Compact Discs My Beloved

For Christmas, I got a CD player. It’s a modern one, made by Yamaha, one of the few brands still making stereo component-style CD players. While a lot of people in the collecting community will recommend vintage gear, it doesn’t come with a warranty and not everyone has the skill or knowledge to get one working if it needs new belts or capacitors. The Yamaha fits in, does the job, and does it well.

The side effect of getting it is that I’m collecting CDs again. I used to, a long time ago, buy CDs voraciously. As a teenager, it was about all I spent my money on, and any loose change I had ended up getting spent at an arcade. I stopped in the late 2000s when digital music started being a thing and I exclusively bought digital for a while, and then streaming music happened and I hopped on that, but I always recognised that renting music from Apple is not a great way to maintain a collection.

So a few years ago I bought my Dad a new record player. Around the same time I stopped buying CDs, he gave away his huge record collection to my best friend, who still has them all and still regularly listens to him (he has an SL-1200 the lucky… person). But with vinyl starting to come back into vogue I thought it would be cool if Dad got a record player. He could re-buy new pressings of his old albums (or borrow them back) and I could buy physical media for music.

The problem is, for me, a teenager of the 1990s, records are an alien thing. While I did have a record player then, I barely used it because CDs were just easier to buy, and also because I found the process of playing a record kind of scary. What if I dropped the needle wrong ant it left a huge scratch in some precious vinyl? What if I had to replace the cartridge? What if I had to get up and change sides?

CDs don’t have those problems. You drop them into the tray, close the tray (or the lid, if you’re using my old Discman) and hit play. Music happens. So I realised that I wanted to get back into CD collecting and started researching what would make a good player. Originally I was hoping to find my old orange Discman as it was one of the rare models with a line out, but it seems to have disappeared forever (If anyone has a working D-E405 Discman let me know), so I had to seek another solution.

Come Christmas 2024 and I get the Yamaha as a gift from my Dad, kind of an equivalent exchange for the record player I got him a few years earlier, and I’ve been off to the races pretty much ever since.

It feels good to go to a shop and buy CDs. The big benefit they have over vinyl is that they’re cheap as hell right now. On a trip to Greville Records in Prahran, my Dad spent $160 on three records. I spent $25 on four CDs. I’ve been insatiably going through op-shops, and finding little gems in amongst the piles of Michael Buble, Robbie Williams and Anthony Callea CDs (seriously who was buying that many Anthony Callea discs? Show yourselves). There’s almost always something good for $2.

My best recent find might be a copy of Los Angeles by The Brilliant Green. A great J-Rock album I downloaded in the Napster era when I was first discovering Japanese music, and which is super cool to have on CD. I also found an M-Flo compilation in the same store. Elsewhere I’ve picked up Sigur Ros, Jamie Liddell, Manic Street Preachers and Morcheeba’s Who Can You Trust, all for a grand total of less than $10.

I’m not going to say every excursion is a success, but it's the thrill of the hunt. Flipping through discs for half an hour to find something you didn’t expect but really want, and knowing you won’t have to spend a fortune to get it is really liberating. Just take a risk on it. Why not buy that Flacco & The Sandman live album from 1995 that’s probably obscure as hell? Sure, I’ll pick up a CD by Melbourne busking legend George Kamikawa. Why not? It’s risk-free.

That’s not to say I haven’t been spending big bucks on new releases as well. I’ve picked up Chappel Roan’s album, the new Jamie xx, the new Manics album, almost every CHVRCHES album (I still need Screen Violence), Billie Eilish’s latest, the posthumous SOPHiE album, The Weeknd’s After Hours album.

Even those, though still the price I paid for CDs in the 1990s, are cheaper than their vinyl equivalents. The most I’ve paid for a new release CD is $50 for the limited edition re-release of Squarepusher’s Ultravisitor album (limited to 2000 on CD but 5000 on vinyl, which is wild), and even that felt worth it.

Ultimately though, buying CDs has got me loving music again in a way I haven’t for a long time. Mostly on my phone, I just stream songs at random from my carefully curated library of a touch over 40000 tracks. Many of which are just Apple Music versions but I do have a number of things from when I was a rabid music downloader that still aren’t on AM. And while I do enjoy having music playing when I’m out and about (I’m listening to Megumi Hayashibara right now as I type this), I missed the simple pleasure of putting a disc into the tray and dropping a whole album.

And I think there’s something to be said for that. Songs are great, but albums are where artists really get to show their talents. Whether or not it's legends of the twentieth century like Neil Young or R.E.M. or The Chemical Brothers or modern artists like Chappel Roan and Billie Eilish, the album still has a place, and always will have a place in the world. And CDs, I think, are the ultimate format for the album. The length (80 minutes if you stretch it) and quality (nobody should need more than 16 bits at 44.1Khz) are perfect. And they look cool as hell.