Blogs Is it time to bin your optical drive?

Instead get a better car radio with a USB port and have all your music on one stick?

 

I've not used an optical drive in the last five years at all.

Though I do agree with the points made - audio CDs cannot be displaced until the online stores start selling in FLAC. Charging the same for an album as the CD while giving an inferior quality encode is just a rip-off.

 

Effort, my car's radio is a big build in jobbie I'd rather not mess with. It does come with a 3.5mm port for my phone/mp3 player, but that's beside the point I was making.

 

That and games really. Everyone has abandoned cartridges, except Nintendo in the DS. I suspect 4k might do a straight leap to web distribution though as people end up ignoring the quad-layer format.

Agreed, but thats not likely to change any time soon: its simply too easy to make copies if they allowed that for music and videos. Mind you, its easy enough to strip the DRM off (if present) in the first place...

Alternately, you end up with very closed ecosystems like Steam and various other content stores. Trading games is getting there though: GreenManGaming has such a system in place. I suspect Valve will pay attention and add that to Steam in response. I suspect other companies will start paying attention, but most software won't be tradeable. Strictly speaking, neither are most games according to most EULAs (iirc), although nobody has challenged them so far (to my knowledge).

This is not however practical for a certain group of people who use different media players of their choice, and nobody will buy into proprietary formats these days anyways.

That's not at all related to vinyl vs * on a medium basis. The difference in quality is purely due to the different (less volume-boosted) mastering used for vinyl simply because vinyl can't go as loud as as CD or any other digital format. Read up on the loudness wars for more info. In terms of resolution, a 44.1kHz signal at 16bits (Red Book/standard CD quality) is more than enough to cover essentially all of human hearing. And there's science to back that claim too. Studios use a better resolution (192kHz at 24, if not 32 or even 48bit depth) in order to cleanly mix large numbers of tracks without distortion. They then downsample to the right rate for the target medium (vinyl/CD/SACD/FLAC/MP3).

 

who in the hell wants to be tied to the net for anything. you're doing a big injustice by even writing this. I pay for games I don't own or can't play without a net connection anymore. why? before you know it you won't be able to play them because somebody deems them too old or not enough people play them anymore so we're not going to support it anymore.
who want's all your personal stuff stored on a server somewhere instead of on your own hard drive?
YOU GOTTA BE OFF YOUR NUT!

 

Having actually used my optical drive more in the last few months than the previous 5 years this is interesting.

I've used it because at last the online music services are decent, and I've started using Google Play and its 20k free storage, and I've actually bought some albums digitally. Whereas in the past these were always over priced given the obvious, and unmentioned, reduction in potential sound quality.

But my CD hifi that I use for alarm can't play them, so burning to CD is the easiest to achieve.
I have got a squeezebox attached but getting that working at the same time as the hifi is doable, but not quite as easy as saying CD, vol 8, on 6:20 off 7:10!

Also netflix might be 1080p but its bitrate is no where near blu-ray, and on any TV the differences should be obvious!!

 

I will maintan that the sound from a vinyl is both fatter and warmer, it just sounds better than a CD, CD sounds harsh and sharp in comparison...and there is more to sound quality than just details.

 

Every now and then someone tries to tell me that I should throw away my optical drive and then peddles me some ****.

I'm going to coin these people "**** pioneers"

I didn't spend lots of money on a decent sound system to have poor quality rammed into my receiver and make the whole point in shelling out redundant. If you can live in a world of **** quality, fine. Don't try and pass it off on me or you will be flat out received with profanities.

 

You have obviously not realised that is just a cheap way of experiencing that warmth. There are valve amps for that.

 

This is just stupid. Ever heard of metered internet? Or, on the other hand, do you want to pay $5 to $10 more for a game because they had to include a thumb drive instead of a $.01 disc?

 

Which was? Burning CDs which can't hold many songs, is more effort and cost than plugging in a iPod or USB stick if your system supports that and having your whole music collection available. Want a mix tape, create a new playlist.

I find it quite amusing all these comments about sound quality when in a blind sound comparison test, I'd wager 95% of people couldn't tell the difference between vinyl/cd and mp3. It happens every time a new technology comes along, one day it will be people saying that people don't want to switch from mp3 because the new technology doesn't sound as good. People hate change, it really is that simple.

 

I wouldn't call Vinyl cheap, at least not if you take into account the cost of a quality turntable.

There are those who are able to tell the difference and then there are those that aren't. Those that aren't often find topics like these amusing.

 

Vinyl would have a certain amount of noise on it. CD / mp3 is probably more difficult to determine a difference. Audio can be quite subjective and I'm happy to listen to stuff on youtube that has been compressed. There is also a huge amount of bollocksology when it comes to audio. I think visual stuff is much easier to see how much it has been compressed or if the quality is poor.

 

I find this to be a very narrow view. I will never get rid of my drive. What about all the people who have slow internet? You can install a game faster than taking 24+ hours to download 12GB at 100KB/s. I like owning a physical copy of the game, which includes the CDs. And everything you talked about how you go out of your way to avoid using a CD (downloaded drivers and such in advance and transferring everything, including Windows, to a flash drive) sounds like it would take longer than popping in a CD.

 

I would agree that vinyl sounds 'different', but I would disagree that it can ever be close to what the producer intended, where as a CD can.

Now that's either bad or good depending on your PoV

It doesn't help that some CD's are produced immensely badly with such a compressed range just so they sound better over a shopping centre tannoy :-O

You can say you like the sound of vinyl, but to say its better than CD is just ignoring the technical differences and ignoring the physics.

 

Get a pair of decent speakers, get a decent amp, get a decent CD-player.

And now tell us again how good those MP3-files sound compared to an original CD.

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Yes I'm ripping my CDs into MP3s (320kb FBR) aswell, as this format allows me to carry my hole music-library on a 64GB USB-Stick, but the quality of these is nothing compared to the original CD. If it would be possible I would carry my FLAC-files around, but they're way bigger unfortunately.

 

I have a pair of fostex near field studio monitors, is that good enough?

 

Unless there's a way to convert all my PC game collection to digital versions, i wont be ditching my optical drive any time soon.
Much less so for upcoming titles such as Bioshock, which STILL required a drive to be installed from (with the 3 discs and all)

 

ISOs?

 

Binned mine 3 years ago. I still miss it for ripping CD's and I use my PS3 for blu-rays weekly.

If I didn't have a PS3 I would buy an optical drive for my HTPC so I guess I'm not fully ready to bin it yet.