GOODSOUND!GoodSound! "Editorial" Archives

December 1, 2007

 

The Decline of the CD and the Uncertain Audio Future

This year, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Compact Disc. The format has had an amazing run; in fact, after it superseded the LP and cassette back in the 1980s, the CD held on to the spot of No.1 music format for longer than many thought possible. After all, in the last few years there were some who believed that the SACD or DVD-Audio disc would replace it. Not so; the CD held firm. But, that doesn’t mean that CD’s reign will last forever.

Recently, I read an article about Wal-Mart and Best Buy, two of North America’s largest sellers of CDs. They’ve begun, and will continue, to scale down the size of their stores’ CD sections. Customer traffic is down in those aisles and sales have steadily declined, something these companies don’t see stopping anytime soon. In fact, making these stores’ music sections smaller will probably decrease CD sales even more. The writing is on the wall.

None of this is surprising. The music industry has been telling us about this tailspin for years, and most people know that, nowadays, many music enthusiasts don’t buy their music on CD -- or SACD or DVD-A -- at all. Instead, they download it from the Internet. If you need proof, look at the success of iTunes.

What is surprising is that, despite the decrease in CD sales and the increase in downloads, no new "standard" has yet been established to replace the CD following its demise. Nor does the digital audio market seem to be taking any definite turn in one direction or another. As a result, audiophiles worldwide today keep asking What’s next? They’re getting few answers. What they’re getting instead is a lot of crystal-ball gazing, some of which I do myself.

In my opinion, it’s pretty clear that the next big thing won’t be a physical format like the CD, which is one of the reasons that SACD and DVD-A have failed. Consumers don’t seem to want anything that cumbersome anymore. Instead, the music delivery of the future won’t be tied to a "hard" medium; rather, it will be about digital files -- WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Apple Lossless, etc. -- that can be delivered to your system in a variety of ways, downloading obviously being one. Think of it as MP3 on a more expansive scale. Furthermore, without the constraints of a physical disc format tying us down, we might get away from the idea of the "album" altogether, as people buy their music by the song or the work.

It’s not hard to imagine that the musical front-end of the future will be a computer of some sort hooked up to the Internet, whether a device dedicated to the job or your multi-use home computer. Whichever, gone will be the large, cumbersome disc transports that have been staples of the audiophile world ever since digital separates took the stage back in the 1980s, and whose controls haven’t changed since the first CD player surfaced in 1983. Enter something like the MacBook, which can store and output every kind of digital music to an external DAC, and has a super-slick user interface that puts even the best CD player’s control panel to shame. It only makes sense that things will continue to go in this direction.

None of this is new or revolutionary -- many people are doing all this today -- but as yet, no new format has been formally adopted by the music industry, as the CD was. No one is endorsing some new protocol and telling you that this is the way to go. In fact, I suspect that many companies don’t even want you to even lean this way. Copyright infringement through digital copying is one reason for that, but the royalties generated by sales of physical media is another.

Sony and Philips jointly developed the Compact Disc, and reaped the rewards of their invention by collecting royalties from every record and hardware company that licensed it in the 25 years following its introduction. Obviously, that’s a lot of money, and the way to keep that going is to invent something new. Sony developed SACD in the hopes that a newer, better digital format would keep the royalties rolling in. It didn’t work out that way.

Today’s world isn’t like the world of 25 years ago. With the proliferation of digital technologies, it’s hard for a single company to own everything and control what people do. Sony never had a chance of making SACD stick, and neither did the companies behind DVD-Audio. In fact, although some may disagree with me, I’m actually happy that SACD and DVD-A have failed. Hard formats such as these may be bigger money makers for their developers, but file-based, downloadable playback is faster, easier, and cheaper for the consumer. That’s the way I want it to go.

However, that doesn’t mean that you need to stop buying CDs (and/or SACDs or DVD-As), or throw out the ones you already have. None of this will happen overnight, even though we already have the technologies needed for a downloadable, high-resolution music-serving solution. For whatever reason, such changes move notoriously slowly. So, for a long time -- years and years -- you’ll still want a playback device that can handle your discs without having to rip them to a hard drive: in short, a player of some sort. But at the same time, you might want to consider looking toward the future, if you haven’t already. You might want start thinking about using a computer for a source as well. It’s the right time to live in both worlds.

This month, we review two products that might help you out. One is the Oppo Digital DV-970HD universal player, which supports CD, SACD, DVD-A, DVD-V, and more -- most of the relevant hard formats of the day. What’s more, it costs only $169 USD. Then there’s the Trends Audio UD-10.1 USB-based audio converter, for those who have an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that lacks a USB port. The UD-10.1 connects to your computer’s USB port and gives you four digital outputs to connect to your DAC: two S/PDIF, one TosLink, and one AES/EBU. It’s not a complete music-serving solution, but it’ll help get you there -- and it’s only $149.

CD may be on the decline, and the future might look uncertain, but that’s no reason to sit on your hands and wait to see what finally shakes out. If you do, you might wait a long time. I suggest you instead take advantage of what’s on the market today, and create your own music-making way.

…Doug Schneider

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