What would you choose, CD or digital format, for music?

[Le fishe au chocolat]

CD contains high quality of sound, meanwhile stream service has a wide range of selection.

I really love playing a CD, because it sounds the best with speakers.

In other hand, a lot of songs don't have their own physical form. That's why I play them via Spotify. But, somehow these Spotify songs sound weird on speakers despite they sound well with headphone. I'm sure it isn't my speakers' problem because it goes well with FLAC files ripped off from CD.

Because of that, I always choose CD when a new album released.

How about you?

[Kargor]

Origineel geplaatst door HMSNeptune:

What would you choose, CD or digital format, for music?

Well, I'm not into music at all.

However, if I go with movies -- I still buy BluRays instead of the streaming stuff...

So, if I wanted to buy music, I can't imagine that I'd go streaming.

[Amuro0079]

Origineel geplaatst door Kargor:

Origineel geplaatst door HMSNeptune:

What would you choose, CD or digital format, for music?

Well, I'm not into music at all.

However, if I go with movies -- I still buy BluRays instead of the streaming stuff...

So, if I wanted to buy music, I can't imagine that I'd go streaming.

Same here, movies, physical is way better, no streaming service can match the bitrates of a blu-ray, plus blu-rays come with a digital code most of the time.

But I've gone digital for music. Apple Music is best specially for their Atmos spatial thing.

[Moogal™]

CD

[ʙᴜɴ.ᴇ]

Origineel geplaatst door HMSNeptune:

CD contains high quality of sound, meanwhile stream service has a wide range of selection.

I really love playing a CD, because it sounds the best with speakers.

In other hand, a lot of songs don't have their own physical form. That's why I play them via Spotify. But, somehow these Spotify songs sound weird on speakers despite they sound well with headphone. I'm sure it isn't my speakers' problem because it goes well with FLAC files ripped off from CD.

Because of that, I always choose CD when a new album released.

How about you?

the reason spotify sounds muddy is because all online streaming providers compress the music and duck the output levels for consistency.

its designed so when you are playing a playlist and have a nice volume level set you don't have to keep adjusting for each song because you go from playing different genres with different mastering levels. Since the streaming service forces all songs to the same loudness level.

The result is because its just ducking your music it can chop off frequencies of the full track so you miss high end and the song sounds a complete mess when compared to a clean playback.

If you are uploading to streaming services you have to take that into consideration when mixing down a master track and master it within the parameters spotify and other streaming providers set for the best possible final result when played on those platforms, if you master correctly and have ducked the levels yourself you don't get that distortion and frequency cut off from the automated system as the uploaded song is already meeting requirements.

So because most of the songs uploaded to spotify have not gone through a separate mastering process just for that platform they will sound muddy and compressed.

CD does not compress and is genuinely a high quality playback method for any song.

If you don't wish to use CD format though its highly recommended to use high bitrate FLAC format as that is the highest quality digital format to play on your PC while keeping filesize manageable.

[Siluva]

Streaming is garbage, gimme those good uncompressed FLAC and all.

[Acetyl]

Origineel geplaatst door Lithurge:

Being picky CD is digital. Quality comes down to the bit rate being used to encode the music, CD's are 1141kbps, Spotify is a quarter of that if you use premium, less if you're on the free version.

So yeah if you want best quality from the two options go CD.

Only because they're uncompressed though. APE and FLAC can reduce that losslessly by 40 to 70%. Bitrate is important but the encoding scheme makes a difference as well. eg vorbis vs opus vs mp3 vs ac3 etc.

[Acetyl]

eg this is the kind of encoding youtube will use.

Format : Opus
Codec ID : A_OPUS
Duration : 42 min 17 s
Bit rate : 131 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel layout : L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate : 50.000 FPS (960 SPF)
Bit depth : 32 bits
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 39.7 MiB (99%)

or

Format : AAC LC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec Low Complexity
Codec ID : A_AAC-2
Duration : 5 min 22 s
Bit rate : 254 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel layout : L R
Sampling rate : 44.1 kHz
Frame rate : 43.066 FPS (1024 SPF)
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 9.75 MiB (11%)

[gza]

Digital for convenience.

If I like something, I buy it on vinyl mostly, sometimes cassette.

[↑↑↓↓←→←→BASelect]

Cd then ripped to flac for phone.

[Hobbit XIII]

Best home entertainment sounds for me came from the 1980s HiFi setups with vinyl and cassette and the old speakers and nice graphic equalizers.

Unless your going to spend silly money the sound just aint there like it used to be...
I'm sounding like the old dudes of when I was young.

[gza]

Origineel geplaatst door Hobbit XIII:

Best home entertainment sounds for me came from the 1980s HiFi setups with vinyl and cassette and the old speakers and nice graphic equalizers.

Unless your going to spend silly money the sound just aint there like it used to be...
I'm sounding like the old dudes of when I was young.

This guy knows what's up.

[kilésengati]

With CDs you always have to be careful with that DRM crap.

And since I mostly listen to music on my computer or in my car, having all my favourite tunes stored on drives and sticks, I'd probably just dump the disc and forget about it.
I'd prefer download, some DRM-free FLAC, or ALS if it's more than eight channels. Then I'd just convert it to whichever format I need.

And to all the CD, cassette and vinyl lovers out there. Yes, your hobby is valid, I collect discs, too. But most productions these days, and even all the way back to the 80s, get recorded to a digital medium anyway. There is at least one instance of A/D-D/A conversion between the artist and the master record. If you have a decent D/A converter at home, you can skip the press, save some resources and enjoy the final product at an higher quality.

[AbedsBrother]

I used to collect CDs. Then I discovered that disc rot is real. FLAC all the way now.

[Hobbit XIII]

Origineel geplaatst door AbedsBrother:

I used to collect CDs. Then I discovered that disc rot is real. FLAC all the way now.

is it the same with dvds?

[🍋 Lemonfed 🍋]

Digital download , they can easily give you FLAC or very high rate MP3 such as 320Kbs and if you need a physical Record you can just burn the music on a CD-ROM.

external CD/DVD rom burner are not very expensive these days and I remember seeing some in both physical and online stores.