David Sudjiman

I was walking along this afternoon around Sydney city square for window shopping just to enjoy my day off alone. After having Nando’s Chicken Peri-Peri, I looked around the corner there a CD/DVD store. Quite big, though. Probably one of the biggest around Sydney.

I happened to stumble upon this jukebox machine that enable customers to compile their own music track and burn it to CD. Interesting. Playing with its touch screen, I tried to search Brian McKnight’s Gemini Album. Hey, It’s there!

But wait! That’s not what I wanted. I didn’t want to buy just the songs. I wanted to buy the album. I wanted to have the album sitting there in my CD shelf. I wanted to own the CD as my collection. I really appreciate what Brian does for music, and this is how I appreciate what he does, buy the CD. Therefore I would be able to know who does arrange the songs, who was playing what instrument, and all sort of details included in the CD including the cover and other gimmicks.

Buying a music CD is like buying a work of art. As a matter of fact, it is a work of art. It’s not just a digital file that we can store inside an mp3 player. It’s the whole CD.

Having MP3 compression makes music quality become more easily to duplicate yet the downside is having a bad quality music. Well, accept the fact the MP3 is not for those music maniac audiophile nerd.

I’m using MP3 in my computer just to listen any songs but I’m still expecting to have the CD for those particular artist/music that I really like. I still can remember having MP3′ed Linkin Park’s Numb on the car didn’t really make the vibrant and I was really disappointed to hear some cracking noise here and there. That was happening when I converted the CD using 192 kb/s rate. 192 kb/s is considered a ‘near CD’ quality.

Now I’m listening an old song from Rick Price’s Tenterfield Saddler as Nicole Kidman was using this song as in her marriage with Keith Urban yesterday. My mind is flying to year 1993/1994 when I was quite lucky to met him in Jakarta, Indonesia. Listening to his voice live, without audio remixing, making it inevitable not to buy the CD. Now, I’m listening it again after 13 years. I want to have his complete albums, not just the low quality of mp3 music.