I have 100's of the little silver blighters and I love many things about them, but Philips were way off.
25 years later and here's what amusing:
Forever? Well, not only do they scratch with disappointing results like vinyl, but the results are often worse than vinyl. At least when a record skipped you could just move the needle over with a nudge or a less impatient method and carry on listening to the song. With CD your player can do one of a few things. More often than not you have to start the disc again only to have to stop at the scratch point again. Some discs can't be played at all when scratched. Some players have to be switched-off completely in order to do anything with them other than watch the machine wear it's laser down trying to find information to read.

I have many records which I bought from new more than 20 years ago which still sound great. The background is all but silent on most of them. I owe this to keeping the records clean, making sure the cartridge is aligned properly and replaced when worn.
I have CDs which have simply deteriorated over time. Some have turned gold/bronze/brown/yellow and can't be played the whole way through despite the lack of any visible scratches. Some now have very small holes in them (visible when you hold them up to a bright light). These are rather isolated incidents, but everyone has heard a CD skipping.
And when the laser goes most folks threw the player away and bought a new one. Most CD player owners have no idea what goes on inside one of those things. We're not exactly invitied to look by the way the black box is put together. Forever? Nope.

As for perfect sound; well, it's perfectly clean. But genrally lifeless and lacking in the musicality found on an LP record. Restricted dynamic range and compressed information does that of course.

I do love the way CDs play the whole album all the way through if it's less than 80 minutes - great for background music.
I can sit and listen to vinyl all day long, but with CD, there aren't many in the collection that make me want to stick to my seat and keep listening the way vinyl does. Perfect Sound? Not compared with vinyl it isn't. And for those who believe CD has perfect sound, how come they had several models in the range of most manufacturers? Were some more perfect than others? It wasn't just features that made the difference. And then there was the introduction of off-board DACs, which wouldn't be necessary if CD possessed perfect sound.

Not an original topic by any means, but it's time we had another superb sounding music playback format. 'Very good' is a bit of a cop-out in this digital day and age.

I've never bought or heard one that I am aware of. If I listen to "Dark Side of the Moon" on the gold re-mastered CD, will I notice a difference? Will I think it's better?

I have a ZZTop collection (six-pack) which was remastered and I'm not a fan of some of the work. The drums stand out as different and not in a good way on songs like "La Grange" and "It's Only Love".

The other day the Jefferson Airplane song "Somebody to Love" was on the radio. Now this song needs to be re-mastered. The vocals are way out front and they overpower everything else. The guitar solos sound like they were recorded in the stairwell of the studio. There's no balance. And is this a stereo recording? It may very well be mono pushed through as stereo.

I have other examples but I'm mostly concerned about a better balance between vocals and instruments than anything else, and that's not a re-mastering issue as far as I know.

You are more likely to hear a difference if the disc is remastered using something other than 16BiT technology. I have some 20, 22 and 24BiT remasters which are an improvement on the original.
Sometimes it's because they really did a good job on the remaster, other times because the original was so poor they almost couldn't go wrong with a remaster.
SBM (super BiT mapping) offerings are usually very good. I have Floyd's Wish You Were Here and Roger Waters' Amused To Death on SBM gold discs where they are considerably better than the originals. The Wall came out well to through Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs gold discs. With the wall I heard much less background noise, more dynamics and less grain. WYWH sounded considerably more open and even warm (unusual for CD), whereas ATD sounded more detailed and 3 dimensional (no mean feat considering the quality of the original).
Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue benefitted in a similar too with SBM.

None of the Dark Side Of The Moon re-issues have sounded much better than the original except for the SACD version of course (which I prefer in stereo because it sounds to my ears that James Guthrie did a pretty crap job of the surround mix on all songs barring 'Money'; where you couldn't really go wrong)

Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love sounded better as a remaster (16BiT). There was simply more information to be heard.

Pink Floyd's Animals remaster (16BiT) didn't offer much of an improvement over the original. neither did Meddle.

U2's The Joshua Tree didn't sound any better as MFSL gold disc remaster compared with the original. But U2's production has never really been about sound quality. I'm not sure if they quite know what they are trying to achieve with their production techniques. Their albums usually have a combination of a cold, hard, dry, sludgey, compressed and mirky character to them. Shame really because they have written some fine tunes in the past. I find them a little boring these days. Their first two albums sound fantasic compared with their last two.

It has yet to be determined whether or not the color of the disc makes a difference to the sound quality. It looks special though.

Convert if it ever came out in DTS 5.1. Waiting for that day.

I remember seeing Pink Floyd (twice actually) in concert and I sat right in the middle of the action. Their speaker set up was all around the stadium and you could hear the sound "run around" the stadium. I remember the literature saying that they were going to use a quad stereo arrangement for the sound system because some of the original recordings were in quad.

I did test out some gold vs regular CDs and the gold version was better IMHO. They also used the same master and recording technique. However I'm not sure if they used the same plant to press them. Could that have something to do with it?

I also have Dark side of the moon from Mobile fidelity and I swear it is a lot better than the other two recordings I have of the same album. It also could be the use of the "trifield mode" in my system that makes the difference when the CD is not recorded in DTS 5.1.

Alan Parson's "On Air" recorded in DTS 5.1 is also fantastic for special effects.

to appease the purists. And supposedly the DVD-A mix is just the Alan Parson's mix rather than the SACD Guthrie mix.

Studio recording available?

Darn I wish DTS and Parson got together and made a real good version of it.

All I know is when I play Dark side of the moon from the Mobile Fidelity gold recording on my system in "Trifield mode", it is awesome! Almost 5.1 in spatial separation.

<a href="http://www.highfidelityreview.com/reviews/review.asp?reviewnumber=12583627" target="_blank">Review</a>


Me, I'm waiting for the Rush SACDs, Peter Garbriel to remix all of his old albums and the oft delayed Genesis <i>The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway</i>

<center><img src="http://pictureposter.audiworld.com/17807/img_1370.jpg"></center><p>...just one of the great simple pleasures of life!!

In fact what's the whole set-up again? I'm sure you've mentioned it before.

Love the pic.

I really think the tonearm cable could use upgrading,but been too lazy to undertake it as of yet. I keep telling myself to just hold on and upgrade whole 'table instead.