Once upon a time, my birthday wish was for my friends to buy me a set of physical CDs. Many people probably have CD storage boxes for CDs at home. As a teenager, I flipped through the CD storage box like a book to find what I wanted to read. The cartoons and animation are probably the happy memories of many people born in the 90s.
However, the era of optical discs is far shorter than imagined. The manufacturers who fought over technical specifications such as DVDs probably did not expect that DVDs and even more advanced Blu-ray discs would disappear from most markets just over ten years later.
For audio and video enthusiasts, DVDs disappeared earlier. Many of the young generation may have only seen the study CDs that come with books.
Why Are Physical Discs Being Phased Out?
Most audio and video stores that once filled the streets have closed down. There is no room for CDs to survive in the technically. Optical discs are gradually being forgotten in markets such as Europe and the United States. Some time ago, Disney announced it would stop selling DVDs and Blu-ray discs in the Australian market.
As one of the world’s largest media giants, Disney owns many film production companies, such as Marvel and 20th Century Fox, and is also one of the largest distributors. When Disney plans to withdraw from the DVD and Blu-ray markets gradually, this implies that this market has ended.
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Why Is It The Time For Compact Discs to Be Withdrawn From The Market?
The era of streaming media came faster and more violently than expected. Earlier, streaming media and physical discs did not replace but complemented each other. At that time, the Internet speed was still in the era of kb, and MP3 and MP4 formats had become the most common file format in the streaming media library.
Challenges Of Earlier Streaming Media Files
The advantages of both are apparent. Both have high compression rates, but the disadvantages are also evident. High compression rates will bring a noticeable loss of details. Taking an MP3 song as an example, under the common 128kbs sampling rate at that time, as long as you Have slightly better headphones, you can hear problems such as missing high frequencies and background noise.
For comparison, most music CDs were then produced using music files with a sampling rate of 44.1KHz, and the information density was not at the same level.
Therefore, if you wanted to enjoy real high-quality music at that time, music CDs were the only option. The other option was to download lossless music files shared by others.
These music files basically came from music CD enthusiasts who purchased the CDs through A CD player with a burning function, who will grab the files and then share them on file-sharing sites through the Internet.
The same is true for movies. The picture quality of early online videos was even worse than that of online music.
Even so, as the Internet speed has increased to the MB/s stage, 1080P movie quality can already meet most people’s needs for picture quality. Since then, after streaming media has eliminated music CDs, it has started focusing on DVDs.
Why Are Blu-Ray Discs Not As Dominant As DVDs?
However, DVD’s first exit is not entirely due to streaming media. Film companies are also considering response strategies under the impact of streaming media. On the one hand, they cooperate with streaming media platforms to provide genuine movie resources and combat pirated movies.
On the other hand, it mainly promotes Blu-ray discs to provide users with a better audio-visual experience using 4K, HDR, Dolby, and other technologies.
This is a two-pronged approach; the picture and sound quality are far inferior to those of Blu-ray Discs, and the convenience goes to the streaming media platforms.
Sadly, Blu-ray Disc has not been able to take over the original DVD market completely. Compared with DVD, the Blu-ray Disc market is smaller.
There are two reasons for this. First, Blu-ray discs are not cheap and can cost much money. Secondly, if you want a complete audio-visual experience, Blu-ray players, 4K TVs, and home audio are indispensable, and their performance must be at the highest level.
The price of purchasing such a set of equipment is not cheap. Except for a few movie lovers, few people are willing to invest. However, thanks to the game consoles Sony and Microsoft, supporting Blu-ray disc playback and disc rental services, Blu-ray discs can barely survive in Europe, America, Japan, and other regions.
Media Streaming is king.
With the upgrade of streaming media services, we can now quickly obtain high-standard lossless music and 4K movies online. Platforms such as Netflix support a variety of Dolby Cinema technologies, and the experience is almost the same as that of Blu-ray discs.
It can be said that today’s CDs have a slight advantage over streaming media, leaving only some collection value.
This is still the case in Europe and the United States, and the situation of optical discs in China is even worse. You might as well think about the last video CD store you saw.
Even so, you can count the number of audio and video stores still open on two hands, and only one has customers patronizing them. Walking into a store at random, the walls are covered with music CDs and vinyl discs. The attendant listening to the song looked up at me and asked, “What do you want to buy?” After walking around the store, I started chatting with the boss.
The boss was not impatient when he learned I was looking for a video and TV disc store. Instead, he said bluntly: “Not many stores sell DVDs now. That stuff has stopped selling a few years ago.
“Video discs have been sold for a long time. First it was DVD, then Blu-ray. How many people still have video disc players at home? (In Cantonese-speaking areas, it is customary to call discs with recorded movies called DVDs.)” The boss continued: “If you are looking for DVDs, there are none in this square, and you may find them in another digital city if you go down.”
I’m not surprised by this answer. While wandering around the store, I noticed that the shelves were mostly music CDs, and the few marked as videos were also video versions of concerts or live performances.
Maybe seeing me looking around, the boss smiled and said: “Don’t look, young man, there isn’t one. Even if there were one, I wouldn’t put it up for sale.”
“How do you say it?” My memory of DVDs dates back to the college days when you could buy one in the store in front of the school and get a discount when you traded the old one for a new one.
China has jumped directly from DVD to streaming media, ignoring the Blu-ray stage. The optical discs market is almost non-existent, so naturally, no manufacturer is willing to do such an unprofitable business.
In addition, there are pirated discs. Nowadays, the cracking and re-burning technology of Blu-ray discs is quite mature.
Those who consider pirated copies don’t care about genuine copies. At the same time, they want to enjoy 4K picture quality + 7.1 Dolby sound effects at any time instead of the highly compressed video stream of the streaming platform.
“There are few people buying DVDs, and the risk of selling them is still high, so many merchants have stopped doing it. What they are still doing is online transactions.
How are the sales of music CDs? It feels like fewer people are listening to it now.” During the ten minutes that I walked into the store, not to mention the buyers entering the store, no people were even passing through the door to ask for CDs. There was only The sound of our conversations and music from the speakers.
“It’s not easy to sell, but at least it’s better than DVDs. Business has been better in the past two years. Maybe more people are nostalgic.” I nodded in approval. In recent years, there has been a wave of nostalgia in some global communities from time to time. From old CCD digital cameras to even older CD players, some businesses have always benefited from this.
Music CDs Are Also Trying to Keep Up With The Times.
In my impression, music CDs are still in the lossless era. Still, after the boss’s introduction, I learned that to compete with the streaming media market, today’s high-end music CDs have already entered the Blu-ray stage. Master-level files of tens of gigabytes can be compressed to several gigabytes through a particular compression method. Then, the entire album can be stuffed into a Blu-ray disc, providing Hi-Fi enthusiasts with sound quality far exceeding that of streaming media.
What is the mastering-grade sound quality? Simply put, it uses the original files from the recording studio. These audio files are often in DSD format. The file size of a song of several minutes can reach tens of GB, retaining all the music details and supporting most types of audio modes.
Has Streaming Media Fully Replaced Blu-ray Discs?
Suppose you want to experience the ultimate Hi-Fi music. In that case, high-quality, genuine Blu-ray music discs are still the only choice. Despite the fact that online streaming music software such as Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, QQ, and NetEase Cloud has launched master-level sound quality.
Most AI algorithms are used for compression and restoration to meet the needs of network transmission. It is mainly suitable for use in two-channel audio environments. It will be dwarfed if you want to use it in a multi-channel stereo cinema system.
However, for most people, the most commonly used device for listening to music is headphones, from TWS headphones to headphones. For those with more demanding requirements, bookshelf speakers will be considered.
Even so, 99% of users stop at two channels, and the multi-channel audio system that needs to use the original master-level sound quality will be a minority.
From Blu-ray movies to Blu-ray music discs, as a data carrier that has accompanied humanity for many years, optical discs still bear the task of bringing audiences the best audio-visual entertainment experience. However, with the optimization of AI algorithms and high-compression algorithms, it is only a matter of time before they are replaced.
Summary: Will Optical Discs Be Entirely Eliminated?
Moreover, with the improvement of the new generation Bluetooth standard and network speed, it is not difficult to stream real master-level music online at Gigabit broadband network speed. BD Blu-ray can already be easily transmitted even in a well-established wireless environment.
In the face of the new generation of technology, optical discs will eventually be eliminated, just like the VHS of the past, which were swept into historical memoirs and ultimately only active in special fields or among niche enthusiasts.
If you ask me whether optical discs will disappear entirely in the next few years, my answer is impossible. Virtual music files cannot replace some things. Just like vinyl records are still on sale today, optical discs will continue to accompany us. Take another long journey.
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