The poor old silver disc: it took us from a medium that died a little more each time they played to one that was durably exact each time with a lot less maintenance. From the zero noise between tracks to the rapid programability to the sheer might of the audio quality, CDs won their battle in less than a decade and won it fair and square. But they have become the drunk uncle at the Christmas table who pretends he's still about twenty-five and rarein' to go. Why?
Well, as superior as the new discs were they weren't without their problems. The rush to fill the back catalogue resulted in a lot of embarrassing moments as the same worn masters that had drained the blood of vinyl reissues were used for the CDs and their tinny emptiness was even more exposed. The culture of remastering the ol' chestnuts reversed this but only until the loudness wars infected even that. Between the emergence of a delicate approach to curation of audio quality and the prevalent football stadium chant approach to volume we ended up with a lot of sludge that was blamed on the medium rather than its abuse.
My first two CDs were the then new Debut by Bjork and the first reissue of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti. Bjork's album sparkled, roared and crooned in what felt like endless space and light. The Led Zep sounded like it had been found on a cassette on the floor of a panel van. Both of these phenomena were to change the first for the worse and the latter for the better.
The loudness wars of 90s new releases which offered increasingly saturated audio gave us a lot of sludge for the new music that sadly made it easy to rate the sonics of an album by how it sounded through earbuds on a W-class tram. Next stop, the mangle of mp3s and the tsunami-like rise of iTunes.
The remastering culture which corrected the disasters of early reissues of classics (the 90s remaster of Physical Graffiti sounds aptly like the work of titanic artisans) found a comfortable new home in the newer hi-res formats of DVD-Audio and SACD. The 5.1 mix of the traditionally mono Pet Sounds was a revelation; I still didn't like the album that much but by Christ I had even less excuse this time. The new discs sounded good on bargain basement rigs but you needed special players for them and who could be bothered? This points the way to the online retailers offering lossless compression files for download. These are great, play in normal computers but suffer from profile shadow (everyone knows about itunes, few know of HD Tracks).
What's left is the headphone regiments and the goofball substrate of vinyl enthusiasts who are futilely self-convinced of their place in the groundswell (and remind me of apocaylptic Christians holding hands on the beach) and the infinite superiority of their team. Some know the science (before it just gets down to taste) most do not (same for the digital side, btw).
But what a pity. Oh, I don't miss the growing bulk of the discs. It seemed the more you amassed the more excessive and fat the collection looked. This was, for me the sole advantage of the svelte LP cover over the CD jewel case. As soon as I worked it out (and the available technology allowed it) I boiled my cd collection down to rarities and donated most after reformatting everything as flacs. This is not just for the suburban dad boast of being able to tote my thousand plus albums in a pocket hard drive it also has to do with another great advantage the CD brought to music lovers: the erosion of sentimentality of records as things. The tiny remains of my vinyl collection adorn the walls of my dining room, sentimental favourites from my life story. They look nice. When I want to listen to The Kinks or Stars of the Lid I'll click it up on Winamp. The sound is as good or better and the sound endures. I loved LP cover art but it's the first thing that went.
The pity is that the cultural bone pointing at the CD has legitimated the notion that digital audio equals mp3 simply because it's an easy sleight of hand in an argument. One of my great epiphanies with CDs was with non rock music. I replaced my vinyl copy of a choral album that included a sublime performance of Allegri's Miserre and found my face tightening into a wince in anticipation of the treble's high note signature to the piece. After a few months of play of my copy bought on vinyl back in 1983 this moment was a brief torture of fuzzy distortion. But the moment passed with the purest, clearest silken phrase that hung in the air like a beam of sunlight through stained glass. That's the moment I converted.
CDs brought us this beauty and the facility of mutability without which every ipod or smartphone music lover would be an emotional wreck. CD was the messenger for a world to come that allowed us more self determination than we ever had thought possible. We are trying to forget it when we should be honouring it, not fetishising, mind you, but honouring, a touch to the forelock as we move across the bridge they made for us and head into the next jungle.
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