Let's get physical

Shine worn off streaming? Vinyl collection denting the bank balance? It's time to reconnect with the original digital format.

- David Vivian

THE VENERABLE COMPACT disc. Forty years old and still going, well, downhill to be blunt. Squeezed on one side by the ubiquity of streaming and, on the other, the much celebrated, though slightly sagging, vinyl revival, words like ‘moribund’ and ‘legacy’ often support the sorry tale of the CD’s gradual and seemingly irreversible demise.

But let’s just take stock for a moment. We’re talking here about arguably the most successful music replay format in history, progenitor of the Red Book 16 bit/44.1kHz ‘lossless’ digital standard on which most of the world’s music is stored and played. It’s the format largely responsible for killing off the miserable compact cassette and, ironically, triggering the vinyl revival.

No, not perfect, but the players – understandably fewer in number – have been getting better in line with evolving DAC tech, not least through the years of the silver disc’s accelerating decline. And more recent data suggests that, against the odds, the falling sales may be stalling and, in some regions, starting to climb again. Digital’s first comeback kid? Too early to say, but trend analysts aren’t shy to posit possible reasons: unlimited choice in the cloud is overrated; we’re natural born collectors; CDs have never been better value; physical media is 100 percent reliable whereas the internet is not; off-the-sofa involvement is an itch that needs scratching once more and, the final kicker, pound-for-pound, premium CD replay sounds better than streaming.