Opinion

Once, when all was in black and white – well almost! – it wasn’t unknown for me to have a dozen CD players piled up for review. The process of ‘load disc, play, switch player and repeat’ became so ingrained that I welcomed with open arms my first CD-R machine, allowing the creation of a test disc with multiple tracks chosen to illuminate the qualities of a player in the shortest possible time.

Fast forward to 2024, and some reviews recently published in these pages of the first new CD players I’d encountered for a good while. Out with some familiar discs and I was soon listening and enjoying again. Except...

A blast from the past

I think it must be that I’ve become so used to streaming music from my battery of NAS units, to which I long ago consigned my entire CD library, that the whole process of finding jewel cases, loading discs and skipping through tracks with a remote while peering at a distant display didn’t exactly release waves of nostalgia. Instead, it all seemed a bit of a faff, just to get some music playing.

First world problems, I know, but for some reason this seemed such a throwback to the past as to be on a par with an article I read recently explaining that critical software updates to the remaining Boeing 747s still in service are loaded up via a 3.5in floppy disk drive in the cockpit. This is used to upgrade the plane’s navigation database, the article explained, adding that ‘It’s a database that has to be updated every 28 days: an engineer visits each month, to sit and load eight floppies’. The piece also pointed out that, until recently, the US Department of Defence was still using 8in floppy disks to coordinate the country’s nuclear forces.

In that context, using 12cm silver discs to load music for playback on a hi-fi system also seems a little old-fashioned, something I say not out of laziness, but from the viewpoint of practicality. I appreciate all the ritual involved in setting up a turntable, cleaning an LP, placing it on a platter, screwing down some kind of clamp, and then delicately placing a needle into the run-in groove. It may not be my thing, but those who cleave to vinyl as a means of sticking to direct analogue playback clearly feel it has a point in the 21st century audio landscape. And I’ve heard some turntable-based systems sounding very good indeed. But still playing digital music from silver discs? I’m really not sure that I get it.

The format was almost outdated when CD was launched back in the early 1980s, as it used 1970s technology, and things have definitely moved on in the intervening 40-plus years. My experience with driving means I can remember adjusting a manual choke control to get the engine to catch on start-up, waiting for the glow-plug light to go out on old diesels, and even my father threading a crank handle through a little aperture to turn over the engine on cold mornings. But would I go back to any of that when today all I need do is get in the car, put my foot on the brake pedal and hit a ‘start’ button? Not a chance.

Looking ahead

Back in 2009, when Linn was said – erroneously – to have signalled the death of the CD by stopping production of its players, company boss Gilad Tiefenbrun clarified that he’d still be buying discs, but ripping them for playback on streaming hardware. Fifteen years on, with faster broadband speeds widely available, even buying those discs seems wasteful. Just now, and in the interests of research, I found, bought and downloaded an album from one of the leading online music stores, and from decision to playback took me less than ten minutes. And all that’s before I get into higher-resolution releases or the appeal of streaming.

Yes, I have my extensive CD library, now ripped and stored away, and yes, I’ll continue to buy discs when they’re the only means of getting the content they contain. I’ll even carry on reviewing CD players if, as and when they appear. But really the CD is an anachronism in the modern audio landscape.