Websites for physical media music heads

We’re all aware of the growing trend around vinyl collecting, but few people are aware at the moment that CD collecting is making a resurgence too. In fact, in 2023, CD sales volume increased for the first time in 20 years.

There are a lot of reasons for this- first, Gen-z is enjoying the hipster novelty of playing physical medium like CDs. They’re also getting into CD collecting for the same reason why I primarily started buying CDs which is that vinyl’s have exploded in price and demand for physical media is high while CDs are relatively cheap, often $5-$10 bucks an album.

Personally, I prefer Vinyls over CDs in terms of the playback ritual, and how it really forces you to slow down and take in the the music. If you’re not paying enough attention, you’ll notice that the music stopped playing for the past 10 minutes and you never flipped the disc. However, this can become really tedious when just trying to hang out and listen to music instead of intently focus exclusively on a record.

Comparing Vinyl to other mediums and how it “sounds better”- I don’t buy into that as much- Often times people prefer the sound of vinyl because the cracks and pops (which are undesireable artifacts of dust that hurt the audio quality) are nostalgic, while others find vinyls produce a warmer soundscape.

Some might argue that its even higher fidelity- however this is widely debated since many of those argued frequencies vinyls might have aren’t even perceptible to the human ear. Additionally CDs are provably very high fidelity, lossless compression and produce excellent sound, likely better sound than any vinyl and at least at the current time of writing this, better fidelity than many streaming websites.

The only argument that really might convince me that vinyls sound better than anything else comes down to the original master. The mastering might not be the same when a record is ported from vinyl to CD- either due to the original master being lost, or because a different mastering is required for a different physical medium that wasn’t originally intended at the time of recording. There is a lot of music where the original master was completely lost when introducing the album to CD, which resulted in a poor, overly compressed sound. Additionally, even a good remaster might have enough differences to the original piece of work produced by the artist, and for better or for worse, this means that our appreciation of the original work can’t be fully realized.

A website I discovered related to this whole mastering controversy is https://www.dr.loudness-war.info/

It lets you see the dynamic range of all the reissues, represses, or remasters of a certain album, which can help you understand if your copy is overly compressed or not. The bigger the dynamic range the better the sound should be.

I like CDs for two main reasons: they’re cheaper to collect while still giving me access to nostalgia, physical playback, and the fun of collecting. CDs do come with the convenience factor responsible for eviscerating the Vinyl market which is nice too. I love the discovery process involved with phsyical media digging through crates at some shop. I’ve discovered countless great musicians from this process, and I love it.

I’ve always been a minimalist, but having a collection, albeit small, has been a ton of fun and joy. https://www.discogs.com/ is the go-to website for looking up a specific copy of music, buying/selling it, and keeping track of your collection. What’s nice is that when you visit a seller’s page, it can show you what they might have thats in your wishlist.

I'm Patrick El-Hage and I live and work in San Francisco. I'm also on Twitter.