CD or not CD?

I’ve just bought a new CD player. I’m not sure why because I rarely play CDs these days.

Like most things, I was a little late to compact discs. It was the late Eighties when I replaced my Sony music centre (tuner, amplifier, single cassette deck, turntable) with a Technics (Panasonic) hifi system (tuner, amplifier, twin cassette deck, turntable, CD player).

The Sony, which sat in a cabinet behind a glass door that occasionally fell off, predated the first CDs in 1983 which is why it didn’t have a CD player.

Although it had a turntable (my first) I continued to buy cassettes (having got my first cassette player in 1972, when I was 13) until I was almost 30, when I replaced the Sony with the Technics and started to purchase CDs.

Unloved today, CDs were a huge improvement on cassette tapes that were forever getting mangled in the tape machine.

Audiophiles disagree but I considered them better than vinyl too - no more scratches or hissing, although in time I realised you could scratch a CD too, making it jump or malfunction, if you didn’t look after it and return it to its plastic tray.

However, every car I had in the Nineties and into the new millennium still had a cassette player so it wasn’t until 2004, when I upgraded to an Audi, that I finally had an in-car CD player.

Twenty years later in-car CD players have been replaced by Bluetooth so if I want to listen to music while driving I have to download music to my iPhone.

But in all honesty I don’t play a lot of music, either at home or in the car.

My music collection, such as it is, is currently scattered around the house and garage in several formats - physical CDs, cassettes, and a few vinyl records; plus MP3 files on my iMac and iPhone, mostly ripped (is that the word?) from my CDs, with a handful of tracks purchased from iTunes.

I can’t play the cassettes or vinyl records because I no longer have a cassette deck or turntable. (My daughter has the Technics and it still works.) And until today I didn’t have a dedicated CD player either, but that’s not the reason I don’t listen to a lot of music.

The main reason is … I’m bored listening to the same stuff over and over again.

Like a lot of people, my taste in music was established when I was a young child in the Sixties, then a teenager in the Seventies, and it hasn’t really moved beyond the early Eighties.

Today, when I listen to music, it’s usually new stuff by artists I liked when I was young, or remixed/remasters of old albums (by the same artists) that I already have in my collection.

I convince myself they will sound better than the original recordings but I suspect a non-audiophile like me, listening to MP3 files on middling speakers, won’t hear much difference.

So why have I bought a new CD player, especially when I’ve read that you get better sound quality via streaming, and if I subscribe to a streaming service (Spotify or Apple Music, for example) I can listen to all the music I want to at a fraction of the cost of buying CDs?

First and foremost, I like physical things - CDs, cassettes, vinyl. Streaming seems a bit soulless to me, and I also like the idea of owning something - it’s the difference between buying a book or borrowing it from a library.

But there’s something else. There’s too much choice! Seriously. Choice is great, until there’s too much of it.

It’s like going to a restaurant and being given a menu with a vast selection of dishes. Rarely a good sign. A Michelin restaurant would never do that.

But there’s another reason for buying a CD player and it’s this.

Quite a few CDs I own are not available on any streaming service so the only way I can listen to them is by downloading the tracks on to my computer via an Apple disk drive and playing them through external desktop speakers that, as I’ve said, are OK but not great.

In addition, therefore, I have also bought a Sonos Era 300 speaker that will connect directly to the new CD player. The former has been well reviewed and the latter won the 2023 What HiFi? award for ‘Best Affordable CD Player’, so fingers crossed!

(Connecting the CD player to the speaker via cable is better, apparently, than using Bluetooth which is an option but is said to reduce the sound quality a fraction. Again, I suspect that only audiophiles can tell the difference but we’ll see.)

However, what really inspired me to buy a new CD player and speaker is that, for the first time in years, I am genuinely enthused by a new band, albeit one whose influences seem to hark back to the Seventies.

Again, I’m a bit late to the party - The Last Dinner Party - who I stumbled upon last year on YouTube before the release of their debut album, Prelude To Ecstasy, earlier this year.

I bought the CD a few weeks ago and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in a long, long time, but I felt my ‘system’ (music downloaded to my computer and played via desktop speakers) didn’t do it justice.

Hence the new CD player and speaker, making Prelude To Ecstasy the most expensive album I have ever bought!

I am still tempted though to subscribe to Apple Music - currently available for three months free, then £10 a month after that - if only to explore a world of music I’m largely ignorant of.

If only there was a music sommelier who could guide me to the best and most interesting stuff.

Then again, I do prefer a quiet life …

PS. CDs I shall be playing this weekend:

Prelude to Ecstasy (The Last Dinner Party)
What A Racket! (Joe Jackson)
Powertron (Bill Nelson)
Greatest Living Englishman (Martin Newell)
Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (Paul McCartney)