An odd thing happened last year. No, not that. Another odd thing. For the first time since before the heyday of the CD, vinyl record sales overtook those of CDs. And for the life of me, I can’t understand why.
I get that physical sales have been in decline since the rise of streaming, but vinyl? I mean come on. It’s so like 1930s. Okay, I admit that the artwork on the sleeve is so much easier to read that on a CD booklet. It’s just bigger so there’s no getting around that.
And of course the scene for Shaun of the Dead would’ve so much less effective had the protagonists only had CDs to fling at the oncoming zombie hoard. It could be worse though. What about cassettes? They would’ve been rubbish as an anti-dead weapon. I supposed they couldn’t unspooled some tape and used it as a trip wire. That might’ve worked. And if all else failed they could’ve flung a biro at them and asked them to sort it all out.
At the risk of a pile on, CDs just sound better than vinyl. Always have, always will. And that, perhaps dear readers, is the real issue. Each copy of Dire Straits Brothers in Arms sounds exactly the same as it did when it rolled off the pressing plant in Germany….. and each copy sounds exactly the same. A perfect duplication of the digital recording. Vinyl, on the other hand, needs to be looked after. You can’t expect to fling it into the glove box of a car and expect it to come out again, at some point in the future, unscathed. Those clicks and pops though are part of the records character. Each one is different and, in its own way, unique. Is that why some people have reverted to the LP?
The writing on the wall for the CD was there fir all to seen once MP3 turned up. And, yes of course, I was an early adopter. I remember enthusing/boring* my colleagues with a tale of how I’d managed, over the course of an hour, to rip a Beatles track (And Your Bird Can Sing in case you were wondering) from the CD to a 3.5” floppy disk. At only 1.44MB it was the only track that I could fit on the format, and the practical application of converting a single CD to 14 floppy disks hadn’t quite sunk in, but I was converted. Or at least one track of my CD was. Albeit at a very poor quality.
And that brings me to today, or more accurately last December. You see, when we moved to New Zealand, I decided that as my record collection was totally digitised, then I didn’t need to bother shipping my CDs. Especially as a kind family member had volunteered to stored the boxes in her garage.
But as time wore on, I became increasingly dissatisfied with relying wholly on my digitised library. And somehow, the arrival of widespread streaming made it worse. I didn’t want every album in the world at my fingertips, and have recommendations pushed at me by an algorithm. I wanted to discover things for myself.
The fight back would start now! We’ll actually in three months time because there was the small matter of getting my collection shipped 12,000 miles. And by shipping, I mean shipping. You know, on a boat and that. I did consider, briefly, that it might actually be more cost effective to buy them all again. And maybe it would’ve been, assuming that I could find them all. But each one is a memory. I remember where I bought it, why I decided to make the purchase, and what my initial thoughts we’re on popping the disc into the CD player and pressing play for the first time. And that, can’t be replaced.
So, once again with the help of the aforementioned family member, the boxes were packed into shipping containers and sent off to the Southern Hemisphere.
And last December they arrived. Oh my God what was I going to do with them? I hadn’t really considered the implications of housing 1,500 CDs. Hadn’t needed to before, but now here they were. What on earth was I going to do with all of these CDs? I did consider, albeit briefly, just sticking them in the garage but that kind of defeated the purpose of shipping them here in the first place. Plus it gets far too hot in there in the summer. No, they needed to be accessible but neatly stored.
 |
| From this...... |
The solution eluded me, and for a few months the boxes just sat there. There was only one thing for it - I was just going to have to get stuck in. Each album was removed from the box, inspected, cleaned and the database entry updated to note it had arrived....What? Yes of course I have a database of the collection. Doesn't everyone? Why? Well just because! After just a couple of happy hours, the scale of the problem became even clearer. This was going to take up a lot of shelf space. Shelf space that we didn't have.
As the CDs piled up, I noticed that the bulk of the stack was actually taken up by the plastic case and, if I could get rid of this, it would save an awful amount of space. I wanted to keep the album intact so I needed a way to store the disc and the booklet without the plastic case. A quick trawl on the internet and I found the solution. Plastic sleeves for the CD and accompanying material. Brilliant. Now I could ditch the horrible CD cases and replace it with a plastic sleeve, turning each album into a sort of mini-LP.
And so, over the course of a few weeks, each CD was converted into a space saving sleeve. The finishing touch was to buy a aluminium case to house the CDs - and to put them into alphabetical order.
 |
| .....to this |
I must say that I'm rather pleased with the result. Many of the CD cases, from years of misuse, had become a little tired - scratched and cracked - but now they looked cared for and are protected. In fact, I was a little sad when I completed the transformation. The task was over. Or was it? I still had plenty of spare sleeves and some gaps in my collection. Maybe it was time to check out the second hand record shops.....
