Is the CD on the way out?

The CD celebrated its 26th birthday yesterday. It wasn't exactly a cheerful, forward-looking birthday, because many are convinced the glory days of the shiny little wonder are over.

The compact disc, as we know it, was born in Germany in 1982. It was released by Sony and Philips Consumer Electronics as a medium for music. It was later adapted to store other kinds of data. The CD took a long time coming to India.

In 2002, that's just six years ago, a blank CD cost upwards of Rs 50 in Bangalore, and not all computers had CD drives. The floppy drive was still much in use, and CDs were considered an expensive option. Today, you can buy a good blank for less than Rs 10, and an unbranded one for half that price. The floppy is dead.

The CD is used to store many kinds of data, but the music CD, many believe, will soon be obsolete. For many music lovers addicted to mp3 players and mobile phones doubling up as music players, the CD is already history.

Listening is constantly being redefined. If you asked my father's generation, owning a private music collection meant buying vinyl records. In the 1970s, the first cassette recorders made their appearance in India, and vinyl records began struggling for survival.

Around this time, middle class families were eager to ask relatives returning from abroad to fetch them a Panasonic or a Sony tape recorder. The CD is now ubiquitous, but the cassette still holds its own in the villages and towns. Lahari Recording Company, south India's biggest record label, continues to release both cassette and CD versions of all its titles.

The CD had many advantages over vinyl records and cassettes. It could hold 10 songs, or an hour of music, and play it all without a break. After the mp3 format made its appearance, the CD became so cheap and commonplace that it was sold at street corners. Loaded with songs in this compressed format, a CD could just go on and on.

For those of us who had heard music on the LPs, there was something about the CD that just didn't seem right. It did not match the quality of sound that vinyl could produce. Audiophiles call it warmth. The CD played everything clean, with no distortion, but it was clean in a surgical sort of way.

In lay language, the CD is made up of a sequence of closely aligned blocks. But however closely aligned they are, they are still separate, and so, experts said, digital could never match the smoothness of analog (tape or vinyl).

The convenience of the CD helped it eliminate the cassette in the West. "CDs were smaller, faster and digital, the perfect product for a new era of hyperconsumption and hyperspeed. But that era has come to an end," wrote Scott Thill in Wired magazine.

Now, observers such as Thill believe, the greatest challenge to the music CD is broadband, which enables people to share music without it ever having to be burnt on to a disc.

Thill believes CDs will go because they use too much plastic (for the jewel boxes) and too much paper (for the jackets), and so are environmentally unattractive. He also argues that technology will emerge to help people send and receive high-resolution music on the Net.

I don't know about the environmental bit, because concern for it hasn't really deterred the world from using cars. But I do hope the technological leap to high resolution happens soon, because I love the vinyl sound. Software wizards have developed plug-ins to make digital sounds resemble analog ones, but it still isn't the real thing.

Meanwhile, here's a useful lead for those interested in digitising their vinyl records. A company called Ion has produced a record player with a USB line out. This means you can play your old LPs on the turntable and record the output directly on to your computer. The Ion USB turntable costs about 100 dollars (Rs 4,000). That isn't a big price if you are longing to listen to vintage music but have no way to do so because nobody sells styluses for your old record player any more. Know anyone coming down from the US?