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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

#51

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

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…

I remember being blown away seeing one of those tape-deck to aux cable players for the first time. Plugging my late 2000’s era iPod into my early 90’s car was magical.

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

#52

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

criddell wrote: post #12
aduty wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This won't affect the price of vinyl. Most CD buyers just don't want a bunch of lawyers ruining their collection as happens on the different services from time to time. Ripping a CD to mp3s and sticking them on a thumb drive is easier than with vinyl, but vinyl has its own tactile experience. The types of nostalgia are not the same. Which is really unfortunate since I would also like more affordable vinyl records.

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.

You seem to be stating a general rule when this concerns only a very small amount of cases (not the loudness war itself, but when the vinyl uses a different and drastically better master) that's also quite dependent on genre.

And omit that a lot of music sounds a lot worse on vinyl due to its lack of dynamic range and poor LF capabilities (classical, electronic). This isn't for nothing that the first recording pressed on CD was a rendition of the Alpensinfonie.

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

#53

Post by throw0101d »

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…

> That sounds wonderful.

Except that rust is eating it and I'll have to replace it soon-ish.

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

#54

Post by TacticalCoder »

netsharc wrote: post #33
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).

My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car. Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connec…

> ... stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!

Sadly when you stream music over Bluetooth there is lossy compression taking place.

People can bitch all they want about "320 kbps mp3 using a modern encoder being indistinguishable from the lossless source", the fact is: mp3 were nice 30 years ago in the Napster day (when I had my ADSL Internet connection).

It's 2026 and I play lossless music, including FLAC files I bit-perfectly ripped from my own CD collection (and the rips have been verified online with a DB of rips, so I now they're bit-perfect) and including lossless music from proper music streaming platform (I pay a Qobuz subscription: amazing quality, huge offering, but shittiest music discovery platform ever btw).

Really: it's 2026 and if people like to listen to lossy music, more power to them. I don't, and hence I don't stream audio over Bluetooth.

My car both takes CDs, memory sticks (mp3 and WAV, no FLAC) and has got its own memory. I've got a few hundred songs stored in the car: they go losslessly to the car's DAC.

High-end luxury car and it's the type of car where people who've never been in one say: "I never knew music could sound that good in a car" (which btw is funny to witness when some car youtubers try a car with an amazing soundsystem).

Now of course it's still a car. Don't get me started on home stereo because I've got that too (and when you know what you're doing you can get amazing audio for a really very reasonable price: for example I won't put 30 K in a McIntosh amp where a Yamaha amp costing 1/30th of the price will do).

Call me an audiofool and... Enjoy your lossy Bluetooth streaming adding a layer of lossyness on your already lossy mp3 on your car stereo system which sounds like crap anyway.

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

#55

Post by cdrnsf »

dylan604 wrote: post #49
cdrnsf wrote: post #18

Buy CDs, buy vinyl, buy merch, go see shows — support artists instead of platforms and middlemen wherever you can. This is a welcome trend.

There's a couple of artists that I would absolutely buy their vinyl except the shipping is more expensive than the vinyl. I've done it a couple of times for artists I really like and appreciate, but it is most definitely cost prohibitive. So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees

Shipping on vinyl is rough — even shirts from anywhere outside of the US have tipped towards being hard to justify with shipping and all. I'll usually go for Bandcamp in that case (or buy something licensed in the US in the hopes that the license fee is at least something).

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

#56

Post by dylan604 »

cdrnsf wrote: post #55
dylan604 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a couple of artists that I would absolutely buy their vinyl except the shipping is more expensive than the vinyl. I've done it a couple of times for artists I really like and appreciate, but it is most definitely cost prohibitive. So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees

Shipping on vinyl is rough — even shirts from anywhere outside of the US have tipped towards being hard to justify with shipping and all. I'll usually go for Bandcamp in that case (or buy something licensed in the US in the hopes that the license fee is at least something).

> Shipping on vinyl is rough

I'm well aware. I used to co-operate a vinyl store and very familiar with shipping heavy vinyl. I really wish there was a bandcamp distributor model so that artists could ship to each distributor in bulk so the consumer did not have to pay international charges rather than drop shipping per order.

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

#57

Post by 999900000999 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #54
netsharc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car. Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connec…

> ... stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car! Sadly when you stream music over Bluetooth there is lossy compression taking place. People can bitch all they want about "320 kbps mp3 using a modern encoder being indistinguishable from the lossless source" , the fact is: mp3 were nice 30 years ago in the Napster day (when I had my ADSL Internet…

Apple has ruined audio for a generation.

I have a budget android phone with a jack and it's miles more convenient than a dongle or Bluetooth headphones which are never comfortable to me.

Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones

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

#58

Post by ColdStream »

smelendez wrote: post #44
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 most common CD players around now are probably video game consoles.

And even then I think it is only up to the 360/Ps3 generation. After that they only play DVD's/Blu Ray as it is a cheaper laser component.

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

#59

Post by ColdStream »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #54
netsharc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car. Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connec…

> ... stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car! Sadly when you stream music over Bluetooth there is lossy compression taking place. People can bitch all they want about "320 kbps mp3 using a modern encoder being indistinguishable from the lossless source" , the fact is: mp3 were nice 30 years ago in the Napster day (when I had my ADSL Internet…

Alas convenience wins for most people. They will take a loss in quality if it makes it a little easier.

I'm one of those people who cannot tell until the bit rate gets stupidly low or the encoder cannot handle the symbols on drums but that is no universal.

Even then I stick to headphone jacks when possible. If it is a low quality podcast, occasionally my $20 bluetooth buds come out but that is a reasonable trade off.

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

#60

Post by ColdStream »

dieselgate wrote: post #28
justsomehnguy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah! Last year I bought a USB DVD RW drive just for the sake of it. My 5.25" NEC 4xxx (with LightScribe) just quietly died in a PC used daily after around ~5 years of an extremely low usage. My only other ODD was in ThinkPad X301 and I had a feeling it would just die someday too most - and I would know it only when I would need read something. So I just somewhat future-proofed myself a bit. Number of discs I read on…

I purchased a DVD player for the first time this past weekend.

It's the funniest thing with DVD and older consoles for that matter. For the first few minutes you can really sense the lower resolution but once you adjust it is perfectly fine. I am actually impressed with how well the image quality on some DVD's are considering it is a 30 year old format. Compare it to the likes of Bink or Sorenson codecs of the time and it looks amazing. Although I think a big part of that is just throwing stacks of bandwidth at the problem.
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