Technology Can Make You Feel Old

I was reading that the first CD came out thirty years ago today. Three decades ago. I remember hearing my first one circa 1987 since cassette tapes took awhile to be displaced.  In fact, I did not have a CD player until around ten years after the first ones were released.

Now the Compact Disc is on its way out with sales having collapsed. Downloadable digital files have been the bulk of music sales for some time now and supposedly streaming subscriptions are the wave of the future. That I will believe when I see it.

Attempts to replace the CD with another hard medium all failed. SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc), DAT (Digital Audio Tape), and DVD-A (Digital Versatile Disc – Audio) never caught on with only DAT surviving in the studio environment.

One of these days I should count and catalog my CDs (and movies for that matter), but since iTunes came out more and more of my purchases have been digital. 528 tracks from iTunes alone, 483 from Amazon MP3, 70 from EMusic, and many more from a variety of services over the past decade testify to the changeover in my music collecting life.

Of course, the digital music files are so much cheaper than CDs especially when you watch for sales like I have, so they build up quickly. The convenience of only buying the songs you want versus an entire album may irk artists, but consumers love that.

Still, CDs are better for some formats, such as classical music and acoustic guitar due to less sound compression. Mind you, compression schemes have improved radically in regards to sound quality over the years. Current M4A (AAC) and MP3 compressors do a great job for the most part, since most people do not have the ears or high quality speakers/headphones to be able to tell any difference.

Now cars come with USB ports or iPod interfaces, which is a sure sign that CDs are on their way out. Come to think of it, last year was the last time I bought a CD that wasn’t bundled with something else.

Well, it has been a good run for the format and I do not see vinyl replacing it. Despite an uptick in sales that hoary format is still relegated to novelty status. The death of the CD has been announced many times, so time will tell us how much longer it will cripple along.

But it makes me feel old watching it go defunct when I remember it being shiny and new.