The Great CD Betrayal

November 25th, 2007 at 10:03am Michael Conniff 2

All your life you sit and wait for a chance that will never come—complete and unfettered access (within reason) to the music collection in a radio station. You walk in and they’re all there on the wall: dozens of Dylans, Tom Petty, John Hiatt, The Doors—groups old and new and infirm waiting for you on the wall in alphabetical order.

Paradise regained, or so I thought until I started to put the CDs into the CD players at the station. It’s not that they’re all broken—just the ones you want to listen to. Just as you’re getting to that great moment within every song where memory meets reality, the thing skips.

Or stops.

Or starts to ba- ba- ba- ba- ba- ba- ba—without ever going anywhere.

That’s what I’m talking about, bro.

Meanwhile, consider the state of my personal record collection safely stashed in the clean room where we do the laundry. I cared for those vinyl suckers like they were all my first-born. I even kept the plastic on the album covers, so most of those are intact. I’ve got 300 or more the last time I counted, and they are all, more or less, in mint condition.

So here’s the betrayal: you might not be old enough to know this, but when CDs replaced LPs, we were told by the electronics industry that they were virtually indestructible—that they would last forever.

So what did we do? We bought all of our old favorite records in CD, and most of the time that worked out. (Though where, oh where, did John McLaughlin’s guitar solo go in “Inner Mounting Flame” by the Mahavishnu Orchestra? That one’s a crime against humanity.) Some audiophiles grumbled the loss of this or that in the re-telling, but most of us could not have told the difference if a stun gun was to our head. Most people eventually dumped their record collections.

We were happy, you see. We had bought an indestructible CD collection that would last forever.

It was a lie, of course, though I acknowledge up front that a rock radio station poses a worst-case scenario, my records the best. Still, anybody with half a collection knows CDs are fungible and fallible, despite what the industry told us. I actually once did some consulting work for the PR guy from Phillips in L.A. who sold us this bill of goods. He actually believed what he was saying on the “Today” show, and the rest is recorded history.

You could look it up but you can’t because the CD that holds it has probably gone bad.

Too bad for you. That’s what you get for not listening.

Entry Filed under: Music, Technology, Basalt, Media, Colorado, Radio, Jazz, United Post