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This is a raging issue with music lovers. Vinyl or CDs? It's not an easy decision to make for me. Each has it's own qualities that recommend them and I love both but ultimately I must cast my towel in with CDs. Why? CDs have that crystal clear sound. It's like being at the concert itself in a hall with great acoustics! You can hear every track that was laid down in the song, every instrument played. The sound quality from CDs is clear as a bell and a major leap in quality from what was available to music fans before. What you lose in the warmness of sound and that wonderful crackling effect that records make, you make up for in phenomenal clarity of sound.

When it comes to durability CDs aren't much more durable than records. They scratch easily like records and can skip if you don't take good care of them. In that respect they are very much like owning records. You can't throw them around like you can throw around cassette tapes. But they are far more elegant looking than tapes and much smaller than records. They take up much less space than both. This is an important point. As your music collection grows, you're going to need more and more space. You can fit hundreds of CDs into a small space. You can still get beautiful album art, CD art, liner notes and a nice sophisticated case to carry them in. CDs are much like vinyl records in those respects. With tapes, you had lousy audio quality and a lousy form for album art. CDs were a huge step up in sound quality, yet they brought back something great about having vinyl: You don't have to give up getting CD art and album art.

Besides that, you get something extra with CDs - extra content. Because CDs are a new medium and can be used with computers and they can store tremendous amounts of information. With a CD you can get the music and album information in print and you can get this information encoded in digital form. You can also access website information like videos, extra tracks from a website, games, basically all kinds of information can be added to a CD so that you can access online content from the artist, band or label. They are far more versatile than records. Records can only be played on record players. You are tied to wherever your record player is stationed, which is usually at home. CDs can be used in almost any disc-playing device. You can play them on computers, CD players and DVD players. You can play them in your car or carry a discman and bring your CDs in a carrying case along with you. You can carry them anywhere with you. Sound clarity, versatility and space economy is what gives CDs the edge over vinyl.

Learn more about this author, Victoria Jeffrey.
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