According to the Guardian the CD is making a comeback. It’s a bold claim but I’m not convinced because the evidence seems rather thin to me.
Nevertheless, you may recall that two years ago I bought a ‘new’ CD player because, despite owning hundreds of CDs, most of them acquired several decades ago, I no longer had a CD player at home or in my car. Therefore the only way I could listen to CDs was by ripping them to my iMac via an external CD drive and then playing them through my desktop speakers, or downloading them from my computer to my iPhone and playing them in the car via Bluetooth, which was a bit of a faff.
I also read that MP3 files ripped from CDs lose some of their sound quality and although I’m sceptical that a non-audiophile like myself will notice the difference, I thought there might be a small improvement if I bought a dedicated CD player and combined it with a better speaker. Therefore, as well as buying a Marantz 6007 (a well-reviewed ‘budget’ CD player that nevertheless cost over £300), I also bought the highly rated Sonos Era 300 speaker and together they pair quite neatly in my office at home. The downside is, I have never been able to work and listen to music at the same time so I don’t actually use them very much.
That doesn’t stop me buying CDs, though, and sometimes people buy me CDs as a gift. More often than not the CDs I buy are remastered versions of CDs I already possess. Occasionally my choices are a bit more random. For example, my most recent purchases were the direct result of discovering, on YouTube, a cover of the La’s ‘There She Goes’, a song you are probably familiar with. First released in 1988, the original version featured on the band's debut album. It reached #13 on the UK Singles Chart but only after it was re-issued in 1990.
Listening to the cover version by a Nashville-based band called Sixpence None The Richer, I realised I knew very little about the La’s so I went online and found they were from Liverpool. The most interesting part of their story however concerned Lee Mavers, the band’s lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter, who, according to Wikipedia, ‘gained a reputation for perfectionism and eccentricity particularly due to the fraught recording of their debut album’:
Obsessing over the group's troubled recording efforts between 1987 and 1992, Mavers eventually retreated to his Liverpool home after the release of the La's' eponymous debut album, his perception of the music industry soured by the fact the release was not a version of the album he had wished to be made public.
Intrigued by this, I bought both the debut album and a BBC In Session CD that features largely the same songs recorded for broadcast on radio programmes hosted by Janice Long, Liz Kershaw, Bob Harris and Nicky Campbell between 1987 and 1990. Interestingly, the In Session CD does sound, to my ears, significantly punchier than the original album. ‘There She Goes’ stands out on the studio album, but on the In Session CD it has a bit more bite, like most of the other songs. As an album I really like it.
The cover version recorded by Sixpence None The Richer has a female vocal and is softer. Recorded for the band’s eponymous third album, which was released in 1997, the song wasn’t issued as a single until 1999 when it reached #14 in the UK and #32 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
To be honest, until I stumbled on a video of the band performing a live version of the song on Top of the Pops, I had never heard of Sixpence None The Richer, nor had I heard their version of ‘There She Goes’, but that’s what happens when you go down a rabbit hole online. Since then I’ve become a little bit obsessed by the band and two weeks ago I bought the ‘deluxe 25th anniversary’ CD of the self- titled third album. Again, I really like it.
The band, featuring lead singer Leigh Nash, broke up in 2004 but has reunited intermittently to record new music and tour. By coincidence, they were due to tour the UK this autumn but the tour was cancelled following the death of their long-serving bass player. The name, Sixpence None The Richer, intrigued me too and I discovered that it was inspired by a passage in ‘Mere Christianity’, a book by C.S. Lewis:
C.S. Lewis uses an illustration of a child who wants to buy a Christmas present for his father. The child asks the father for sixpence, the father gives him the sixpence, and the child uses it to buy a present back for the father. Ultimately, the father is "sixpence none the richer" because the money came from him to begin with.
Anyway, with these and other purchases I must be contributing to the CD comeback narrative. Meanwhile I am being bombarded by online ads for something called the Brennan B3+ which is described as a ‘hard disk music jukebox and audio system designed to store, rip, and play an entire CD collection’ (up to 4,000 CDs). The Brennan B3/B3+ is said to be the size of a hardback book, and there’s smaller version, the Brennan B2, which is the size of a paperback. They claim there is no loss of quality, unlike MP3 files, and it effectively makes your CD player redundant.
Neither is cheap (they both cost around £799) but I can see the appeal if you own lots of CDs and have nowhere to store them apart from boxes in the garage. How big a market there is for a ‘hard disk music jukebox’ that stores, rips and plays your entire CD collection is hard to judge, but I am tempted.
See: ‘Algorithms make everything predictable’: why the CD is making a comeback (Guardian)
