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Compact Discs offer fidelity beyond anything that vinyl records are physically capable of offering. The equipment of vinyl records is fallible, expensive, and unpractical for most uses; compact discs became popular because the audio that is recorded goes beyond anything that human ears are capable of truly appreciating, though what little bit of it we can hear is absolutely amazing. The problem with compact discs is that record companies rarely put the effort and work into putting the real technical brilliance into them that is possible. The other aspect is that since the majority of music is digitally produced anyway, with unnatural sounds, placing it back onto analog material only deteriorates the sound, particularly in the case of audio sampling.

Unlike digital video discs, which highlight obvious limitations of analog recording equipment, compact discs do not appear to be a huge shift in sound quality for audiophiles. Compact discs work better with different types of music, and it helps when they use technologies such as Super Audio CD that can really bring out the flaws of audio recordings and create better reproductions of digital masters than typical digital media. The problem is that in today's day and age, companies cannot make the premiums off of compact discs that they could in the eighties when they were first made available to the public when downloading and file trading wasn't the norm. Earlier compact discs were thick and of an extremely high quality to endure cheap players that often skipped and did not perform well. As the players got better and cheaper the discs cheapened as well; even today's digital video discs are not of the great quality that they could be, Superbit was a failed technology that sought to improve the picture quality of traditional digital video discs such as Super Audio CD was a superior, yet cost prohibitive, implementation of digital recording technology there as well.

Vinyl was fully exhausted years ago and there isn't much room for improvement at prices that are practical for most consumers. Yet it will always exist, if for nothing just the novelty of a time that has passed us by ...

Learn more about this author, Christopher Kendalls.
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