than rip them myself.

There are certain trouble files that can't be encoded well with MP3 even at 320k. I once successfully ABXY tested one such file 20 times in a row.

I think there is way more individual differences here than what some people assume. I have a few friends that often perceive way more details in images and image quality than me, to the point that some compressions that are fine for me will bother them. I think the same is true with sound: some people will benefit from CD quality, and some others won't.

That may also depend on the music that people listen to. If the tests are not made with the music you listen to, is the result the same? Is there a way to say "there's no difference for song X, so there is also no difference for song Y"?