if you have a perfect internet connection at all times and are willing to pay for unlimited bandwidth at high speeds then maybe streaming can be done at cd quality and you don't need cds.

otherwise, cds are still superior to streaming in terms of playback fidelity.

something i've also read in multiple articles is the claim that lossless audio is higher quality than cd. people seem to actually believe that that's true, which makes me want to break something.

i really strongly disagree with this pseudo-intellectual bullshit pop psychology argument that buying or listening to cds is about "nostalgia". i don't even know what that means. cds are the highest possible quality audio format on the market (with the exception of sacds, dvd audio or 24 bit streaming, all of which remain obscure, and only relevant for a select collection of recordings). of the thousands of cds in my music collection, i'm sure a numerical majority were released before i was born and the amount of music that i own that was released in the "nostalgia" period of my teens or early twenties is on the order of 15% of the total collection. even if i understood what that meant, it wouldn't be the period i'd want to remember. i spent those years listening to music because i was locked in dirty basements studying math and science. i listened to music instead of spending time with people - with the doors closed, through headphones. the age range i was more likely to go out somewhere was in my 30s, and i own almost no recorded music from that time frame because i spent the money on concert tickets instead. 

and beer.

i know it's hard for the stupid freudian idiots to understand, but when i put a cd on and listen to it through a good quality setup it's because i want to listen to music i like in high quality. really. that's it.

further, the music i listen to is detailed and complex enough to justify a good playback system, and the reason i like to listen to it is the detail and complexity in it, which requires a good system to properly enjoy.

i was born in 1981.

while it's a function of the fact that i'm setting my apartment up and taking cds out of boxes to put on shelves, my current 5 cd rotation (i don't listen to one cd at a time. i listen to five. i don't "slow down". it's not fundamentally different than how i consume digital audio, which is through full album playlists stacked together. i don't listen to one song at a time when i stream audio. nobody does. that's not real.) is

- antonio carlos jobim, stone flower, 1970

- billy cobham, spectrum, 1973 <---tommy bolin!

- claude debussy, la mer, 1905 and nocturnes, 1900

- do make say think, winter hymn country hymn secret hymn, 2003

- gustav holst, the planets, 1918 with the tallis fantasia by ralph vaughn williams after it (1567/1919)

this is a reasonably representative random sample in terms of genre and release date, with four out of 5 records being released before i was born. none of these records were my father's or were things my dad would have listened to (i do have some of his records, but it's because i enjoy listening to them, not for nostalgia). i'm not remembering anything. my collection is heavy on guitar-driven jazz and prog from the 60s and 70s and orchestral music from as far back as the 1500s. the tallis piece is maybe exceptional in terms of age, but i have cds from every time frame, in multiple abstract genres. the music i have from my youth is mostly experimental music on off labels, or punky grunge. i did like grunge. besides that, what i don't have is throwaway corporate pop from the 90 or 00s.

there may be some minimal subset of people that just want to remember being young, but that's not a reasonable analysis of why people that actually like music listen to music or why they buy music on high quality formats and the suggestion that it is is nothing better than moronically idiotic. it's just another example of how psychology is not a science and why freud makes everybody that reads him less intelligent than they were beforehand.