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Business News
Linn discontinue CD players
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 23 November 2009
High-end audio manufacturer Linn Products, based in Glasgow, has discontinued its entire line of CD players, thanks to booming sales of its Linn DS hard-disk based stereo systems (which they refer to as ‘streaming players’).
Speaking to The Guardian, the company’s MD, Gilad Tiefenbrun said: “We introduced our streaming players two years ago, and thought they would be slow to take off. But sales of CD players have declined 40% year-on-year, while streaming players now make up 30% of our total business. It’s unprecedented growth”.
Another side effect of this boom in higher-end digital music devices is that people who rate high quality (or perceived high quality) audio are also willing to pay more for their downloads. Linn’s music retail division, Linn Records, has also seen a boom in sales of uncompressed audio in FLAC format, and particularly in 24bit studio master quality files (which offer much higher quality than CDs can), for which the company charge £18 an album.
With the cheapest ‘streaming system’ costing £975, none of this isn’t likely to have much of an effect on the average music listener in the short term, though with audiophiles seemingly choosing high quality streaming audio now, thanks to large hard disks becoming increasingly available and more affordable, it is likely that in the coming years that demand and technology will filter down to medium range and ultimately budget systems, meaning higher quality digital audio will become a standard feature.
However, it remains to be seen how quickly uncompressed audio will take off. It’s most likely that the mainstream music industry will want to keep flogging compressed files for as long as possible before announcing that they’re rubbish and that we should all replace our music collections with FLAC and WAV files. And so the record industry can return to its strategy of reselling us the same music but in a new format yet again.
