I’m someone who has a lot of fondness for old, obsolete media. In my office, I am surrounded by, let’s see, six different old computers that use 5.25″ floppy drives (ranging from 90K to 360K) as their primary storage medium, two that use two different formats of 3.5″ floppies, and between five and seven that use some manner of cassette-based storage. Then there’s all the different cartridge-based consoles, and even one that can also use these funny little cards. There’s an eight-inch floppy hanging on my wall, too, and a big Bullwinkle laserdisc down here. I clearly have some perverse love for old media. And yet, despite all this, I hate compact discs (CDs) and am happy they’re gone.
That’s right, I said it: fuck CDs. Granted, this take is probably at least a decade or maybe even two too late to, you know, matter, but I have been encountering more and more people who profess some nostalgia for those shiny discs, and to those people I just have to say, with all due respect, knock it off. CDs are not worth your nostalgia, because they’re charmless and clumsy and cumbersome, and it’s good we’ve moved on.
More specifically, I think CDs were especially garbage when it came to using them in cars, one of the best places to listen to music, period. I’m not just saying this from some elevated and removed position of objective assessment, this all comes from someone who was there, dammit, who lived with these things and wanted them to be great, only to be sorely disappointed.
I tried, dammit. I tried to like these things, because when they first hit the scene, it was genuinely exciting. The first commercial CD came out in 1982, and everyone lost their shit. It was being hyped all over the media, where they claimed it was the perfect new medium, completely resistant to dust and scratches, and would make everything else obsolete:
Much of this is, of course, absolutely true: lasers did read the music off the disc, they were compact, the audio quality was great, but everything about dust and scratch resistance was complete horseshit. CDs were fragile and annoying.
When I got my first CD player, the medium was about 6 or 7 years old; I started with cassettes in my first cars, a ’68 Volkswagen Beetle, soon to be replaced by a ’71 Super Beetle. I finally got a cheap portable CD player for my car maybe around my senior year of high school, and used one of those cassette adapters to connect it to my terrible Sparkomatic speakers I had clumsily installed in my doors.
That’s when I learned how absurdly sensitive CDs were to skipping. A Beetle is hardly the smoothest car in the world, but my cassettes never cared a bit about that. These princesses that were CDs, though, would panic at the slightest jostle, stuttering and restarting, and being unable to get through the first 10 seconds of a song.
Eventually, I came up with a solution like you see above, crudely illustrated from hazy memories. In order to get the damn thing to play any song I had to carefully fold at least two layers of impact-absorbing hoodies or sweatshirts or towels and place that under the CD player, which would then be placed squarely in the center of the passenger seat, so the cushioning and springing of the seat could help the process of coddling His Majesty The Great And Sensitive CD Player just right.
Of course, this was useless if you had a friend with you in the car, and the whole setup required near-constant maintenance and monitoring. But somehow I stuck with it, babying this absurd contraption for hours and hours on road trips, just so I could listen to, say, Hey or Lovecats or Rock Lobster at full volume.
Now, sure, many cars came with in-dash CD players, ones specifically engineered for the automotive environment, and those did not skip. They were vastly better. But, even with the right equipment, CDs still sucked.
The problem is that the physical form of a CD is simply not well-suited to being played in a car. The disc itself is far too fussy about how it must be handled. Remember holding CDs by their edges, being careful not to get any fingerprints on the bottom, because then it wouldn’t play? That’s ridiculous.
Drop one on your car’s floor? The CD is likely boned. Have any crap on your floormats that could scratch a sensitive CD’s surface? Of course you do, because everything could scratch them. Saying the word “grit” to a CD loudly enough could scratch it.
Compare that to plastic cassette tapes, which could be lost in your car for months, until finally found under a floor mat, partially adhered to the carpet via a combination of mud, grime, and probably some vomit. You could just pick it up, give it a quick perfunctory wipe on your pant leg to get off the biggest chunks, thunk it in the cassette slot on your head unit, and that motherfucker would play.
Not only that, but the packaging that CDs came in were awful, too. “Jewel cases” is what they were called, and they were miserable, miserable things.
Remember those? Even outside of a car, in the stable environment of a home on dry, non-seismic ground, they also sucked. If you had a stack of them, their nearly non-existent surface friction meant that every stack of three or more CDs was likely to come crashing down if you just looked at it too intently.
And whenever these cases encountered even the slightest bit of physical trauma, one or both of those little hinge tabs on the cover would break off, making the whole thing an even less stable mess.
Because these cases were such garbage, most people, especially for in-car purposes, would take their CDs out of the cases, then slide all of their CDs into these big binder things:
The binders themselves were a decent solution to the considerable problem of CD storage, but then you were left with big stacks of empty, usually somewhat broken jewel cases, which still usually had all of the album art and liner notes you wanted to save, so they just took up space somewhere, devaluing everything around them.
Yes, CDs let you jump to any track. Great. They could hold a good amount of music. Fine. I would have sacrificed either of those traits for a music medium that was less of a hassle to handle, use, store, maintain, everything. Cassettes were better. Vinyl records have their own kind of novel charm. What do CDs have?
Fuck-all, that’s what. Well, wait, I take that back: the lightning show they’d give when you put them in a microwave was pretty fun:
Aside from that, CDs were garbage, and I’m so glad not to have to deal with them anymore. For a good 20 years, these things were absolutely everywhere, and it was hell. I know it’s annoying to have to re-buy all your music on new formats, but I was happy to do it when everything went digital.
I get nostalgia for obsolete media. Of course I do. But I cannot give CDs that sort of attention, because they did not and never will deserve it. The current noncorporeal nature of modern music playing in cars, where everything is streamed from the internet or a USB drive or something like that may lack a certain character, but it’s so much better to live with.
So, if you’re young and being lured by the shiny, rainbow-reflecting allure of the CD, perhaps considering starting a semi-ironic collection of your own, hear this: stop. Don’t do it.
Go further back and collect cassette tapes, or even 8-tracks, which were also garbage but at least they were fun garbage. CDs are not fun. They’re the self-satisfied prima donnas of music media, and I will happily support launching all remaining ones into the sun.
So there.
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The only times I really used CDs were every year around Christmas time. We had two CDs which my father made, and every morning, year after year, we listened to them from the start (so we always heard the same songs) in the car on the way to kindergarten and school. Very good times.
You know, I have one simple request… and that is to have T-Rex played via friggin laser beams.
Idk there, I had quite a few tapes spontaneously eat themselves in spectacular fashion. CDs absolutely were divas, but if you treated them right, they worked. The same cant be said for the random death cassettes.
I’m with Torch on this one. I hated those things for almost every single reason he just listed—seriously, it’s like a hate symphony! And, surprise surprise, it was the same nonsense with so many formats before. The world always seems to pick the absolute worst format possible and collectively says, “Yes, let’s go with *this* one!” It’s like the global version of bad group decisions—you know, the same logic that brought us mullets and cargo shorts.
There were so many better solutions to every single problem CDs had. For instance, Sony’s minidisc format. *Chef’s kiss*! I started my professional life while attending university, and my second job was at a small-ish radio station as a newscaster. Fancy title, right? It basically meant I had a sound engineer to record me, but I had to do all the other stuff—reports, production, you name it—by myself.
The station used two formats: DAT, because of its top-tier quality and capacity, and the legendary minidisc. Oh man, Sony nailed it with minidiscs. They fixed all of CDs’ issues: they were rewritable, had their own protective cases, were compact and super easy to handle, and even sounded better. Honestly, they were like the Swiss Army knives of recording media. The station used them for producing news and other, shall we say, “fun” content. I even learned to cut reports on them, and here’s the kicker—I had to do it without a computer. Old-school, analog-style. Picture me with a minidisc player and not even an analog control unit to cut. Still, it was surprisingly easy to use! Plus, there were these effects that let me smooth out the edges of cuts. It felt like wizardry.
But alas, the world is a dumb place. We keep repeating the same mistakes, over and over, like a bad sitcom plot. It’s the Beta vs VHS debacle all over again. Speaking of which, I’m old enough to remember when I started working for a TV station (linear, of course), and we still used Beta and Digital Beta for recording. The quality was absolutely mind-blowing compared to anything else at the time—except film, of course.
Anyway, long story short: yes, I’m old. And yes, the world has a PhD in making poor format decisions.
Way-back radio guy myself here. I did the DJ/radio news schtick before I went into TV. Yeah, MD was a huge upgrade over CD. Absolutely loved the format. I even still have my old field MD recorder and several MDs with old stories on them.
But from a consumer audio standpoint, CD was actually the better choice. Yes, MD could do everything CD did in a more compact and convenient format, but what CD couldn’t do is prevent you from ripping discs to a hard drive so you could load songs onto an MP3 player. MD could. It was specifically set up so that if it did take off, publishers could mark files as protected, and any file marked as protected couldn’t be copied off of the disc.
It’s one of the few examples of a product with greater consumer rights rising to the top that we have, VHS vs Laserdisc being another.
BTW, Beta SP was not the same thing as the Betamax that consumers got. It was vastly superior in quality to the consumer-grade format.
Thank you! I hated them as well. Skipping was my biggest issue and while, as you said, some cars did fix skipping, they did so by buffering a few seconds ahead, so they still skipped but you wouldn’t notice. That’s fine, except that buffering created delays when switching tracks. You know those albums that were supposed to be continuous? Yeah, those had awful gaps in between tracks.
It was also ridiculous that we went from rewritable floppies and cassettes to perma-burned CDs that most car stereos couldn’t read. The MP3s and CD-RW really improved things but by then I was already using a thumb drive or a phone with aux.
Hey! Something we don’t agree on! Was bound to happen eventually.
For my 77 911, I wanted a high end deck, that was sort of period correct. I wound up getting a Denon DCT970R, and it looks perfect, black plastic, green illuminated buttons like an Alpine unit, etc. Aesthetically I love it. Functionally, it does skip sometimes, and I spent WAY too much time trying to make the pinout for the multi disc CD changer work with an iPhone or something (I gave up).
I keep my CD binder under the seat. Idk. It’s kind of fun, man. I do think there was something lost when everyone just started streaming individual songs, instead of listening to an entire album start to finish… oh well.
So, if you’re young and being lured by the shiny, rainbow-reflecting allure of the CD, perhaps considering starting a semi-ironic collection of your own, hear this: stop. Don’t do it.
I needed this article about 8 years ago but I’ll take the advice now.
Torch I’m older than you yet I have to blame age on your CD issues. First a simple pouch hanging from the sun visor kept CDs separate and dust free. Sure a harsh pot hole got a skip but remember tapes just getting eaten for no reason? Then with multi disc players you could put more music 6 CDs in and play than ever. Easier to skip a track or a whole CD. Keep up with the times old man, from someone turning 62 this year.
Yes
My current car is modern enough to have a 6-cd changer that can play mp3s. I’m pretty jazzed about it tbh. Tho it will not play any burnt using Nero on the windows pc, only ones made on the linux machine using brasero Because Reasons. I have hacked a Bluetooth receiver in there as well, but using that with a phone or what have you is more of a fuck on than occasionally replacing the CDs when they crap out IMO.
Anybody who has nostalgia for cassette tapes obviously didn’t grow up in the South. Leaving a cassette in a car in a Houston summer was leaving it to die. Hit play, listen to the tape screech as it stretches and breaks. CDs have their weaknesses, but I never lost a CD due to leaving it in the car.
That can happen
And then throw the busted cassette out the window like chocolate brown confetti
This needed to be said. Thank you for your bravery on this!
As the (still) owner of a working 100 disc CD Changer, that capability of using the random play function of just playing one song then searching out another song was glorious! Like listening to your favorite songs on the radio without any annoying commercials.
Car CD capability, very hit and miss, starting with the cassette adapter from a portable CD player, then one disc in dash players that did okay. My current car, 2007 Toyota Solara convertible with factory in dash six disc player radio that still works well. But the future was knocking with first year Aux input for iPods at the time. Bluetooth was there too, but Toyota had decided it could only be used for pairing a phone for phones calls, not for Bluetooth music playing.
CD disc quality was horribly uneven, some I have still play fantastic while others just suffer from plastic degradation and the disc itself seemingly degrading so Torch is correct how very frustrating that became if you had a large collection.
I’m convinced CD packaging frustrated such a large multi generational that when streaming became easily available and accessible they just screamed Yes! Yes! No more jewel cases, no more 8” tall totally useless outer CD packaging encloses designed to fit in the former record album shelves. The record companies rejoiced! No more money spent on physical packaging to put the music on and artwork for album/Cad covers. Just pay $ and it’s yours through the air! That has been breathtaking for me to see the audio advancement on music availability as I’m in my early 60’s. Just is sad that the artists compensation share with streaming services has truly suffered compared to what is was for the record/tape/CD eras. Pardon the length, but Torch’s article brought back memories galore.
Nice. Solaras were brilliant cars!
I lived through the same times at roughly the same age. You’re not wrong. I remember seeking out a portable CD player that had a 3 second memory to handle the skips. And my later in-trunk 6 disc changer designed for automotive use WOULD skip (hello, Houston roads), so even the ones designed for cars weren’t perfect (at least not in my college years price range).