View From The Couch - 20/Feb/2016

The End Of CDs

I ordered 'Dark Star' from JB Hi-Fi. Something went wrong with the order - which seems to be the waylay luck goes these days, - and the PayPal transaction never went through.I didn't realise this until month went by and my order didn't arrive. I only found out after I queried the order, and so I trekked in to a JB HiFi store to buy my copy. On the way to the counter I picked up the last Frank Zappa album on the shelf, which just so happened to be 'Guitar', an album Walk-Off HBP was hoping to encode lossless into his iTunes.

It turns out that CDs don't last forever after all. Somehow some rogue bit of moisture gets in and compromises the data storage. Walk-Off HBP had been moving his vast CD collection on to a hard disk only to find some of his older CDs had died on the shelf. I don't think any of my CDs have died just yet, but the indication is, it's very possible; I'd have to go through them all one by one to find out It's quite the drag. I don't think I could face such a task.

The oldest CDs I own are 'Aliens Ate My Buick' by Thomas Dolby and '90125' by Yes. I remember buying those thinking, this is the first day of my CD collection. They both still function so clearly it's not just age which affects these things. You can't get too wedded to formats. Videotapes were great when there was nothing else around;  DVDs were an excellent improvement until the Blu-Ray came along in HD 1080p; LPs were great when that was all there is; cassettes were fine until a better alternative came along. And while the future of CDs looks greatly diminished, the format of 16bit 44.12KHz will live on a bit longer.

Each time any technology gets updated, you have to bite the bullet and move on to the next thing. The funny thing is even if you know this to be abundantly true, it's hard to let go of the old tech. It's not as if the practical advantages of the CD has disappeared. The future is likely digital files streamed from some place and we pay subscriptions for this pleasure, and ownership of blocks of units goes into the past, proper listening will demand you control aspects the physical medium itself. It's a strange world in any case because Led Zeppelin have a LP box set out with CDs included for each of their albums. I wondered just what kind of person dropped $199.99 for that package of 'In Through The Out Door'. A lot of this tech has a long tail.

Walk Off HBO said that once he is done transferring all his discs on to a hard drive, he'll be able to pack up all his CDs into boxes. It would be the end of the CD era for him. It's such a weird thought. Yet I can recall way back in the mid-80s, Walk-Off HBP had crystallised that idea. He had created a fictional character who lives in the future who carried around a huge library of 20th century recorded music on a tiny data storage unit. Little did he know he was really talking about himself.