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CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

consequence.net

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

#81

Post by 999900000999 »

Kirby64 wrote: post #80
justsomehnguy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20 BT would get you a proper BT phonecall experience but they wouldn't give you a remotely good music playback at all. BT have a lot of codecs but a $20 headset including tax and markup would not include all the fancy ones by the cost alone.

> BT have a lot of codecs but a $20 headset including tax and markup would not include all the fancy ones by the cost alone. What do you mean by this? AAC or SBC is perfectly fine for $20 headphones. Definitely for that quality of headphone. LDAC or Apt-X are pointless for a headphone in that price bracket.

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.

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

#82

Post by cdrnsf »

dylan604 wrote: post #56
cdrnsf wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd love that — didn't CDBaby used to do that? Hopefully something'll crop up if the popularity keeps increasing.

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

#83

Post by neckro23 »

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…

The layering of compression really does get you. I've noticed (both in "Plexamp in my car" and "playing music on Twitch" contexts) that using a FLAC source makes an audible difference, even compared to a high-bitrate MP3 source.

This might seem pretty obvious, but I wasn't expecting it to matter as much since the end result was compressed again (and yet again on my car's Bluetooth) using a different codec.

This isn't on anything close to audiophile gear either. My car stereo is thoroughly mediocre and my home stereo is speakers I literally found in the trash.

Now I'm (belatedly) rebuilding my music collection in FLAC...

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

#84

Post by Kirby64 »

999900000999 wrote: post #81
Kirby64 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BT have a lot of codecs but a $20 headset including tax and markup would not include all the fancy ones by the cost alone. What do you mean by this? AAC or SBC is perfectly fine for $20 headphones. Definitely for that quality of headphone. LDAC or Apt-X are pointless for a headphone in that price bracket.

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.

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

#86

Post by andrew_lettuce »

throwway120385 wrote: post #43
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…

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

This is what I do with my 18 minivan that has a 6 disc player. That's a lot of mp3s and it's fun to guess what's next (my rando mp3 discs tend to always be in alphabetical order

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

#88

Post by Nursie »

sperr11 wrote: post #34
justsomehnguy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If true this is quite ironic because being able to be a media centre for a household is what propelled the sales of PS1 and PS2.

This is also what pushed me to get a PS3 later in its lifetime : getting a game console, CD player and DVD + Blu-Ray player all in one box was pretty convenient.

This is also what pushed a lot of people to get the PS3 earlier in its lifetime!

Sure, it wasn't cheap at launch and it marked a leap in console prices compared to previous generations, but it was around the same price as a standalone Blu-ray player as those were just coming to market.

So at that point, why not get the more capable console?

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

#89

Post by mintflow »

recently I bought my 8 years old a cheap new cassette player as a birthday gift which I want to get when I was child

Turned out he really love it and I also bought more cassetee as requested from him, and the cost of those cassetee seem surpass the player itself

What I find the child seems feel more real if the music play from some gears instead of digital ones, and he know well how to use and find a track in the middle

I also want to buy a new cd player which is also I want when I was youth...

Maybe people are just tired of the streaming and I also find that there seems to be a surge of new album and music in youtube music now, the album's cover seems being generated by AI, and maybe also the music itself is generated by AI

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