A middle-aged man in a central Auckland suburb was recently surprised and delighted to discover a precious and significant trove of music recorded onto compact discs – in his own house.
“They turned up all over the place,” said the 62 year-old journalist. “Drawers we hadn’t opened for years turned out to be crammed with them. And wow, there’s some really good stuff there. This guy – who turns out to be me in a past life – had great taste.” – News
Our household’s return to ownership of a working CD player has been, in some respects, the product of difficult times. My darling is very ill and for a while a vision problem left her unable to read comfortably. Music, something we’ve shared through the decades we’ve been in each other’s lives, became very important again. Sometimes we have simply sat together and listened, only occasionally troubling to speak. Sometimes there were only troubles to speak of anyway.
It was she who brought up the CDs. The sleek music centre we put in the room where she’s spending most of her days has been a boon. Two tiny speakers and a sub-woofer run off a network receiver that delivers streaming music via AirPlay and Bluetooth from our phones, and is connected to a turntable. The cube spaces below the kit are crammed with records. But she was finding the streaming service and its recommendations irksome, and the more records we stuffed into the shelves, the harder it seemed to be to find the right one.
Some time between the advent of the iTunes Store and the launch of Spotify, our basic old Sony CD player had been made redundant. It’s still gathering dust in the office, but without committing some aesthetic crime, there was no room for it in the new set-up anyway. “Are there small CD players?” she asked, before searching the internet and finding the FiiO DM13. No, I’d never heard of it either. But the reviews made it seem attractive and the $269 price tag doubly so.
FiiO’s DM13 is a marvel. Like the turntable and portable cassette player made by the same Chinese manufacturer, it’s a blend of retro style and modern technology. It looks like a vintage Discman, but uses the kind of DAC (digital-to-analogue converter) you’d normally find only in high-end audio gear. One hi-fi mag characterised its sound as, ahem, “youthful” – meaning it delivers tight, clear bass. The sound image doesn’t suspend ineffably in the air the way voice and piano from a good vinyl record do, but they both sound better and more “present” than the lossless streams from Apple Music.
The latter could be fixed with the addition of a dedicated music streamer, but they’re expensive – and there are reasons to want to dial back on streaming anyway. Its revenue model, which is crushing anyone who’s not a big-selling artist or the owner of a large catalogue, can feel like a bad thing to be part of. Spotify is stuffing its mood playlists with “commodity audio” commissioned from fake artists so it can pay our listening money to itself. Some of that audio is very likely AI-generated. As is so often the case on the modern internet, it’s hard not to feel manipulated.
For now, though, it’s the joy and surprise of finding albums we’d forgotten we ever owned and hearing them sound better than ever. CDs – or rather, their accursed jewel cases – are still dreadful objects and we’ve had to quickly find accessible storage solutions.
But last week, I bought my first new CD in years. No More Water, Meshell Ndegeocello’s astonishing tribute to the author James Baldwin, comes in at $100 on vinyl. The CD was $29. As the great Barry White once said: let the music play.
