alt.hn

7/16/2026 at 5:19:16 PM

CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

 https://consequence.net/2026/07/the-cd-revival-is-getting-hard-to-ignore/

by speckx

7/17/2026 at 6:31:09 AM

In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl)

I think it is really nice for kids to get something physical they can look for themselves in stores and find music that they think looks interesting rather than just what the algorithm would give them were they to use screens (They watch some tv though). But they also seem to love just looking in the booklets and the pictures of the artists or they characters from the books. But it also gives them more freedom to just put on a record if they want rather than having to ask me to put something on our Google Nest.

Vinyl records are still too hard to put on and there isn't that much good kids stuff you can find and cassettes are so easy to accidentely tangle. They are still not that good at handling the cd records so they get smudged and jacks and stuff, but i'm looking into buying a CD-R writer so i can easily make new copies of the cd:s that stutter and won't play.

by herrh

7/17/2026 at 10:34:06 AM

Anyone else remember the superb manuals that used to come with games? The starcrat and warcraft manuals. Drawings and lore. Diablo. Those old games came with books.

by 21asdffdsa12

7/17/2026 at 2:41:43 PM

Nothing was worse however than getting a game used and not getting the manual included, when the manual contained very necessary information to progress through the game, and in an era where 'The Web' still wasn't really a thing....

I'm looking at you, 1993's Journeyman Project....

by mk_stjames

7/18/2026 at 2:01:29 PM

Journeyman Project... that brought back a deep rooted memory. Its still not clear to me if my Packard Bell came with a full version or a demo, because I remember being stuck about an hour in and could not figure out how to progress. I also was mildly interested in the game, but had better ones to play- Myst, X-Wing, etc.

by kevstev

7/21/2026 at 7:07:38 PM

Actually, yes, this was the experience I was recalling... it was 1995, not 1993, and it was the 'Turbo' version of Journeyman Project, which came in a CD pack bundled with Windows 95 by Packard Bell (a surprisingly large compilation of software to bundle with such a computer at the time. Man, it was a golden age of progress in the PC world back then). Since it wasn't the retail version of the game, it did not come with the original instructions; instead they buried the door access code and some other numerical codes you needed during the game in a bundled instruction book for the CD box set. [0](the little teal booklet in this photo) No one ever knew to look in there, because it doesn't appear to be branded to have anything to do with the game.

There are entire sects of people on the internet that share this incredibly frustrating memory from their childhood. [1]

[0] https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1995-packard-bell-sof...

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/359420/discussions/0/13550947...

by mk_stjames

7/17/2026 at 2:08:07 PM

I remember the smell of a freshly opened game, damn still gives me shivers of excitement

by FacelessJim

7/17/2026 at 2:51:37 PM

Yeah. I remember going to the store to buy Starcraft 2 physically, specifically because Blizzard had always had such good manuals. Then there was nothing in there. It was such a letdown.

by bigstrat2003

7/17/2026 at 12:49:04 PM

I remember fondly spending countless hours looking through the Icewind Dale manual.

Unfortunately, I purchased Baldur’s Gate 1/2 many years later with no manual. I’m sure it had an awesome manual as well.

by krogenx

7/17/2026 at 11:26:45 PM

Can confirm the Baldur's Gate 2 manual was an endlessly fascinating tome.

by hazbot

7/17/2026 at 1:09:22 PM

Those came with spiral bound manuals, as they were that tjick, attempting to explain at least some of D&D 2nd edition, even when the full rules were out pf scope

by hibikir

7/17/2026 at 2:15:11 PM

TIE Fighter even had a novella that worked in-came commands in to the story.

I recall SimEarth having a multi-hundred page spiral-bound manual (though my memory is hazy)

I pored over them obsessively.

by CalRobert

7/17/2026 at 1:32:00 PM

Lemmings 2 came with a short story describing the journey of Jimmy McLemming around the Lemmings world. It was great.

by thaumasiotes

7/19/2026 at 12:50:57 PM

Even if those books were to come back now, they would be AI-generated slop. I am sad for the future of creative works.

by Eddy_Viscosity2

7/17/2026 at 8:46:30 AM

One of my absolute favourite things as an impressionable teen getting into music was reading through the liner notes in the CD booklets.

You'd read the lyrics, see some pictures, and best you'd scour through the thank you section and those would be the bands you'd look for next time you were in the record shop. Great times.

by iamben

7/17/2026 at 9:41:08 AM

The pictures. They told a thousand words. I loved those times. Made me think about what the artist was thinking. 90s had some great CD and cassette booklets

by DoesntMatter22

7/17/2026 at 2:51:09 PM

My way of giving my kids access to music without screens was to buy a battery powered mp3 playing radio, then fill an SD card with music and pop it into the player. I put a mix of kids songs, classic songs, and things I enjoy that I'd want them to also enjoy. I have some very cute videos of my daughter skipping through the songs. It was always a bit heartbreaking for her to get to one of my favorites and then skip over it, but it was also adorable to watch her stop on a song unexpectedly and sing along with it. One video in particular that is dear to me is her singing along to If I Fell by The Beatles. Also funny is she'd play All I Ask of You by Skrillex over and over.

by hoherd

7/18/2026 at 6:16:09 AM

Exact same story here. Same age kids (well, one just turned 5). I wonder how many CDs are being sold just because of parents trying to protect their kids from device addiction.

by edbaskerville

7/17/2026 at 7:08:37 PM

I agree on physically exploring.

It is always nice to take younger folks to the used DVD/CD store and let them explore. It is not expensive.

There's also a strange paradox, where the better stuff is cheaper. (technically it is probably popular stuff is cheaper). The dvds of season 1 of Friends is usually $1.

and sometimes you can get 4k UHD disks for cheap.

by m463

7/17/2026 at 1:10:32 PM

> Vinyl records are still too hard to put on

Nonsense. Me and my bro happily put records of fairy tales and Disney movie adaptations back in the 80s on our crappy portable record player (don’t you dare call this thing a turntable). Harder than a cd? For sure. Too hard for a 5 year old? Certainly not, as long as you don’t mind the record itself facing some rough handling. Which they survived just fine, anyway.

by loloquwowndueo

7/17/2026 at 10:57:01 AM

> A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl)

That's awesome. I remember when that song came out. Those were the days...

(I hope it isn't driving you crazy haha(

by gib444

7/17/2026 at 10:19:54 AM

I've been on a journey to rediscover cassettes as a medium this year, both for myself and my kid.

For myself, the motivation was ownership over streaming and wanting to support the long tail of artists (or, anyways, the subset whose music I happen to like).

For my kid, my motivation looks just like yours: not wanting to give him access to smart devices and wanting to keep him away from screens.

The big learning was that, almost inevitably, one has to divorce the medium used for purchase from the medium used for consumption (which eliminates vinyl from consideration right there). When I started actually buying cassettes from artists on BandCamp, I quickly realized that I was paying way more for shipping costs and customs duties than for the actual media. Artists often offer the cassette including the digital album on BandCamp at similar prices to just the digital. Makes sense, if you consider that the digital doesn't add any real marginal cost. But, once you factor in the cost of tape stock, production, packaging/handling, often done by the artists themselves, I almost feel bad about taking advantage of their generosity. My intention is to financially support them, but I'm finding it hard to believe that, on the other end of all of these costs, there is any money left over for them. ...so, I tended to use the BandCamp feature for tipping/overpaying, but too much of that got eaten up by taxes and my collector / music enjoyment hobby just became too expensive over all, that way.

So, I stopped buying physical. My plan is to set up some kind of system to help me stay organized with self-hosted music files, and then re-booting my collecting hobby by buying one-time digital downloads on BandCamp Fridays or directly from artists. Maybe, I will also make mix tapes from time to time for myself or to give to other people. -- I think, in this context, the degrading-quality of analogue is a feature not a bug, because the ideal outcome would be for friends to enjoy single tracks from albums in degraded quality from the mix tapes, and then look up the artists they like and buy full albums as high-quality digital downloads, and support the artists that way.

For the kid, I got a vintage Fisher Price cassette player, and am finding it hard to believe that anything based on CDs could match the sturdy build quality. Also, with a toddler, it's a given that the media will be in contact with the floor a lot and scratch. So, this is another area where the cassette is a clear winner.

The third learning is about the actual process of making the cassettes: Right now, I have a tablet connected to a vintage tape deck through an analogue cable, and that's a surprisingly low-friction way to turn any kind of content that you can actually play into a cassette. Trying to stay within the digital realm to burn a CD means fighting the DRM platforms of each channel you're sourcing content through separately (with each presenting a moving target through time). That can get quite exhausting. I guess, if quality is not so much of a concern (which, with cassettes you're throwing out the window from the get-go), one can always use some kind of a screen-recording tool to record desktop audio, so, maybe, this is not a fair comparison.

Fourth, cassettes are easy to recycle: If I have a mixtape that I no longer listen to, or my kid outgrows a given piece of content, I can just record over it. I can buy boxes full of old cassettes as attic-finds on e-bay dirt-cheap, and get some use out of that stuff. This seems more environmentally friendly and sustainable than paying an industry to keep producing something that will inevitably be garbage one day. Maybe CD-RWs present a similar opportunity; not sure (never really looked into it much).

I also buy some new tape stock from Recording The Masters, though, because I dig what they're doing, and want to support them.

So, regarding that whole trend of bringing back physical media, my pick is the cassette.

by gyulai

7/17/2026 at 11:50:38 AM

Yeah, i also started considering introducing cassettes for several of the reasons you state above, especially the ease in which you can make the cassettes. I have been a little hesitant because it feels like buying empty cassettes is pretty hard when it comes to the cost, it is pretty cheap to buy a lot of empty CD:s (In Sweden you can get 10 for less than a dollar each) but cassettes are several times more expensive and there is a much bigger lack of options for cassettes in second hand-stores.

But you have a great point regarding the durability (and the sound and esthetics). I have been a bit afraid of them playing with the tape and me having to detangle it, but maybe that is not such a big problem. Especially when it comes to compact players, i bought a cheap second hand portable cd-player for my 4 year old to listen to with headphones, but they seem very easily breakable compared to an old tape deck. But now i'm feeling pretty inspired so I think I might try getting hold of an old portable tape deck and try!

by herrh

7/17/2026 at 2:52:58 PM

Why cassettes besides the nostalgia though? I still remember that hiss and how crap they sounded. Almost as bad as those 480p DVDs.

by dyauspitr

7/17/2026 at 3:25:18 PM

...well, the "audiophile" angle is simply not where I'm coming from (see my argument about bad sound quality being "the feature, not the bug"). From an audiophile perspective: Absolutely, cassettes have no place in the modern world.

I think the way to go is lossless digitial downloads purchased as one-time purchases and optimized for lowest non-artist revenue share for sourcing and then probably also hobbyist archiving (combined with sensible backup strategies, etc.) Recording to tape then instantiates the tape as the medium that creates an enjoyable experience and cultural artefact around it. But there's no reason not to have your cake and eat it too, going back to the digital for maximum quality. -- I just don't think the two are in competition all that much.

by gyulai

7/16/2026 at 8:55:58 PM

A friend in his 40s had a 90s birthday party so I burned some mix CDs as party favors.

Those CDrs were 20 years old and have been sitting in a hot, humid attic for the last 10+ years, but still recorded fine.

The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!

Also, I don’t think k3b or any of the other software i tried has been updated since 2005, but it all still worked great!

Most importantly, one of my friends brought it home and his 8 year old was so intrigued by it she came over and we burned a bunch of mix cds for her and her friends! I have no idea if her friends had anyway to play them, but she enjoyed making hand made cover art for each friend.

When I was in the attic looking for blank cds I came across a few other spindles of burned cds. Both mixes from my formative years and a bunch my wife had kept. Those times were magical and I few like kids have missed out.

by l72

7/17/2026 at 5:35:57 AM

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!

That's wild. Popping in a CD is part of the road trip experience!

by mbs159

7/17/2026 at 7:26:50 AM

I remember the frustration of hitting a washboarded dirt road and the CD jumping around and messing playback.

by w4der

7/16/2026 at 9:48:03 PM

However if you’ve tried to read those cd-rw after 20-30 years, they would most likely be corrupted.

Factory stampted cds are better in this regard

by piskov

7/18/2026 at 2:09:42 PM

So I actually had a use case for this last month. My NAS is too weak to run immich well, so I dusted off my old sandybridge core i7 laptop from ~2011, and it actually benchmarks about 4x my nas, and has 8GB of RAM. But it was still loaded with windows. Long story short, its actually kind of difficult these days to install linux on such an old box, distros have become massive. I searched around in my closet and found my old spindle of burned CDs- and I wanted to go on a nostalgia trip, and every one I tried worked! I used Kodak Golds, which have lived up to their hype.

I even burned a CD of the smallest ubuntu distro I could find, and its happily running linux and hosting Immich, among other things.

by kevstev

7/17/2026 at 4:20:43 AM

Factory stamps are still not immune to bit rot, even when stored in ideal conditions.

by asciimov

7/17/2026 at 11:11:22 AM

Maybe not, but I think the concerns are a bit overblown. Just like the other poster, I've had CDs and DVDs that lived for over 10 years in an attic and a fair number of them are 25+ years old. No problems reading them!

by xienze

7/19/2026 at 2:40:26 AM

Nearly a decade ago I digitized my families cds and dvds. The stamped discs had about a 10% failure rate, which was higher than I expected.

Fortunately the vast majority of discs people own aren’t particularly rare, so if they loose a disc from a top 40 artist, they can easily get a replacement.

by asciimov

7/17/2026 at 7:14:10 PM

> Factory stamped cds are better in this regard

One thing factory CDs don't do well is spin. I think they were probably balanced good enough for 1x, but trying to rip some of them at 48x is noisy and feels close to explosive deconstruction.

by m463

7/17/2026 at 12:40:01 AM

Is there a reason why or is it just the quality of the materials?

by shimman

7/17/2026 at 2:19:39 AM

Stamped = Data pits are a physical, unalterable thing on the disc. CD-R = Pits are still physical, but they are on a die layer that can fade. Some discs are more resilient (blue, gold) than others (cyan). CD-RW = Pits are (mostly) bistable for practical purposes, but will degrade to a neutral state on a long-term basis.

by xattt

7/17/2026 at 11:25:07 AM

"Unalterable" is a matter of some debate... The physical pits and lands are on a super thin layer of aluminum. Ideally, this is protected with a laquer coating, but a lot of CD manufacturers in the 90s and 00s skimped on this to save money. I owned a lot of CDs where the coating didn't hold up over time and the aluminum just sort of flaked off, or became damaged/scratched easier than they should have with normal handling.

by bityard

7/17/2026 at 1:04:39 AM

CD-Rs use an organic dye which fades (or in the worst case the bonds holding it on can delaminate).

They hold up much better if stored in a dark place. A spindle on a shelf that sees sunlight is the worst case and they can become unreadable in years.

by kalleboo

7/17/2026 at 8:48:22 AM

Also don't CD-Rs need a more sensitive detector in the drive to read? I remember seeing somewhere that early drives have trouble with them

by grishka

7/17/2026 at 7:13:15 PM

I remember reading about drives/players that wouldn't read CD-R, but I've never encountered one in the wild.

Anecdotally, every time I've tried: A burned CD that works well with one reader works with all others.

It was a hobby of mine at that time. I tried a lot of combinations: I was working at a local hifi shop where we had all kinds of stuff rolling through to play around with.

by ssl-3

7/17/2026 at 1:12:15 AM

But the above comment said CD-RW? Those are a crystal.

by Dylan16807

7/17/2026 at 1:55:35 PM

I assumed it was a typo since the topic was burning mixtape discs for folks and I've never heard of anyone giving out CD-RWs like that

by kalleboo

7/16/2026 at 9:16:00 PM

> The real problem was almost no one had a CD player not even in their car!

And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

by throw0101d

7/16/2026 at 9:50:50 PM

> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

That sounds wonderful.

There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time.

It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s.

Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.

by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh

7/16/2026 at 10:25:18 PM

Don't forget the adapters that plugged into the 1/8" jack on your Sony WalkMan with a cassette shaped adapter that went into the tape deck. There are also those weird devices that plugged into the 1/8" jack with a low power radio transmitter to tune your in dash receiver to hear. (A local station I listen is on the low end where these devices operate. The station is lower powered college station with the transmitter located where I'm pretty close to the edge of its range. From time to time at stop lights, a stronger signal will come in to interrupt and disappears after the green and cars separate. I'm guessing one of these is being used)

by dylan604

7/17/2026 at 7:49:07 AM

Perhaps coincidentally, it was also around the same brief beautiful moment in time where one could talk with all of one's friends using a single messaging client, possibly even over federated XMPP.

by _jackdk_

7/17/2026 at 1:38:07 PM

I had a car with just a tape deck. This turns out to be all you want.

I went through two phases:

1. I ordered some type of Walkman-like car kit that came with a portable CD player, glue strips to adhere the CD player to your dashboard, and a cassette tape adapter that plugged into an aux port (on the CD player) and inserted into the tape deck. I'd burn CDs to play in the car that way.

2. I got a Zen Stone, a tiny mp3 player with no screen that was easy to operate by feel. I stored mp3s on it... and plugged the cassette adapter that I still had into it. That was as good as in-car music can get without being voice operated.

They still make the adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Arsvita-Audio-Cassette-Adapter-Auxill...

by thaumasiotes

7/17/2026 at 12:10:33 PM

When I was buying my last car, I was searching for something with a CD player option. Turns out there are no new cars with CD players and the last manufacturer to offer one was Lexus in 2022.

I ripped my collection to my phone and I use CarPlay and it works well enough. But still if I could, I'd buy a car with a CD player.

My next car might be a Slate truck because they supposedly support single or double DIN radios and there has to be an aftermarket option that would work.

by criddell

7/17/2026 at 12:28:24 AM

I had that PLUS a mini-disc player, all stock on a dirt-cheap car.

by mc3301

7/17/2026 at 5:45:09 AM

If you could go back in time and show your younger self Spotify streamed wirelessly from a phone via AA/AC, now that would be magical. Pretty much endless amount of music delivered instantly.

But I understand that it is a different kind of magic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-kqUkZnDcM (VW Cabrion Pink Moon ad)

by imp0cat

7/17/2026 at 2:59:22 PM

My younger self wouldn't be interested in endless music any more than my current self is. It's pretty rare that I discover a new band I want to listen to; otherwise I listen to the same music I already like and have.

by bigstrat2003

7/17/2026 at 6:10:01 AM

> > And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

> That sounds wonderful.

I don't know if people are really serious but there seems to be a good market interest in car's that's not just equipped with touchscreens and Apple CarPlay. It's interesting (and perhaps understandable) how no car manufacturing is interested in tapping into such a niche segment.

by kleiba2

7/16/2026 at 10:33:27 PM

I remember being blown away seeing one of those tape-deck to aux cable players for the first time. Plugging my late 2000’s era iPod into my early 90’s car was magical.

by BuyMyBitcoins

7/16/2026 at 10:48:45 PM

> That sounds wonderful.

Except that rust is eating it and I'll have to replace it soon-ish.

by throw0101d

7/16/2026 at 10:11:42 PM

I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now

by idiotsecant

7/16/2026 at 10:26:38 PM

"For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options." <=> "I donno Bluetooth is pretty universal now"

Your comment does not disagree with GP's in the way you think it does

by dylan604

7/17/2026 at 1:40:51 AM

I guess what I'm saying is 27 different media players duct taped together does not seem like the peak of engineering. A single wireless protocol seems pretty good.

by idiotsecant

7/17/2026 at 4:34:49 AM

Back in the day, we'd rate ourselves by how many dongles we'd string together to get things to work.

by dylan604

7/17/2026 at 5:37:10 AM

Some time after the Thunderbolt 3 MacBooks were released I had to get data off of a FireWire 400 drive. Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800, FireWire 800 to FireWire 400. Everything mounted up just fine.

by jonhohle

7/17/2026 at 5:40:27 PM

That's pretty impressive. The closest to that I personally dealt with was back in the days of Mac Quadras and the ADB port where software was protected with dongles that would daisy chain via ADB.

In audio connectors, I've had some pretty crazy builds getting from various formats when the exact right thing isn't available but a giant milk crate of random cables was on hand.

by dylan604

7/17/2026 at 5:39:16 AM

A single protocol seems to be very limited, especially if your collection of music is purely physical, and for a lot of people it is

by mbs159

7/17/2026 at 7:19:57 PM

It's been over 20 years, and Bluetooth audio still usually sounds bad, still evades troubleshooting when it is working suboptimally, and increasingly drops out in some areas as interference increases.

I've never had any of those issues with a short piece of wire operating at audio frequencies.

by ssl-3

7/16/2026 at 9:38:43 PM

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 (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), 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!

by netsharc

7/17/2026 at 5:33:04 AM

There was a short period where CD players with Bluetooth and FM transmitters were made. Pairing is weird and may not work with every vehicle, but FM fallback is, well, as bad as it always has been.

I really like CDs and enjoy buying them second hand when on road trips. It was fun to put in something new while traveling, but now it requires an extra device on the off chance that a CD is found.

by jonhohle

7/16/2026 at 10:57:13 PM

> ... 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 connection).

It's 2026 and I play lossless music, including FLAC files I bit-perfectly ripped from my own CD collection (and the rips have been verified online with a DB of rips, so I now they're bit-perfect) and including lossless music from proper music streaming platform (I pay a Qobuz subscription: amazing quality, huge offering, but shittiest music discovery platform ever btw).

Really: it's 2026 and if people like to listen to lossy music, more power to them. I don't, and hence I don't stream audio over Bluetooth.

My car both takes CDs, memory sticks (mp3 and WAV, no FLAC) and has got its own memory. I've got a few hundred songs stored in the car: they go losslessly to the car's DAC.

High-end luxury car and it's the type of car where people who've never been in one say: "I never knew music could sound that good in a car" (which btw is funny to witness when some car youtubers try a car with an amazing soundsystem).

Now of course it's still a car. Don't get me started on home stereo because I've got that too (and when you know what you're doing you can get amazing audio for a really very reasonable price: for example I won't put 30 K in a McIntosh amp where a Yamaha amp costing 1/30th of the price will do).

Call me an audiofool and... Enjoy your lossy Bluetooth streaming adding a layer of lossyness on your already lossy mp3 on your car stereo system which sounds like crap anyway.

by TacticalCoder

7/17/2026 at 2:41:25 AM

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...

by neckro23

7/16/2026 at 11:30:54 PM

Apple has ruined audio for a generation.

I have a budget android phone with a jack and it's miles more convenient than a dongle or Bluetooth headphones which are never comfortable to me.

Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones

by 999900000999

7/17/2026 at 12:28:14 AM

> Nothing could sell a phone with a jack, but then you don't need to pay 300$ for some crappy Bluetooth headphones

Have you looked at the price of actually mediocre Bluetooth headphones recently? They’re like… $20 for a distinct fine set of true wireless headphones, including the case, even from a real brand. Certainly comparable to $20 wired headphones.

by Kirby64

7/17/2026 at 11:20:15 AM

All <$100 bluetooth headphones sound like shit though while you can somehow get, not hifi quality but decent cabled ones for less than $50

by prmoustache

7/17/2026 at 1:40:08 PM

Either your standards are much higher than mine or you haven’t been exposed to current gen Bluetooth gear. Decent picks sound perfectly fine even in the sub $100 category. Anker, Nothing, or even Sony have some decent stuff in that price range.

by Kirby64

7/17/2026 at 4:43:33 PM

Fine.

I don't feel like having to charge two devices.

On long international flights a traditional headphone jack beats Bluetooth every time.

Bluetooth headphones last as long as their batteries do. Wired headphones, particularly ones with replaceable cords, last forever.

I'm not sure why your being argumentive here, it's a known fact that Bluetooth has to compress everything down and sacrifices quality to do so.

by 999900000999

7/17/2026 at 4:59:15 PM

> On long international flights a traditional headphone jack beats Bluetooth every time.

Current gen over ear ANC headphones have battery life in excess of any international flight. Most in excess of a round trip, even. True wireless ones don’t, but that’s not typically what you use on a plane. If you’re using the in flight infotainment, you’re corded anyways… so it’s a bit of a moot point. I can’t possibly imagine flying without ANC headphones at this point though, which requires a battery. The cable is also such a pain on a long flight. Any time you get up or move around, it’s inevitable you have to relocate or move the cable around to prevent it from getting snagged. If I could have Bluetooth on every infotainment system I’d love that.

> I'm not sure why your being argumentive here, it's a known fact that Bluetooth has to compress everything down and sacrifices quality to do so.

My point is that although that’s technically true, it’s practically not true. The quality is sufficient that you’ll hardly notice for most environments. If you’re in some listening room, sure fine. Use your fancy wired headphones.

In public, with environmental noise, etc or especially on planes? The picture is a lot muddier.

by Kirby64

7/17/2026 at 8:20:01 PM

ANC gives me headaches.

You know the neat thing about phones with an audio jack, you can use Bluetooth or wired headphones.

Apple figured out they could print money by selling AirPods and now every phone brand has some crappy Bluetooth headphones they want to sell.

Thus most phones don’t have jacks anymore. I don’t see any advantage to the end consumer.

by 999900000999

7/17/2026 at 8:36:05 PM

> ANC gives me headaches.

Sorry that occurs with you. I know some people are much more sensitive to it than others. Also, lower quality or older ANC products have a much stronger “head pressure” effect which is definitely undesirable. Modern high end stuff from Apple, Sony, or Bose basically have all eliminated that effect in my experience.

I’m not sure what your vendetta here is against phones without jacks. There’s so, so, so many decent USB to 3.5mm jacks that are nearly free these days. Same with ones that also offer pass through charging.

The fact is today Bluetooth headphones are 99% of the market for phone users, and for the rest of folks the dongle is a perfectly suitable solution. In fact, dongles are a way to offer superior performance to most phone 3.5mm jacks. If you really care about the audio performance of your headphones, most phones offered mediocre or even outright bad audio quality out of their headphone jacks.

by Kirby64

7/17/2026 at 9:20:23 PM

>I’m not sure what your vendetta here is against phones without jacks.

There's literally no benefit to the end user.

Dongles are a great way to put stress on a single point of failure. If your USB c port stops working your phone can't be charged anymore and is useless.

I have more Bluetooth earbuds then I can count. At 30$ a pair they almost always go bad within 6 months. My wired headphones work for years.

It's not like my opinion matters that much. Literally the only flagship phone with a jack is a 1300$ Sony Xperia.

by 999900000999

7/17/2026 at 9:41:43 PM

> There's literally no benefit to the end user.

The benefit to the end user is lower cost, fewer parts that can break, more area for other components, and potentially improved form factors from not having to have a 3.5mm cutout. Maybe all of those don’t immediately translate to tangible benefits from consumers, but there’s quite a few phone form factors that have existed that would not be possible with 3.5mm jacks.

> If your USB c port stops working your phone can't be charged anymore and is useless.

Pretty much all phones have wireless charging in some form now. That’s your backup, or potentially primary if you’re in the wireless charging ecosystem. Also, most phones have a method of repairing/replacing the USB-C port. Not convenient of course, but this is no different than damaging a phone from yanking the charging cable or whatever.

> I have more Bluetooth earbuds then I can count. At 30$ a pair they almost always go bad within 6 months. My wired headphones work for years.

Then… don’t buy cheap products? I’ve never had a battery go bad in over ear Bluetooth headphones, and even if they did I’m pretty confident a replacement set of batteries would be widely available. I’ve replaced parts on extremely old Bose headphones without an issue.

by Kirby64

7/17/2026 at 11:03:00 PM

If you don't see the connection between a phone brand removing the 3.5mm jack and selling overpriced branded Bluetooth headphones I don't see a point in continuing this conversation.

As I started this thread Nothing doesn't include a jack on their phones because they want to sell you a 300$ pair of Bluetooth headphones that I can guarantee are inferior to my 70$ Fiio headphones.

You'd have a point if *every* single phone oem wasn't trying to sell Bluetooth headphones.

>and even if they did I’m pretty confident a replacement set of batteries would be widely available.

Airpods , which are above and beyond the most popular Bluetooth buds don't have user replaceable batteries. You have to ask Apple to do so at 50$.

Apple did this as an outrageously anti consumer move. And they've made billions of airpods in doing so. Then they brought Beats which sound worse than 30$ sennheiser HD201s.

by 999900000999

7/17/2026 at 11:46:58 PM

> As I started this thread Nothing doesn't include a jack on their phones because they want to sell you a 300$ pair of Bluetooth headphones that I can guarantee are inferior to my 70$ Fiio headphones.

Nobody is forcing you to buy their most expensive headphones. Also, the cheapest Bluetooth earbuds that Nothing offers are literally $25. I don’t get your point here. They’re offering a range of competitive headphones and you’re free to choose other brands. There’s also nothing forcing you to buy the same brand of headphones or earbuds.

> Airpods , which are above and beyond the most popular Bluetooth buds don't have user replaceable batteries. You have to ask Apple to do so at 50$.

I said over ear headphones. Pretty much all of those have user serviceable (without destroying the device) batteries. Even the AirPods Max you can do it.

And for true wireless earbuds, form factor makes that difficult. Nonetheless, there exist earbuds that do actually have user serviceable batteries. I’ve personally replaced a pair of batteries in Sony WF-1000XM3s. At a cost of $10… hardly a lot for the original price of these things.

by Kirby64

7/17/2026 at 5:32:57 PM

You can start getting decent bluetooth headphones from $60 to $80 if you are picky about the brand. Anker has had several winners in that range over the last 10 years.

by NoGravitas

7/17/2026 at 1:51:11 AM

$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.

by justsomehnguy

7/17/2026 at 2:22:32 AM

> 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.

by Kirby64

7/17/2026 at 2:37:58 AM

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.

by 999900000999

7/17/2026 at 2:43:04 AM

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.

by Kirby64

7/17/2026 at 7:03:00 AM

> But, if you want ANC for planes or something then you are going to be using wireless headphones anyways.

Why? I used to use wired Bose noise cancelling headphones in the late 2010s.

by eru

7/17/2026 at 1:34:08 PM

And basically all current gen ANC headphones still offer wired options as well, including Bose. But they still come with wireless if you’d opt to use it. My comment was in reference to the ANC “clamping on your head” which is sort of irrelevant to wired vs wireless.

Also, a significant advantage to wireless when using ANC is you don’t have to deal with cable noise. Especially in a quiet office environment, noise from the cable moving around on your body gets amplified and you can hear it.

by Kirby64

7/16/2026 at 11:49:16 PM

Alas convenience wins for most people. They will take a loss in quality if it makes it a little easier.

I'm one of those people who cannot tell until the bit rate gets stupidly low or the encoder cannot handle the symbols on drums but that is no universal.

Even then I stick to headphone jacks when possible. If it is a low quality podcast, occasionally my $20 bluetooth buds come out but that is a reasonable trade off.

by ColdStream

7/16/2026 at 10:17:32 PM

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

by throwway120385

7/16/2026 at 10:27:11 PM

Nearly every automobile MP3 player (USB-based or CD-based) I've used was defective in some way. Usually something stupid like only playing tracks in alphabetical order, or inserting audible gaps between tracks that are meant to flow into one another, or not supporting tags correctly, or not handling UTF-8 text... Car companies don't know how to do consumer software.

by ryandrake

7/17/2026 at 12:27:40 AM

Mine would cut the last few second and first few seconds of each song with some terrible "meld together" business, like the world's worst DJ.

by mc3301

7/17/2026 at 6:22:48 AM

The system in my car (2018 Ford Fiesta) will play mp3s from a usb stick but, as with your experience, it has only a basic understanding of ID3. It completely ignores the "position in media set" tag, for example, meaning that it plays the 1st track from each cd in a set, then all the second tracks, etc.

I wrote [1] to post-process my (slightly obsessively) neatly tagged mp3 collection for use in my car.

[1] https://github.com/andyjohnson0/ID3Minimiser

Obligatory note: destructively edits tags, so run it on a copy of any mp3 files.

by andyjohnson0

7/17/2026 at 2:49:53 AM

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

by andrew_lettuce

7/16/2026 at 9:11:09 PM

Hah!

Last year I bought a USB DVD RW drive just for the sake of it.

My 5.25" NEC 4xxx (with LightScribe) just quietly died in a PC used daily after around ~5 years of an extremely low usage. My only other ODD was in ThinkPad X301 and I had a feeling it would just die someday too most - and I would know it only when I would need read something.

So I just somewhat future-proofed myself a bit.

Number of discs I read on that drive is below 10 I think.

EDIT: oh, I helped out a friend to transfer some MRI records from a CDR with that drive. Somehow it was easier to send them from the other side of the country to a friend who would ask me to copy it and to send them back electronically.

by justsomehnguy

7/16/2026 at 9:12:24 PM

I purchased a DVD player for the first time this past weekend.

by dieselgate

7/16/2026 at 11:57:07 PM

It's the funniest thing with DVD and older consoles for that matter. For the first few minutes you can really sense the lower resolution but once you adjust it is perfectly fine. I am actually impressed with how well the image quality on some DVD's are considering it is a 30 year old format. Compare it to the likes of Bink or Sorenson codecs of the time and it looks amazing. Although I think a big part of that is just throwing stacks of bandwidth at the problem.

by ColdStream

7/17/2026 at 1:38:10 PM

It's hard to buy people media now. You can't really gift people CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Rays because nobody has players anymore.

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

7/17/2026 at 1:44:50 PM

A USB drive with FLAC files works pretty well. It doesn't have the same feel as a CD with art though.

For movies there isn't a legal way to acquire proper files unfortunately.

by kevincox

7/17/2026 at 1:51:46 PM

It's safe to assume to buy them a player device too with the CD :)

by tiborsaas

7/17/2026 at 7:15:19 PM

Send a player too. :)

by m463

7/17/2026 at 6:07:12 AM

One of the hobby projects that I want to do, and hopefully will find the time for before we get rid of my wife's car, is to retrofit it with a CD player, powered by a Raspberry Pi or something alike. It could nicely live in the glove compartment and I believe the in-car entertainment system is already equipped with an aux port.

by kleiba2

7/17/2026 at 6:18:23 AM

Ha, this reminded me-when I was a teenager I had an old beat-up car that didn't have a CD player or an AUX port. I also had an old boombox that had removable speakers. I removed the glove box from the car and, with the speakers removed, the boombox fit perfectly into the open space. I powered it with an inverter and used one of those old tapes that played from a headphone jack to connect the boombox to the car sound system. It sounded like dirt, and I got a strange look from a cop when I got pulled over and didn't have a glove box in which to keep my registration, but it worked!

by grahamburger

7/17/2026 at 12:39:26 AM

Funny because the CD player in my car has been dead for like 16 years but the cassette player has never been better. Wonder why the cassette player lasted much longer, guessing the optical drive in the car is damaged because CDs will fail to read after like 10 second.

by shimman

7/17/2026 at 3:07:19 PM

Do you drive over a lot of cattle grids?

CD players are precision items and don't take kindly to high impulse. Conversely, many tape decks are seriously robust. My dad had an old Grundig tape deck that was built like a tank (or a 380Z). Pretty sure whoever has that now is still getting quality sounds out of it.

by 6031769

7/17/2026 at 4:55:49 PM

Hmm, I've had for the car for 20 years (it's even older). Where I originally lived the roads were always smooth + paved well (also elevation was basically flat). Now that I'm in a city with actual hills (along with snow plows that ruin the roads), that's when the problems occurred. Seriously never seen so many potholes before in my life!

Not a cattle grid, but wouldn't have thought of the pothole angle without it.

by shimman

7/17/2026 at 9:26:33 AM

I did the same for a friend's birthday recently: put together a bunch of mix CDs as a present. My concession to the fact he probably doesn't use a CD player much was a QR code, with a link to a matching Spotify playlist.

by specproc

7/17/2026 at 1:04:46 PM

Two years ago, we sent CDs as our wedding invitations. We also received a lot of feedback to the effect that lots of our guests had difficulty finding a way to play the discs (including at least one person who was incredulous that the CD was real; but that might be because we sent vinyl-effect CDs).

I put a Spotify code[0] to the playlist on the back cover as a concession to streaming, but if anyone knew what it was and used it, they never told me.

[0]: https://www.spotifycodes.com/

by MrDOS

7/16/2026 at 10:21:07 PM

The most common CD players around now are probably video game consoles.

by smelendez

7/16/2026 at 11:43:34 PM

And even then I think it is only up to the 360/Ps3 generation. After that they only play DVD's/Blu Ray as it is a cheaper laser component.

by ColdStream

7/17/2026 at 7:32:12 PM

All Xbox consoles can play audio CDs. (Later ones need software added to do that, but that software is free.)

Playstations after the PS3, though: Not so much. (Sony lost track of their "It Only Does Everything" schtick[1] somewhere along the way.)

[1]: https://blog.playstation.com/2009/08/27/it-only-does-everyth...

by ssl-3

7/17/2026 at 8:51:59 AM

Wait really? How much can the second laser possibly add to the BOM of a mass produced device? Now I'm wondering if there are also PC drives that cheap out like that - can't say I have tried a CD yet in the one I have right now.

by account42

7/17/2026 at 7:12:00 PM

[dead]

by m463

7/17/2026 at 5:29:27 AM

> CD sales surged 16% to 16.3 million units, soundly outpacing vinyl’s comparatively modest 2.4% growth.

Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things.

Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them.

I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.

by msftgreed

7/17/2026 at 12:18:22 PM

Re BTS, really it's just because there is a CD included in the box with all the other stuff you get when you buy the album. My daughter thought it was neat; that's when I realized I don't even have a CD player anywhere. I doubt many people are actually using these CDs

by adzm

7/17/2026 at 1:57:34 PM

Yeah came here to say the same thing on the lack of absolute units.

Speaking as an older vinyl collector myself, with kids who have also gotten into it...it would surprise me if the total unit numbers were even within 2 orders of magnitude.

Vinyl just feels different. The feeling of holding the cardboard cover and the weight of the album on a turntable can't be replicated at all with CDs.

by voncheese

7/17/2026 at 1:33:48 PM

I'm in the middle of the GenX zone, and have regularly been seeing bands play at small music clubs my entire adult life. When I was younger they'd sell cassette tapes at their merch booth, and that gave way to CDs. Then at some point in the late 00's that shifted to vinyl because CDs became passe, and while most people had shifted to online music vinyl was cool again.

That shifted again in the mid-teens when I started noticing more bands selling cassette tapes, especially in the more underground scenes. Then it was back to vinyl when things got back in action post-COVID.

But what I've noticed over the last couple of years is everyone's selling CDs again. What's more, they're *actually focusing on CDs*. Over the last 20-30 years it's been more an assumption that one is going to download the music and sure, maybe buy some physical media at the merch table. Now it seems like the assumption is you're going to just buy the physical media.

I've found that interesting.

by jghn

7/16/2026 at 9:06:42 PM

About 10 years back I figured that this was coming. CDs are the best of both worlds. Near perfect audio quality, not too big physically, cannot have the rights revoked, no subscription fees but really easy to rip and put on your phone or whatever.

A few years back I saw some people buying collections of thousands of discs for maybe $100. Even if 10% of it was good, that was still a huge win. Those huge hauls are becoming rare now as they have been picked clean.

If only Minidisc had better audio quality, it would have REALLY been the perfect medium.

by ColdStream

7/17/2026 at 4:42:24 AM

There are people who do this at scale, often reselling online. It's definitely for those who are truly passionate about it, and enjoy discovering new things.

I gave it a shot, and while profitable, just not for me at all.

by CamelCaseName

7/17/2026 at 11:19:03 AM

slotMusic/slotRadio has tried to sell music through SD cards. They never took off, but a full SD card would probably be the best balance in terms of reliability, size, and capacity in my opinion. Plus, a surprising amount of media devices still carry SD card readers.

Flash storage developments came too late, but the spinning disks and risk of physical damage to the plastic are an annoying risk to have to deal with. Even Minidisc still required some form of physical motion.

by jeroenhd

7/16/2026 at 8:59:57 PM

Buy CDs, buy vinyl, buy merch, go see shows — support artists instead of platforms and middlemen wherever you can. This is a welcome trend.

by cdrnsf

7/16/2026 at 10:29:32 PM

There's a couple of artists that I would absolutely buy their vinyl except the shipping is more expensive than the vinyl. I've done it a couple of times for artists I really like and appreciate, but it is most definitely cost prohibitive.

So it's pay their bandcamp prices for the digitals and streaming, but the physical media is just made in too limited quantities to be affordable by anyone but FAANG employees

by dylan604

7/17/2026 at 1:14:41 AM

I’m not sure if you live in big city or not, but if so, a visit to your local vinyl shop might be able to score you a copy. Or they might be able to order it in with their shipments.

by nickthegreek

7/17/2026 at 9:18:38 AM

I've not seen a case where shipping was more expensive than vinyl but;

I made an album and sell the vinyl on our website. The sleeve to ship the vinyl safely in was somewhere between £0.5 and £1 depending on where we bought it from. Actually shipping it cost £5. So the £30 vinyl came with £6 in shipping fees. Lots of people complained to us that it was expensive, but that's just what it cost.

by maccard

7/17/2026 at 4:47:15 PM

> I've not seen a case where shipping was more expensive than vinyl but;

Maybe you have the fortune of being on the same continent the item is being shipped. Your use of pounds is a big clue there. Shipping it across the pond is routinely doubling the price of the album plus taxes on top of that

by dylan604

7/17/2026 at 7:56:06 PM

Ah - shipping pretty much anything transatlantic is expensive, doubly so if you want it to actually survive. It’s never going to be worth shopping a $40 item from the US to the UK unless it’s tiny.

by maccard

7/17/2026 at 9:55:49 PM

> It’s never going to be worth shopping a $40 item from the US to the UK unless it’s tiny.

That's bold. Who are you to say what is worth something to someone you don't know. I've already stated that I have done this, but it is a limiting factor on how often I do.

by dylan604

7/18/2026 at 9:08:19 AM

Sorry - only a sith deals in absolutes. I didn’t mean “literally never under any circumstances” I meant “on the balance of probabilities it’s unlikely that the financial cost of shipping something small is worth it, unless the item has some value that is not financial”

But that was wordy

by maccard

7/16/2026 at 11:03:14 PM

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).

by cdrnsf

7/17/2026 at 12:47:02 PM

Even keeping vinyl is rough. I used to have a good collection that I had to drop because of moving. Still, some of my vinyls were ruined because I stored them poorly and they warped. It’s almost as bad as physical books, though they store more easily unless it’s mass paperback which will quickly stain to a weird yellow and develop a smell. Records are so fun though. The art, the physicality, the sound of the needle moving across the grooves, so good.

by lovehashbrowns

7/16/2026 at 11:19:10 PM

> 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.

by dylan604

7/17/2026 at 2:38:48 AM

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

by cdrnsf

7/17/2026 at 4:17:01 AM

I import a lot of stuff from Europe and the shipping is rough. I save by bundling items.

by Acrobatic_Road

7/17/2026 at 4:32:50 AM

If only I could get the artists I like to release at the same time

by dylan604

7/19/2026 at 12:19:27 AM

My guy holds stuff for me. My current order started last year.

by Acrobatic_Road

7/17/2026 at 7:03:46 PM

None of the things you listed are free of middlemen. Record companies were the OG villains of the music industry. Livenation has a monopoly over event venues.

Sometimes you can't just outrun the bad guys. You have to fight them head on.

by pibaker

7/16/2026 at 9:43:56 PM

I try to buy as many shirts as possible from bands I like and this post reminded me to go look again. I listen to a lot of metal and punk and the problem is most the shirts are either black, which overheat you in SoCal, or have designs that are aggressively ugly [1].

I wish more bands hired better designers or at least had shirts I wouldn't overheat in

[1] I own and wear this one so it's not always a deal breaker https://merchbar.imgix.net/product/174/7292/6127313518766/Zs...

by arthurjj

7/16/2026 at 10:21:18 PM

I have a ton of shirts, but have been sticking to buy limited edition ones or from bands at shows lately. I live in SoCal (north of LA) and end up suffering in the heat. Nothing did some non-black ones for their new album at least https://bandofnothing.shop/collections/apparel/products/esse...

by cdrnsf

7/17/2026 at 2:49:46 AM

I've been turning back to radio. So many talented DJs playing great music around the world.

by localbolu

7/18/2026 at 10:42:37 AM

All we really need is a solid system for adding all of the 100k+ internet radio stations to a synthetic radio spectrum that can be easily navigated with a rotary dial just like local radio.

by beenBoutIT

7/17/2026 at 12:41:05 PM

KEXP is great for this - various types of live shows and sets with great DJs. Most of the new music I've discovered over the past 10 years has been from them.

https://www.kexp.org/

by squigz

7/17/2026 at 5:05:18 PM

I only listen to FM radio in the car. This has forced me to kinda enjoy Mexican music, cause it's either that or 1980s millennials' nostalgia channels.

by frollogaston

7/16/2026 at 8:20:58 PM

I built a computer last year and made sure it had a blu-ray drive in it. There are very few cases that have built-in CD bays any more.

by honeycrispy

7/17/2026 at 12:18:35 AM

My PC case has a complete flat front, very much regret that choice.

by ColdStream

7/17/2026 at 10:50:25 AM

Yep, seems they pretty much all do! I couldn't find a sensible case last year when putting together a new PC for my brother, who wanted it to include a CD/DVD drive. (He regularly buys CDs at 10 for £1, listens for a bit then sells them for a lot more on eBay - the demand is there.) I ended up reusing the case from an old computer of my own.

I'm sure on my own next upgrade, I'll continue to stick with my existing 20-year-old case, for the same reason.

And the drives themselves are 2-3 times the price they were at the peak of their demand (makes sense, they're almost a niche product these days).

by abanana

7/17/2026 at 12:19:46 PM

I've been looking for a retro-style case. There are companies that make cases that look like 90's towers (Silverstone), but I'm hoping to find something more like a PS/2 Model 30 (or any PS/2 - so many beautiful designs) or Amiga 1000. Something I can put under my monitor.

by criddell

7/16/2026 at 7:46:01 PM

I have subscribed to Spotify since before 2012. I enjoyed finding new music and the convenience of listening to anything, whenever. My consumption habits are not very amenable to buying CDs, because I have no idea ahead of time which songs will "Hit" for me. I generally don't like "Artists" or "Genres" and I enjoy listening to wildly different music from day to day.

However, I have watched Spotify destroy my playlists regularly, and now it seems to happen more than once a year! Songs that they still have a license for and still have on their platform will be removed from your playlist and marked "Unavailable" because some licensing agreement change meant the actual file and unique ID in their system has changed, and they make zero effort to resolve the damage this regularly does to my library and playlists.

It makes staying on the spotify platform, the spotify "ecosystem" as it were, utterly worthless. No playlist you make today can be expected to be usable in the future. Any effort you put in to organize and find stuff is for naught.

Meanwhile, my shitty folder full of mp3 rips from sketchy sources from highschool has stayed with me, and works perfectly.

It's getting hard to justify now. None of the money I pay even goes to the people I listen to, because they are primarily niche and indie groups. Spotify seems to be doing this on purpose, and a close friend of people high up in Spotify is running a business to generate AI music so that spotify can fill up their generated playlists with slop that they don't have to pay anyone for, and which dilutes the rev share for real humans.

by mrguyorama

7/16/2026 at 10:10:16 PM

I wonder if that is what itunes match protects against? I've paid for that service for a long time, but at this point not certain it has any value.

by teepo

7/16/2026 at 7:52:41 PM

Good! As a vinyl collector, the price has gotten way too high. Let this help drive it down.

by geekamongus

7/16/2026 at 8:22:59 PM

This won't affect the price of vinyl. Most CD buyers just don't want a bunch of lawyers ruining their collection as happens on the different services from time to time. Ripping a CD to mp3s and sticking them on a thumb drive is easier than with vinyl, but vinyl has its own tactile experience.

The types of nostalgia are not the same. Which is really unfortunate since I would also like more affordable vinyl records.

by aduty

7/16/2026 at 8:47:16 PM

Vinyl is just more cumbersome to make and ship and store, there's no way the price goes down. As someone who only likes vinyl for the art size I'd almost wish CD longboxes or something similar would come back.

by threetonesun

7/16/2026 at 8:52:39 PM

Most (all?) new vinyls these days were originally digital files anyways. I like the big album covers though, and the ritual of turning them over in the middle.

by helterskelter

7/17/2026 at 9:22:07 AM

I had my album printed on vinyl a while back. We had very specific instructions on how to prepare it, but it was effectively two files, one for side A and one for side B, and we were told the padding margins for start/end to leave. All vinyl has likely passed through some digital format for the last 45 years.

We mastered specifically for vinyl as a format though, the difference between the spotify masters and the vinyl masters is quite significant.

by maccard

7/16/2026 at 9:00:00 PM

I like vinyl (any physical media, i still listen to new bands that only release on cassette) because it is cumbersome and purposeful.

You have to flip through a collection and make a conscious decision on what to listen to. You don’t get to just skip skip skip so you tend to pay attention and listen to the full album.

I get the convenience of streaming and love it when I’m on the go or need background music, but it is a totally different experience.

by l72

7/16/2026 at 8:47:06 PM

The tactile experience is one thing, but if you are bothered by the heavy use of compression on CDs (the loudness wars), then vinyl might sound better to you.

Now that people aren't listening to CDs in the car, it would be amazing to see some remasters of CDs with the dynamic compression dialed back a bit.

by criddell

7/17/2026 at 12:40:47 AM

This type of remastering (and remixing) has been happening for a while now. Lots of newer releases of classic albums of the CD era have remasters with less compression. Pretty Hate Machine, American Idiot, Absolution (Muse)…

by mypalmike

7/17/2026 at 5:52:23 AM

PHM was released before the loudness war. I’ve actually read the opposite about the 2010 remaster. Significantly more compression making all the layers (one of the hallmarks of NIN) inaudible. I’ve listened to the 2010 version, but never felt anything wrong with the original. Fortunately, the original is extremely easy to find and usually very cheap, for comparison.

by jonhohle

7/17/2026 at 5:55:44 PM

True, PHM was not the best example.

by mypalmike

7/16/2026 at 10:43:54 PM

You seem to be stating a general rule when this concerns only a very small amount of cases (not the loudness war itself, but when the vinyl uses a different and drastically better master) that's also quite dependent on genre.

And omit that a lot of music sounds a lot worse on vinyl due to its lack of dynamic range and poor LF capabilities (classical, electronic). This isn't for nothing that the first recording pressed on CD was a rendition of the Alpensinfonie.

by BoingBoomTschak

7/17/2026 at 2:30:13 PM

> You seem to be stating a general rule

I was trying not to. I thought saying "it might sound better to you" would make it clear that it's a subjective matter of taste.

by criddell

7/18/2026 at 11:45:56 AM

I meant "general" with regards to the material, not the listener.

I have myself digitized a few rare cases like Celtic Frost's Monotheist because the CD was horrid and I know pop and rock suffered much more from the phenomenon, but unless the music was released first as a vinyl then got later butchered on CD (so before '85~88), it's very rare to have a situation where the vinyl is objectively better.

One such case I encountered was Unknown Pleasures (https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/11/music-revie...) but I finally found a CD worth the change. Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode were also bands that gave me much trouble when navigating their haphazard CD master landscape.

by BoingBoomTschak

7/17/2026 at 10:35:18 AM

I recently started buying CD's again (also have bought vinyl for a couple of decades now). Something it made me realise is that we've lost the 'gift' of music. Giving/receiving CD's as gifts was always a joy. Copying CD's for friends too if you thought they might like it. With streaming we've completely lost this and are unlikely to get it back.

by basisword

7/16/2026 at 8:09:51 PM

The Jumanji “What year is it” meme 100% applies here.

by adamm255

7/17/2026 at 11:36:26 AM

I've been digitising my music collection since 2000 and still buy CDs or, if available, lossless FLACs. I really wonder how many people still bother "owning" the music they like instead of "renting" it. It might be irrational, but buying it and owning it feels very different than getting it over the radio or some streaming service.

by wvh

7/16/2026 at 8:59:25 PM

Playing a physical CD is a bit like going to a movie theatre instead of Netflix.

It is a ceremony, a ritual, a physical engagement of respect for the artists that created the work.

You don't do that to discardable music, the kind of crap they play on shopping malls, gyms, supermarkets and elevators. You do it to what you recognize as art and worth attention and care.

by diego_moita

7/17/2026 at 12:30:17 PM

CD Audio may espouse "lindy" properties. No DRM (CD format has resisted attempts) and relative easiness of manufacturing + decent enough audio quality. It is a great engineering achievement and sales are bouncing back!

by valeg

7/17/2026 at 3:48:11 PM

I did a FLAC rip of my CD's and now play them on my Astel and Kern MP3 player. It sounds AMAZING, and I don't have a huge binder of CDs cluttering up my office.

by runamuck

7/17/2026 at 2:28:55 PM

I was also about to go back to CDs but realized it’s a pain, and streaming is a completely different, fluid experience. CDs are expensive, if you listen to new artists, it’s a whole process just to buy one. On the other hand, streaming apps now have recommendation algorithms and top charts and paid promotions, etc. My solution has been using Apple Music’s web player with uBlock origin tweaks. Yes I know it’s not lossless, but it’s the best I’ve come up with.

by Gecko4072

7/17/2026 at 10:59:04 AM

I started buying physical media again, first vinyl and now CDs too.

It started as an impulse purchase and then evolved into hunting down various electronic remixes from the 90s heyday that are not available (legally) in electronic form.

Then I started to notice more & more how my streaming services were revoking songs out of my playlists, which reminded me I don't own anything I can't hold with in my hands.

My final annoyance with the enshittification of streaming music is just the UI/UX of these apps now. I don't want the buttons to move, I don't want a notification, I don't want a popup. I want to press play and listen to music like a big boy. Despite our phones being 100x faster, it seems to take longer and longer to simply do that.

by steveBK123

7/17/2026 at 1:48:53 PM

Let's bring back MiniDisc next!

by wombat-man

7/16/2026 at 9:51:56 PM

I have a sizeable collection of CDs and during last year wrote my own CD reader and a ripper CLI.

As ridiculous as it sounds, but there is some intent in doing all of that and listening to the files on your hard drive. We have a vynil/CD player as well, but they are not at my workplace.

by bloomca

7/17/2026 at 12:53:35 AM

I recently bought an external cdrom for my laptop. The library here has a wonderful cd collection.

by robotburrito

7/17/2026 at 2:32:42 PM

I bought Ween's Brown Box collection in this period. A band's entire studio output on CD for $50 felt like a great value. When I see single CDs at Barnes and Noble with a MSRP of $18 and more I feel otherwise.

by Triphibian

7/17/2026 at 3:33:18 AM

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

by mintflow

7/17/2026 at 9:30:54 AM

I stop buying vinyl still during the early 90's, but I surely do buy CDs to this day.

In some case I do buy MP3 directly from online stores, if not available as CD, and burn the CD as well.

Never had a Spotify account, nor plan to.

by pjmlp

7/17/2026 at 5:04:06 PM

"younger audiences appear to be embracing physical formats"

Journalists have been saying this like it's a fact for like 15 years now. It's wishful thinking, sorry.

by frollogaston

7/17/2026 at 10:00:25 AM

Sorry but vinyls don't offer anything but nostalgia for "old, good times", and approach to the audiophile crowd of insane people.

I don't buy into these crackles. I stopped using MP3. A high quality OPUS file format is the way to go for me. I can take the whole music library in my pocket to the places with no internet, listen through good enough in-ear headphones, or with a small speaker (if for more people), and charge that stuff with a small foldable solar panel on the go, next to the tent. Try this with your gramophone.

YMMV.

by HackerThemAll

7/18/2026 at 9:43:28 AM

The best thing about vinyl is the covers. The artwork and sleeve notes look great due to the size. Cassettes and CDs don't work as well that way.

by nephihaha

7/17/2026 at 10:26:01 AM

> Sorry but vinyls don't offer anything but nostalgia

That's simply incorrect on the face of it, as others have pointed out vinyls offers a curated physical object per clump of music tracks.

Maybe that's not for you, which is fine; but for a number of people, young people today and older people that grew up with records that's a different way of engaging with the media and the artists presentation of media than a faceless, artless, beige device on shuffle.

A large physical album cover with artwork, lyrics, details, etc. is something that some people just like - and was liked even in the days when there was no nostalgia attached to the packaging.

Yoto has a market for children because it has a device driven by physical cards.

~ https://yotoplay.com/

Yeah, I've got an original metal tin from a 1968 purchase as a child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogdens%27_Nut_Gone_Flake#Desig...

by defrost

7/17/2026 at 11:29:52 AM

I mean, I could take an amplifier, my speakers and my turntable all with a big battery station anywhere I want to play records. Less convenient, sure, but "I can take it with me!" is not the win you expect here, haha.

by intrikate

7/17/2026 at 12:01:43 PM

Very glad to see.

Vinyl, Casettes, and CDs may be the last physical audio media forever.

by dnemmers

7/16/2026 at 8:49:22 PM

Kids these days want CD's, ipods and the original apple headphones. They call it "retro".

by helterskelter

7/17/2026 at 3:05:41 AM

Becuase it is retro. The 1990s and 2000s were a generation ago.

by alephnerd

7/17/2026 at 8:49:01 AM

I think it’s because they are more convenient: CDs are cheap, you own your music. With iPods you save hundreds of dollars per year, and you get to keep your music (and the iPod shuffle is perfect for working out).

by danshipt

7/17/2026 at 6:41:23 AM

Vinyl records were a pain in the back, tapes were a pain in the back, CDs were a pain in the back. I still remember the day when mp3 became publicly available. I immediately started ripping and converting everything, and never looked back.

Nowadays, I can buy a $3 microcontroller board and make it play mp3's. And it'll outlive most CDs that are pressed today, so what?

by karlkloss

7/16/2026 at 8:42:50 PM

Buy. Rip. Own forever. Compensate artists fairly. My prefered method.

by needSomeCoffee

7/17/2026 at 9:40:06 AM

I grew up in the eighties. Tapes, records, cds, etc. I've seen it all. I haven't used a device that can play any of these in over two decades. I have more music at my fingertips in Spotify than I ever had on these. Love it.

I was a teenager in a small provincial town in the Netherlands. It had two record stores. They were small. There was also the library with a small collection of decent cds that you could "borrow" (copy to tape). If it wasn't on the radio or in those stores, or in the library, I had no access to it. That was how I built my music collection. Buying albums properly was expensive. I only had about 10 or so. I had a few dozen tapes. Maybe 60 Albums or so and some mix tapes. That was it. Compared to what I have on Spotify, that's nothing.

There's all this BS. how everything was better on "hifi" equipment of the 1980s. The reality of course was that most poor teenagers did not have access to either decent equipment or decent music. I tracked down most of what I had in physical form on Spotify ages ago. And I even listen to some of it regularly. Sounds great with decent modern headphones. I'm perfectly happy with my Sennheiser bluetooth headphones. It probably sounds infinitely better than what I had back in the day. I alsp have a much wider selection of music. Anything I want really.

And of course I'm now in my fifties and my hearing isn't what it used to be in terms of high frequencies. I'm about average in hearing loss (i.e. not going deaf) but any absurdly priced headphones would probably be wasted on me. That's the irony of aging audiophiles, right when they can afford all the right gear, their hearing starts deteriorating. You can't compensate for that with gold plated plugs or any of the other nonsense people are into. Records and analog amplifiers sound nice mainly because of the sound distortion and compression. This isn't all that hard to emulate with digital processing. The pop music of the nineteen eighties was optimized for the cheap FM radios that most people had. That's why a lot of albums got remastered later. The original sound is not actually all that great on modern equipment.

by jillesvangurp

7/17/2026 at 8:41:38 AM

Most of the vinyls I buy are used.

by ErneX

7/17/2026 at 2:57:55 PM

can't beat a quality DAP

by rimworld

7/16/2026 at 7:54:49 PM

While I'm thrilled that kids are experiencing the thrill of buying physical media, I'm not sure CD's are the best way to go. Most of my CD's from my teenage years are no longer playable (partially due to poor upkeep, but some literally from disc rot). But hey, they'll learn the same lesson in a couple of decades haha.

I've personally been buying vinyl both because of the fact I missed out on the excitement myself growing up, and because I have some records that came out decades before I was born that play like the day they were minted. They've outlasted pretty much all of my CD's.

by Rooster61

7/16/2026 at 8:20:38 PM

I have hundreds of CDs from the 80s and 90s, most of them bought used from charity shops. The vast majority play perfectly, despite some of them having obvious signs of poor storage/handling.

I think it's more likely your CD player is failing than your CDs.

by mrob

7/17/2026 at 12:27:19 PM

I had some CDs that I couldn't get an accurate rip from so I took them to a used games store and they polished them for $1 each and all but one I was able to rip them all perfectly. I think the one that continued to fail must have had a flaw on the label side.

by criddell

7/16/2026 at 9:03:42 PM

Agree with the siblings. I have hundreds of CDs in binders. They have lived in the unconditioned storage, very hot and humid attics, and on the floorboards of cars and for the most part, very few have any issues. It is quite incredible.

But storage is cheap so also rip it and burn an additional copy in case!

by l72

7/20/2026 at 8:42:43 PM

I rip CDs as they enter my house, so I don't have to worry about decay.

by terribleperson

7/16/2026 at 8:19:46 PM

I've noticed that pressed discs work better than burned discs, but thats what backups are for... assuming you can get a working original that is...

by nubinetwork

7/16/2026 at 9:05:40 PM

Yeah burned discs wore out much earlier but it depended a lot on the brand. Fry’s great quality brand (or whatever it was called) did not last long. But my memorex and verbatim still work fine after 30 years of mistreatment!

by l72

7/17/2026 at 7:59:25 AM

its happening

by gregjw

7/17/2026 at 10:00:57 AM

Next up: MiniDisc!

by thenthenthen

7/18/2026 at 9:42:29 AM

MiniDisc never took off in some parts of the world, so little real nostalgia in those places.

by nephihaha

7/19/2026 at 1:24:10 PM

Its so funny, after this vinyl revival a couple of years ago (well…10-15?) I jokingly told my friends CD’s would be next, I even produced some CD player prototypes in anticipation (sadly all the transports I got were mostly faulty+dead lasers and I shelved the project…maybe I should pick it back up again?)

by thenthenthen

7/19/2026 at 1:34:21 PM

There was the cassette thing a few years ago. Cassettes were good in that you could drop them on the ground and they would be okay. Not so gold when they got tangled.

I don't think vinyl ever fully went out of fashion.

by nephihaha

7/16/2026 at 8:22:42 PM

Personally, I haven’t stopped buying CDs or in certain cases DVDs and Blu-Rays - not of movies but of music. I find it interesting these “went away” but I can see why: nobody I know has a cd player to begin with. A lot of laptops nowadays don’t come with disc trays, and nobody buys a dvd bluray player. Yes, the PS or Xbox can play it but everyone just streams movies or music. So somewhere along the way it disappeared and I doubt it will genuinely come back. It’s a needless headache.

by tangenter

7/16/2026 at 9:03:03 PM

I think this is a bit more complicated than that. There's more music and video being made today than ever before and social media is how it gets distributed. Attentive time spent on streaming platforms is completely dwarfed by social media. If at all, people have something streaming in the background while they barely pay attention to it and instead focus on their phones.

This aligns with the broader historical trends of the internet creating deep niches. You have to take the good with the bad. We wouldn't even be discussing physical media at all without the internet being how it is. Despite there being a large audience for physical media, they're not the majority. The majority has moved on.

by sublinear

7/16/2026 at 9:02:35 PM

The one thing I hope happens with a revival of CDs/DVDs is that hopefully we get a new generation of players.

I still buy movies on DVD but the players are a bit hit and miss. That said, I do frequently see Sony bluray players in second hand stores for a few dollars and that is how I have my collection of players, but that is not a sustainable system.

I just wish my PC case had a slot for the drive bay, that was a foolish choice on my behalf.

by ColdStream

7/17/2026 at 12:16:43 AM

I have a pile of my own so I know what you are talking about. I love how even today DVD and Blu Ray players look, long after they were released. They are compact and chic, looking a tad futuristic but not at all the sort of stuff that screams attention-seeking, gaudy design. The kind that you could put unassumingly on a shelf next to a pile of books and wouldn’t even know it’s there without a closer look, or take up to a cottage and leave with a pile of old movies to watch on a dark, gloomy day, like in the old days. One looks at, say, LLMs nowadays and is amazed but, to me personally, we haven’t stopped living in the future for a very long time now. This message was typed on a device with a touch screen no larger than my hand.

by tangenter

7/16/2026 at 9:07:47 PM

For some reason, the PS4 and PS5 actually cannot play audio CDs

by mrpippy

7/16/2026 at 9:29:43 PM

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.

by justsomehnguy

7/16/2026 at 9:41:56 PM

The bigger irony is that Sony and Philips worked together to create the CD-Audio specification.

by netsharc

7/16/2026 at 9:39:40 PM

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.

by sperr11

7/17/2026 at 3:10:19 AM

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?

by Nursie

7/16/2026 at 9:42:23 PM

And killed HD-DVD in the process, hehe.

by justsomehnguy

7/17/2026 at 12:17:24 AM

To be fair on a technical scale, Blu-ray was the superior format so losing HD-DVD wasn't the biggest loss. I appreciate what Toshiba was trying to do but it also felt like they were trying to cut-off the competition with a lower quality but cheaper product.

by ColdStream

7/17/2026 at 12:29:51 PM

Some people still use a PS1 for playing CDs. They came with a DAC that some people love.

by criddell

7/16/2026 at 9:19:45 PM

audio CDs use a different wavelength for the laser (infra red) while PS game disks are BluRay (blue laser).

Of course, 99.9% of other BluRay players will also support DVD/CD, so yeah it still does seem silly.

I also remember my Dad’s disappointment when he put a standard DVD in our Wii back in the day. Those are literally the same physical format as wii disks.

by jedbrooke

7/17/2026 at 12:09:56 AM

That was the unfortunate side of licensing fees. The Wii has all the hardware to play DVD, there is homebrew of it, but if you want to do it the legal way Nintendo would have to pay.

Also I don't think Nintendo wanted to turn the Wii into a cheap commodity DVD player, they make most of their money on the games. It is a shame because the Wii was one of the most TV friendly interfaces and inputs, at least when the Wiimote wasn't being throw at the screen.

by ColdStream

7/16/2026 at 10:32:31 PM

any one less item on the BOM brings down the costs.

by dylan604