“Linn Products has become the first manufacturer to announce it will give up on CDs from the start of next year,” Fraser reports. “Instead, the niche company, based in East Renfrewshire, will focus on producing digital streaming equipment.”
Fraser reports, “The firm, which makes systems costing from £2,500 to more than £100,000, said discerning customers recognised the superior quality of digital streaming.”
“The shift from CD players to digital music streamers has been very recent. It was only during 2009 that the digital players outsold Linn’s CD players,” Fraser reports. “The newer technology allows digital streaming through other operating systems, including home computers and networking throughout homes.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A future headline: “More blood on Apple iTunes Store’s play button: The CD player is dead”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]
As Mr Reeee says, LINN “make very nice gear”
High-end hi-fi (and that would include Naim) were always going to come to this impasse with the CD, because there’s a ceiling on how much you can get off one of those disks.
I love my CD collection ~ the advantage is: compact; instant track access; no audible scratches and ticks and pops, such as you get with the superior-sounding LP.
But as turntable-maker Townsend himself said way back, the sampling rate of the CD was way too low. Transient sounds like percussion are passable, but sustained notes played on, say, a violin ~ well, they’re not really very convincing, not if you really listen. But you tell yourself, those are violins ~ because they sound a lot like violins.
Anyway, LINN are actually offering their own download service. Check it out here:
http://www.linnrecords.com/linn-downloads.aspx
@S
try http://store.acousticsounds.com/c/35/Cartridges
Bah, I still like buying something physical. And the fidelity of a cd is good enough for me.
“FIDELITY” doesn’t sell anywhere near the songs they used to.
It’s just too bad that when you bounce the mix from ProTools to 44.1k CD master, it seems like half of the sound quality disappears.
As a musician, I can completely relate to what NeoVoyager, Mike and others are saying. No current audio format (with the exception of the failed SACD or DVD-A) can reproduce music in adequate fidelity. However, today, this is irrelevant.
The biggest music retailer in the US today is iTunes, by a comfortable margin. In other words, iTunes sells more compressed downloads than Wal-Mart, or Target, or even Amazon sell uncompressed CDs. And I am one of their customers as well.
There are very very rare occasions when I would want to sit down in a proper listening room, turn on good quality gear, put on a well-engineered CD into a high-end CD player and listen. Last time this happened, Soviet Union was still run by Gorbachev.
There are people who enjoy listening to music in as pristine conditions as possible as a hobby. These are the ones wishing for 96kHz/24bit uncompressed audio piped through tube pre-amps and monster cables. The rest of the world finds 256kbps AAC perfectly fine for their daily music consumption. Heck, it is still significantly better than FM radio, which used to be the predominant medium for music consumption of the masses.
It is already clear that the CD is on the downward spiral. So, how long will it take for CD to reach the same level of deathness as the LP? Perhaps a few more years (3-4) for the developed world, a bit more for the developing world.
As for the Blu-ray, it still has a reasonably shiny future (same as DVD had at the end of last century). Pushing 4MB over internet is trivial, even over a 256kbps ADSL line (already available in most of developing world); doing the same with 8GB is another matter altogether. DVD and Blu-ray will live strong long after CD had died the way LP (or audio cassette, or MiniDisc) had.
Just a thought here…. the cd bought commercially is a pressed disk. Meaning its manufactured that way, not burned.
This means it should last for 10-50 years if handled well. So, while I like buying iTunes for convienence I like buying cds for the back up side. Amazon has cheap resellers for all kinds of cds , sometimes for little more than shipping and handling.
Just a thought. PSl Linn was described as a niche player in the market. Those drop out all the time.
en
Definition of audiophile: someone more interested in listening to the recording than listening to the music.
@SamTana,
No, an audiophile is someone who knows that an accurate recording is crucial to hearing the music the way the musician(s) played it and they way they intended it to be heard.
With that out of the way, since you took the liberty of attempting to define me, I’ll now do the same:
Definition of SamTana: Someone obviously content to listen to the music, even if it doesn’t really sound like the music. See also, “Tin ears”, “Ignorance is bliss”, and “bigoted.”
Wow. Struck a nerve there, didn’t I?
I’ve never yet heard someone who claims to be an audiophile talk about the music, just about the quality of the recording and how much money they’ve spent on kit to reproduce it, and how much better their system is than yours.
As for “how the musician played it” – most musicians are happy to just get their music played at all. They really don’t care whether it’s on a $200,000 system or on a transister radio.