It was Monday night. The tea was brewed and the day’s labours duly expended. Hašek’s ‘The Good Soldier Švejk’ awaited my attention. Ildjarn-Nidhogg’s ‘Norse’ and ‘Svartfråd’ EPs were queued up for the playing on God’s own format, the humble CD. But I’d barely reclined into a chair when disaster struck. The music incongruously cut out. I instinctively reach for my phone to check the issue. After briefly chastising myself for this toxic reflex, I walked across the room, in the physical realm, to scrutinise a physical problem I am ill equipped to deal with, a fault with a real, tangible piece of hardware. In this case my Technics sound system. I scrutinised the tuner display, it stared balefully back at me. Apparently the input had switched to cassette mode of its own accord. I promptly switch it back to CD. Nothing happened. I try again. Nothing. More button pushing. More nothing. My commands unobeyed, the few levers I have to pull on exhausted, I reach for the power. The classic on-off retcon. Still nothing. The input selector simply will not budge. The contours of my evening take on a dramatically different topography to the planned route as I commence a round of Googling, troubleshooting, and a tentative disassembly of the CD deck to salvage the not exactly easy to come across ‘Norse’ EP. I enter a period of mourning as I consider announcing the time of death on the Technics kit, a vision of having to refresh the whole setup crystalising before me. I tell myself it was probably due an upgrade at some point anyway (we’re currently at the completely-dismantling-each-deck-and-cleaning-every-single-button-with-DeoxIT stage of grief).
The experience has left me sour. Not for the evening lost to pragmatic quandaries that are frankly outside my skillset. Not for the annoyance that comes when any reliable piece of kit decides to down tools. Nor for the odd guilt that comes with realising I should have celebrated the quiet reliability of the Technics system whilst it lasted, a “you only truly appreciate the toaster when it’s gone” despondency. Not even the potential financial hit this could entail fills me with much gloom. The endless dredging of Reddit threads, the bald bespectacled men speaking in tongues on YouTube gear channels, the arcane user manuals, the articles ranking home audio systems creaking under the suspiciously dense array of popups and flashing adverts, even this and the decision paralysis I know is coming I can probably live with.
No, my sourness has a much older source, one that stretches back to my very first CD purchase in 2001 (I’ll admit on record that it was Gorillaz’ self-titled debut). It’s the familiar bitterness of having to justify to some imagined antagonist why I favour CDs over other formats. Bitter, because as far as I’m concerned choice isn’t a fact here, quietly maintaining a CD collection is little more than instinct at this point. It’s like having to explain why you favour oxygen when a whole spectrum of other gases are available. Sure, moving through the world requires us to consume and expel materials with reliable frequency. But why those materials? Organic matter may sustain your bodily functions. But let me tell you about the benefits of rock. Sure CDs have their place, but why not some larger, technologically redundant format that’s notoriously temperamental?
No, CDs have always been my format. For the longest time I believed they were the format. Back in 2001 my older brother was already cultivating a moderate collection. Even earlier in the late 90s my parents purchased a Sony five CD changer that could spiral through each disk in order or play them completely at random. At the time it was, I was led to believe, the absolute business when it came to home audio. So when I initially expressed an interest in music to them my course was set. Buy a ghetto blaster, buy that Gorillaz album on CD. This was just the default starter pack in the early 2000s. Streaming didn’t exist. And building an mp3 library was still a highly subversive practice (I am unaware of building any such collection myself, nor would I be in a position to comment if such a collection did in fact exist). Vinyl was part of some mystical boomer ritual sure to pass out of living memory in time. And cassettes were the punching bag. Sure they were still available in HMV in the early 2000s. But ultimately their destiny lay in facilitating the humble mixtape. The easiest (and annoyingly fun) way to throw together a compilation before CD burning really ground into gear, a practice I would also embrace with gusto throughout the 2000s. Having grown up in the era of CD dominance, they were never something I thought I would have to justify.
But as the vinyl revival fired its opening salvos in the late 2000s announcing the start of the format wars, I had to dig some pretty deep trenches. Why stick with a “good enough” format when this warm, sexy, prestige format exists? CDs are so cold. Corporate. Lifeless. Later a new front was opened by the not-on-anyone’s-bingo-card cassette revival. I’ll admit that the underdog status of the cassette lends it a degree of charm, its modest physical stature when taken against the great, hulking slabs of vinyl, its poor sound quality and all too brief shelf life, these faults become virtues when collecting certain genres of music every bit as temporary as the tape itself (hence its popularity in the dungeon synth milieu). But I’ve always stuck loyally to CDs. Over time the collection became too big to consider hitting reset and repurchasing a bunch of albums on vinyl. And despite many prototypes, the decision tree I would need to run every new purchase through in order to maintain two collections is a mental load I’m unwilling to bear (although I have accidentally grown a modest assemblage of dungeon synth tapes in the meantime). But at some point I began to view this as something other than a collection. My ambition was to build an archive. A reference library. Nothing short of an ice core sample documenting the atmospheric gases of my musical whims through different epochs. The solid reliability of the CD, the “good-enough” audio, their durability and underrated allure as physical objects, all suit this purpose in my muted life quite well.
During COVID I upgraded the audio setup to the now faulty Technics system, chiefly this was to integrate a cassette deck into the picture. Since then I’ve implemented a tight bureaucracy on new purchases and wrapped this around my dual needs as fan and reviewer. Purchases are split into three tiers. The first is underground releases I’ve discovered through reviewing new music, smaller bands I’m keen to support with more than kind words. The second is the canonised tier. Any classic I don’t yet own for whatever reason, metal or otherwise. The third tier is allocated to tentpole releases I don’t particularly want but require for the sake of completeness (Immolation’s latest tepid effort is currently on the docket here, deliberations ongoing as to whether this album’s limited virtues outweigh the fact that my Immo collection is now missing a limb). My phone eventually replaced the USB stick mp3 player for listening out on manoeuvres. I’ve flitted across various streaming services before settling on Qobuz. For the sake of consistency, your promos are reviewed on a pair of fairly chunky Motorola over ear headphones, the best compromise between quality, eliminating ambient noise, and precluding any potential changes in sound based on the position of my ears to the speakers.
A happy equilibrium. But gone now. Incongruously shattered by this exogenous shock curtesy of the Technics system. One that has forced me to take up arms and once more enter the (surely tired) format wars. And it seems that in my absence CDs have been making a comeback. Is it a vibe? Or is there data? Opinions are divided. One thing is certain, young people now view CDs as a prestige item. Given my default position on CDs, this has left me heartened if bemused. Akin to seeing a flock of tourists eagerly photographing my office building. It’s got a nice façade, sure. But it’s also a place I have to go to with regrettable frequency. Seeing people seek it out by choice feels odd. According to a Guardian piece back in August, young people (roughly thirty and under) regard CDs as a neat middle option, offering a superior sound to streaming whilst being less physically threatening than costly and space hungry vinyl.
It seems the vinyl revival finally ran out of steam in the early 2020s. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Runs of Adele and Taylor Swift albums clogged up its rather feeble supply chain arteries. The not-middle-aged-white-guy fanbases of these artists gave rise to the suspicion that many entering the vinyl game were simply filling shelves with no intention of actually spinning the records. And of course people finally accepted that Record Store Day is just Black Friday for wankers. As a committed CDer, it’s easy to feel schadenfreude toward this prompt clipping of vinyl’s wings. We nurture an inherent suspicion toward audiophiles. We’re real ale, they’re craft beer*. The proto spiritual language they use to describe their home audio setup. The stuffy old men claiming some weird relationship to sound, a level of intimacy with the music we plebs couldn’t possibly comprehend. Even the term audiophile raises questions. Not music. Not melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, texture. Literally just audio. The love of sound. An obsessive probing at the most authentic, warm, rich, revealing, stratified sound, working to achieve a divine balance between hardware, environment, and the record itself, finally penetrating to the essence of ‘Led Zepplin IV’ in a moment of perfect climax. But this quest ejects all context and mental effort from the practice of listening to music. It’s a museum exhibit. Valuable, certainly, but somehow unreal through its very curation, not properly knitted into the gritty fabric of daily life. The principle of audiophilia (aside from gear fetishism) relegates the listener to a passive vessel. A mere conduit strapped down in a controlled environment. The trial and chaos of listening to music without this control. Limited by whatever gear is to hand, limited by circumstance. The proactivity of getting your ear into the music regardless of sound quality, learning to appreciate it headphoned up on the morning commute, in the car stereo, the shitty Bluetooth speaker in the park, from across the room on your phone speaker, chance encounters out in the world. Filling in the blanks left by inferior kit. Imagining the music in its totality when the perfect home audio setup isn’t to hand. All are relegated by the audiophile caste. Viewed as necessary, maybe. But outside the temple of their finely tuned home audio setup they become inferior experiences in their eyes.
I accept the clear hypocrisy in what I’m doing here. Having just bitterly descanted at length on having to justify my love of CDs, launching an unprovoked tirade at vinylheads, many of whom I’m sure are just living their lives, is rich. Many of my best friends are vinylheads after all. And most (most) of the time we just let each other get on with it. But let’s plough on with abandon regardless, shall we. Historically my loyalty to CDs has been purely instinctual. In the face of every argument on sound quality, aesthetics, the ritual of listening, I’ve maintained that CDs tick most of the same boxes as vinyl. Being forced to reappraise this preference by the temporary outage of my CD player has only entrenched this view in me. Praise of CDs from vinylheads, rarely offered and always begrudgingly, only ever extends to their functionality. The portable, durable, versatile option. But I enjoy them as objects over and above these things. A love that goes well beyond mere sentiment toward my own collection. Back when Facebook was a viable place I was a member of a few collectors’ groups. Spaces imbued with a simple, ambient joy. Scouring through the photos people shared, towering stacks of CDs thrown into sharp relief by the chasmic valleys they created, photos of rarities or perfect runs, and indeed the guy slowly acquiring every version of ‘Master of Puppets’ he could find (if memory serves he had over thirty at the last count).
The original sin of CD, to make vinyl (and indeed cassettes) redundant for a short while in the 90s and 00s, this will never be forgiven by vinyl zealots. And CDs were duly punished for this. First by mp3s, then by streaming, then by vinyl’s own belligerent resurgence. The apparent revival of CDs in the 2020s (still denied by some vinyl truthers) seems to be based first and foremost on their practicality. Through it all, their quiet, modest virtues as joyful little objects still goes underappreciated outside of certain circles. Having been temporarily dispossessed of my ability to play them (at least outside of my car), I relish nothing more than resurrecting the Technics system through repair or replacement, and spinning those Ildjarn-Nidhogg EPs again, before moving on to Immolation, Immortal, Impaled Nazarene, Imprecation, Incantation, and the rest of the Is into the Js. In the meantime I’ll have to suffer the slurry of targeted ads for home audio equipment coming my way after the pure red meat Monday’s Googling frenzy threw into the algorithm.
*I am aware that if we’re talking perishability and consistency then vinyl is quite clearly real ale and CD craft beer, but I hope the reader will allow that the analogy was made at the cultural and not the material level, audiophiles occupy a similar cultural space to craft beer nerds, belligerent in their tastes and susceptible to fads, cosmopolitan and flighty when taken against the reliably earthy, blokeish pintsmen supping down a bitter of a Sunday afternoon at the local (as an aside, as far as beer is concerned, I remain “of” the former mould whilst aspiring to the latter).
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