08/18/2025
I came across this brief article this morning, and was immediately drawn to it: I love CDs [compact discs], and adore optical technologies. In my early days of college, I even wrote and delivered a twenty-minute speech in which I dissected and divulged basically everything about the 'CD' and optical technology.
No need to read the article; I can summarize it for you further: the first commercial CDs were produced in '82 in Germany, when two ABBA albums on CDs were being released. Also, CD production crested in 2000, then sank down after the advent of digital, online streaming, only to slightly rise up again, as of late.
There are many reasons to love the CD:
first -- except for the disc-spinning, there are no moving and interconnected mechanisms interacting 'physically' while a single laser focuses upon an ink-filled, polycarbonate stratum (the CD resists the wear-and-tear of hardware mechanisms such as the magnetic hard drive -- in which a metallic arm speedily 'taps' a spinning, magnetic disk).
.. second, in retrospect, a substantial amount of data can be stored on a CD and its multi-layered counterpart, the DVD [digital video disc] (compare a 1.44 megabyte [MB] floppy disk's capacity to the CD's nearly 700 MB of capacity).
.. third -- when physically soiled, or covered with oily fingerprints, a CDs polycarbonate plastic 'shell' can simply be wiped clean, keeping the data stored within intact and safe.
.. fourth, one OWNS the CD and the data within. On streaming platforms are only as good as when an internet. cell tower, or satellite connection signal is available, present, and thriving.
I could go a little further, but I won't.
Compared to the LP [long-playing record], the magnetic 'cassette tape,' and streamed music, CDs are bound by format-specifications to provide more dynamic range and negligible noise floor -- at 16-bit (this is the ability to 'represent' the quietest and loudest sound levels) and 44,100 samples-per-second (the number of times the signal has captured the 16-bit signal).
Streamed music, to this day, starves one's ears of musical information. I just recently did a test to see how much data (read as, 'sound') an MP3 (Spotify) or MP4 (Apple) strip from the audio signal, and, I'll tell you what ... you could hear a quite fuller and beefier sound just with the data that is stripped away in compressing the audio file down to streaming quality. (CDs still don't provide the full aural 'story,' however, and can only BARELY deliver a response comparable to the frequency-range of human hearing [5 hertz [Hz] to 20,000 Hz, typically.)
As for digital streaming, Spotify (maybe?), Apple music, and Tidal are only NOW postured to be able to provide 'streamed' music [data] that delivers beyond-CD, 'audiophile' quality (24-bit/192kHz).
But the real story -- and that's why I'm writing this informational rant, is the very fact that CDs and their players MUST spin at a consistent and constant speed in order to synchronize with a CPU's crystal clock and actually deliver their data in the form of sound.
.. drum machines and computer-generated click tracks are quantized with perfect precision, and are more constant than an analog, wooden metronome, or an LP record spinning on a turntable. (This means that mathematical rhythm and musical pitch are always consistent play after play -- without drifting -- they are 'perfect.') And we can thank our local power grids and the 50 and 60 Hz electrical cycles (alternating current -- AC) of our ubiquitous infrastructures for that.
I like this fact: music sounds EXACTLY the same and is perfectly repeatable and truthfully (a la 'high-fidelity') reproduced for MY ears, and EVERYBODY's ears. We are, thusly, on a level playing field across humankind for musical measurements and references.
Yes. I suppose in this consideration, I am a musical 'prescriptivist.'
Thanks for reading.
;)
~ Michael Ash Sharbaugh
CDs are still popular with some music fans, despite the rise of digital streaming platforms.
![I came across this brief article this morning, and was immediately drawn to it: I love CDs [compact discs], and adore op...](https://img3.medioq.com/961/920/1325141659619203.jpg)
![On YouTube -- My spacey [odd] rocler, "The Big Giveness" :::](https://img4.medioq.com/461/175/1275216174611752.jpg)
