Are Compact Discs Going the Way of the 8-Track?

“Doin’ me a concern,” as the meme goes.

I moved from Columbia, SC, to the big city of Atlanta in mid-July 1984, hoping to turn my recently acquired college degree into an adult paycheck. One of the rock/pop stations there boasted of its (severely limited) playlist “from the compact laser disc.” Compact. LASER. (ooo-weee!) Disc. Small and shiny silver, they made the big black vinyl LP records, even the picture discs (a brief fad) look cumbersome and antiquated. 

No more going over your records with a corduroy dust wand or whatever they called those things. No more degaussing the static. (There were actually little pistols you pointed at the record to do this. Squeeze the outsized trigger slowly, then let it spring back slowly.) No more of that snap, crackle, and pop you got regardless of how hard you worked at cleaning the thing. 

And CDs would last forever! You could never wear them out, like you could the best cared-for vinyl you were dumb enough to wear out beneath a needle. 

This was all hype, of course. The auditory quality and volume levels of those first digital remasters were all over the place, depending on who did the transfer of analog to digital. With few exceptions—The Doors’ and The Grateful Dead’s catalogs are the most notable in my experience—CDs made in the 1980s through the early 1990s are best avoided. The sound is subpar, especially in regards to tape hiss that was often carelessly allowed into the mixes.

The discs weren’t indestructible, either. Compact discs might not melt in a hot car, but the heat could cause a reaction in the chemicals holding the plastic laminate to the microgrooved tinfoil and render the disc unreadable. I didn’t start buying CDs until 1990, and I’ve noted that in the not-quite 30 years since then, some will not play on some systems. My computer’s Blu-ray drive can’t read them. That chemical I spoke of degrades over time, depending upon how well you store your CDs.

They were great while they lasted, though. They got the sound and everything else right just in time for streaming to kill the format—or, rather, give the people who take our money for the music an excuse not to permit us our own hardcopies. It doesn’t matter. I’ll hang onto mine, and get what I can while I still can.

Doors and Dylan, with even more Dylan on the rack behind me. How boomer is this?

We bought our first CD player in the summer of 1991. It had a cassette you could load six CDs into, and shuffle function. This enhanced my music listening experience immensely. For one, I could listen under my favorite circumstance, namely, inebriation, and not risk damaging vinyl discs and record player needles alike trying to find a song. Also, with all my songs on shuffle, I could get as close as I could to my perfect radio station. I always liked making mixtapes with juxtapositions of The Go Go’s and Black Sabbath, for example. Here, a computer chip was doing it for me.

That smug proto-hipsters hated them made me love them all the more. I find the triumphalism of the “Vinyl wins!” crowd pathetic inasmuch as it’s been over one-hundred years since the invention of the phonograph. The technology should have improved beyond needle-to-groove. We need a more stable medium with which to store our music. The fire at the warehouse in Los Angeles in which many precious master tapes were destroyed demonstrated the importance of getting the best digital imaging of everything out there, and making copies far and wide. 

As it is, I need to make a checklist of albums I’d like on disc. If I outlive the discs themselves, that will be fine, especially at my age. I’ll be ripping them for maximum quality, of course. But it’s nice having those little shiny round things around. When you can find them, that is. Many all-time great albums have already disappeared into either trendy vinyl or streaming. It’s a matter of time before disc players become impossible to get even for custom-built personal computers.

It’s the twenty-twenties, baby. Whatcha gonna do? Adapt and overcome, as always.