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CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

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Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#101

Post by imp0cat »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #39
throw0101d wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player). That sounds wonderful. There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time. It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer…

If you could go back in time and show your younger self Spotify streamed wirelessly from a phone via AA/AC, now that would be magical. Pretty much endless amount of music delivered instantly.

But I understand that it is a different kind of magic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-kqUkZnDcM (VW Cabrion Pink Moon ad)

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#102

Post by jonhohle »

mypalmike wrote: post #70
criddell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tactile experience is one thing, but if you are bothered by the heavy use of compression on CDs (the loudness wars), then vinyl might sound better to you. Now that people aren't listening to CDs in the car, it would be amazing to see some remasters of CDs with the dynamic compression dialed back a bit.

This type of remastering (and remixing) has been happening for a while now. Lots of newer releases of classic albums of the CD era have remasters with less compression. Pretty Hate Machine, American Idiot, Absolution (Muse)…

PHM was released before the loudness war. I’ve actually read the opposite about the 2010 remaster. Significantly more compression making all the layers (one of the hallmarks of NIN) inaudible. I’ve listened to the 2010 version, but never felt anything wrong with the original. Fortunately, the original is extremely easy to find and usually very cheap, for comparison.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#103

Post by kleiba2 »

l72 wrote: post #16

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine. The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great! Most importantly…

One of the hobby projects that I want to do, and hopefully will find the time for before we get rid of my wife's car, is to retrofit it with a CD player, powered by a Raspberry Pi or something alike. It could nicely live in the glove compartment and I believe the in-car entertainment system is already equipped with an aux port.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#104

Post by kleiba2 »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #39
throw0101d wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player). That sounds wonderful. There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time. It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer…

> > And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

> That sounds wonderful.

I don't know if people are really serious but there seems to be a good market interest in car's that's not just equipped with touchscreens and Apple CarPlay. It's interesting (and perhaps understandable) how no car manufacturing is interested in tapping into such a niche segment.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#105

Post by grahamburger »

kleiba2 wrote: post #103
l72 wrote: post #16

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine. The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great! Most importantly…

One of the hobby projects that I want to do, and hopefully will find the time for before we get rid of my wife's car, is to retrofit it with a CD player, powered by a Raspberry Pi or something alike. It could nicely live in the glove compartment and I believe the in-car entertainment system is already equipped with an aux port.

Ha, this reminded me-when I was a teenager I had an old beat-up car that didn't have a CD player or an AUX port. I also had an old boombox that had removable speakers. I removed the glove box from the car and, with the speakers removed, the boombox fit perfectly into the open space. I powered it with an inverter and used one of those old tapes that played from a headphone jack to connect the boombox to the car sound system. It sounded like dirt, and I got a strange look from a cop when I got pulled over and didn't have a glove box in which to keep my registration, but it worked!

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#106

Post by andyjohnson0 »

ryandrake wrote: post #48
throwway120385 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My truck will actually play MP3s off of a data CD. Maybe I should try that.

Nearly every automobile MP3 player (USB-based or CD-based) I've used was defective in some way. Usually something stupid like only playing tracks in alphabetical order, or inserting audible gaps between tracks that are meant to flow into one another, or not supporting tags correctly, or not handling UTF-8 text... Car companies don't know how to do consumer software.

The system in my car (2018 Ford Fiesta) will play mp3s from a usb stick but, as with your experience, it has only a basic understanding of ID3. It completely ignores the "position in media set" tag, for example, meaning that it plays the 1st track from each cd in a set, then all the second tracks, etc.

I wrote [1] to post-process my (slightly obsessively) neatly tagged mp3 collection for use in my car.

[1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/ID3Minimiser

Obligatory note: destructively edits tags, so run it on a copy of any mp3 files.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#107

Post by herrh »

In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl)

I think it is really nice for kids to get something physical they can look for themselves in stores and find music that they think looks interesting rather than just what the algorithm would give them were they to use screens (They watch some tv though). But they also seem to love just looking in the booklets and the pictures of the artists or they characters from the books. But it also gives them more freedom to just put on a record if they want rather than having to ask me to put something on our Google Nest.

Vinyl records are still too hard to put on and there isn't that much good kids stuff you can find and cassettes are so easy to accidentely tangle. They are still not that good at handling the cd records so they get smudged and jacks and stuff, but i'm looking into buying a CD-R writer so i can easily make new copies of the cd:s that stutter and won't play.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#108

Post by karlkloss »

Vinyl records were a pain in the back, tapes were a pain in the back, CDs were a pain in the back. I still remember the day when mp3 became publicly available. I immediately started ripping and converting everything, and never looked back.

Nowadays, I can buy a $3 microcontroller board and make it play mp3's. And it'll outlive most CDs that are pressed today, so what?

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#109

Post by eru »

Kirby64 wrote: post #84
999900000999 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 100$ I can get wired headphones that don't try to squeeze my head and order to do some noise canceling nonsense. This is really annoying for myself, it's like every single Bluetooth headphone has to add noise canceling and they have to sacrifice comfort to do so. I have some $70 wired headphones from AliExpress that literally beat anything I've personally tried wireless up to like $300 or so.

Or just… don’t buy ones that have noise canceling? Not that hard and often cheaper. Again I’m comparing $20 headphones here. Nobody is saying $100 wired headphones aren’t gonna be better than $100 wireless ones for sound. But, if you want ANC for planes or something then you are going to be using wireless headphones anyways.

> But, if you want ANC for planes or something then you are going to be using wireless headphones anyways.

Why? I used to use wired Bose noise cancelling headphones in the late 2010s.

Re: CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

#110

Post by w4der »

mbs159 wrote: post #98
l72 wrote: post #16

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors. Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine. The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great! Most importantly…

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car! That's wild. Popping in a CD is part of the road trip experience!

I remember the frustration of hitting a washboarded dirt road and the CD jumping around and messing playback.
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