CD Bargains

[AM Matt]

The Who "Bargain" (from 1971 "Who's Next") "I call that a bargain the best I ever had..........the best I ever had!!"

 

[tomswift2002]

Some companies have been doing the " made on demand CDR's to my knowledge since 2007 or thereabouts I have a collection of easy listening instrumental compilations produced by Starborne productions owned by Jim Schlicting on their website they offer their limited edition comps and some proper albums by their artists and they offer some downloads in several audio formats and I remember I mentioned before this was part of the music that was custom radio programming in the waning days of the EZ format on radio I'm happy to say I still have my complete collection which I completed in 2015

The MOD route on CD-R has existed since at least 1990. I’ve got a “Solid Gold Scrapbook” hour that aired December 25, 1990 on both LP & CD as, during that time, stations would get both formats. But the CD-R has a printed label (it looks like inkjet printing, and the label surface feels like the inkjet DVD-R surfaces that I use for customers that want DVD’s) and cue sheet, so it’s a legit CD, and it would’ve still been cheaper to have made the CD-R in 90 than it would’ve been to Press about 150 CD’s. Of course the funny thing with that CD-R is that I can tell it was mastered from a vinyl record, as it one point you hear a “jump” when the announcer is speaking, and there is no “jump” on the LP that I have at that location. So they did not use a tape master, and you have to wonder how many people thought their local station was playing a vinyl record that day (since there are other “jumps” where SGS was clearly using a worn 45 or 33 and the needle skipped) but their station was actually beaming out a digital recording!

 

[Rudy]

@tomswift2002 I've never purchased one of those MOD titles, but yes, I totally get it! On one hand, we should be thankful that we are getting the music in any format that we can. Yet those of us who want to buy a physical product want it to be of sufficient quality so we can enjoy it for years to come. And that's hard to do when it seems as though Amazon just wants to treat it as a product to fulfill an order on the books, with quality apparently not even on the radar.

Shaun Cassidy's carrot face made me chuckle a bit, since it reminded me of some of my earliest exploits trying to print out something nicely on an early inkjet color printer. I think it took me a few generations of printers until I could finally get colors that were rich enough to properly reproduce what I was printing.

 

[Harry]

I've only had one slightly similar experience to a MOD disc, but it was in the form of purchasing an "album" as mp3 files from Amazon for a very difficult to find album, the 80s AyM record of Chris Montez and his CARTAS DE AMOR album.

The songs were all there, and I could tell that they'd been needledropped originally. That didn't bother me as if I could have found the vinyl, I would have done that myself. No, my problem was that I could also tell that the album had been recorded by a CD recorder on some sort of auto-record setting. If you're not familiar with those, it's a setting where you start the album and the track index increases by one when the moments of silence between tracks concludes at the start of the next track. This will play through perfectly as a start-to-finish disc, but if you cue up just one track, you'll hear that, a) it's lightly upcut at the auto-start, and b) it has a tiny fragment of the next track at its very end.

That's what this Chris Montez album did. I managed to fix it by merging all of the files into one long track in Audacity, fixing the join points where a tiny silence was introduced, and then slicing it all up into track the way they should be. As I'm easily capable of doing that, I didn't really mind - it was almost a fun project - but these were paid-for files and should have been handled properly BEFORE offering them as a download.

 

[tomswift2002]

Well with the SGS disc, I would’ve thought that they would’ve used the same master for the CD-R as they did the vinyl, so it was shocking to hear a that it was a needle drop, meaning there was at least one analog generation separating the vinyl from the CD. Considering that digital audio tape was out, if they had recorded to a Betamax or VHS through Sony’s PCM-1 or evening a DAT machine, they could’ve made a digital copy on CD-R. I don’t know, the vinyl might’ve been pressed from a digital source, but the CD is odd.