After many years of neglect, I spent some time yesterday alphabetizing my CD collection. It had gotten entirely jumbled through several moves, and the situation had only been made worse by a bunch of recent purchases from Discogs.

Now it is all orderly and I can actually find stuff, which is pretty great.

I still love CDs; as much fun as vinyl can be, I think CDs still provide the best balance of good sound, convenience, durability, and permanance. Of course, I am probably biased.

Surrounded as we are these days by high-quality audio sources, I think it is hard to overstate how revolutionary the compact disc was when it became widely available in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, unless you were a high-end listener with lots of money to burn, your options were your parents' scratchy record collection, audiocassettes, or FM radio. Nostalgia for the first two aside, they both sounded like crap, and as for FM radio, that was pretty terrible too. Compared to any of those, CDs sounded so much better.

I’m pretty happy to still have an actual amplifier and speakers, and it feels pretty great to be building my CD collection again.