Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

A Reminder as to Why CDs are Better than Records
So far I have converted about 50 albums and 12" singles from vinyl to digital formats. I edit the .wav files so that there is one per track, and also output high-quality 320kbps MP3s for each of them as well so that I am able to listen to them again on my iPod.

While there are audiophiles out there who will swear up and down that an analog-based system like vinyl will always beat digital CDs, late yesterday I was reminded of one of the factors that helped convince the masses that CDs is a far superior format in general.

I am of course talking about pops and crackles, which cannot be escaped from in a vinyl environment. I have several records which have not weathered the years well, and have either painstakingly edited out the worst of the pops by hand, or have just decided to leave it the hopes that one day I will find effective anti-pop and anti-hiss software that will clean up the tracks wholesale for me. But I was surprised to find a Philip Glass album ("Songs from Liquid Days") in our collection that was still in its original shrink wrap, unopened for 20 years.

I don't remember how we came to have it. I know I had a copy many years ago on vinyl and either I bought this as a replacement copy, or it was given to Erika as a gift, or perhaps it was a duplicate copy that I managed to snag back when I was "Rock Director" at CFRC.

I figured whatever collectible value it had as an unopened record was likely negligible, so I opened it up. I put it on the turntable and placed the needle on to the virgin vinyl.

And it still had pops and crackles from what was ostensibly a new record. Not many admittedly, less than a half-dozen that I could easily find. But they were still there.

I am not sure that the new generation of CDs mastered at twice the bitrate of current CDs are likely to take off anytime soon, and the reason for that is that the perception of them doesn't fit the "10x better rule" for putative successor technologies over their predecessors. But the pops on the virgin vinyl helped underline why CDs were perceived as such an improvement -- and that's just the sound, never mind such things as form factor or portability.

It's fun for me to digitize my old record collection, but I am glad for the improvements in audio technology since they were originally made.