It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To C.E.C.

[DM]

Japanese CD player C.E.C. filed for bankruptcy in Japan on 25th January 2017.

 

http://n-seikei.jp/2017/02/post-42473.html

 

音響機器製造のＣＥＣ（株）（群馬県邑楽郡大泉町寄木戸１３１６－５、代表：石渡賢一）は１月２５日、さいたま地裁熊谷支部において、破産手続きの開始決定を受けた。破産管財人には、南雲芳夫弁護士（電話０４８－５２７－６２００）が選任されている。

 

負債額は約３億円。

 

同社は平成１２年９月設立の音響機器メーカー。生産は中国や台湾の企業に依頼し、以前は１５億円以上の売上高を計上していた。しかし、スマホの普及と音質向上により、オーディオ機器が売れなくなり、経営不振に陥り、平成２４年までに事業を停止していた。

 

On January 25, CEC Corp. (Audiovisual Equipment Manufacturing Co., Ltd. Oikumi-machi Oizumi-machi 1316-5, representative: Kenichi Ishiwatari) received a decision to commence bankruptcy proceedings at the Saitama District Court Kumagaya branch. As bankruptcy trustee, Yoshio Nambuku Attorney (telephone 048-527-6200) has been appointed.

 

Debt amount is about 300 million yen.

 

The company is a sound equipment manufacturer established in September 2000. Production is commissioned in China and Taiwan companies, it had previously recorded a more than 15 billion yen in sales. However, due to the spread and quality improvement of the smartphone, audio equipment is no longer sold, fell into financial difficulties, had to stop the project until 2012..

[One and a half]

That's sad news to hear. I liked their gear, but went Accuphase.

 

Improvements in smartphones caused the decline? Chalk and cheese, the smartphone may have killed the compact camera, audio still has a long way to go for smartphones, especially Apple trash.

[xiddox]

Very sad news indeed. I love my tl-1x!

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Computer Audiophile

[crenca]

Improvements in smartphones caused the decline? Chalk and cheese, the smartphone may have killed the compact camera, audio still has a long way to go for smartphones, especially Apple trash.

 

IMO, I think that smartphones (and screens of all types) has been devastating to "the industry" in general - certainly for artists and their labels. They look to the fact that people value music less and less and correlate it with "piracy" but they are wrong. Video killed the radio star, not criminals...

[Samuel T Cogley]

IMO, I think that smartphones (and screens of all types) has been devastating to "the industry" in general - certainly for artists and their labels. They look to the fact that people value music less and less and correlate it with "piracy" but they are wrong. Video killed the radio star, not criminals...

 

There is far more nuance and complexity in the chronology of recorded music as a consumer product than "video killed the radio star".

 

A more accurate distillation might be "Edison started it, Jobs finished it". While some digital audio Luddites might mourn the end of the days when friends would gather at someone's residence and gather around the phonograph to "just listen" and marvel at the dazzling artistry and palpable emotion of the vaunted musicians of the love generation, others just think Bob Dylan could never sing.

 

To be fair, I think a case can be made that some of those 60s/70s artists created art that is somewhat timeless. Perhaps it was their disregard of consumer pressures from the record companies. Most of the history I've read from that era strongly suggests that no one predicted the longevity of acts like Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones. Once the record companies caught on that "classic rock" in their back catalogs could be endlessly repackaged and resold (witness the availability of newly made Ramones T-shirts), revisionist history (Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, et al.) raised classic rock to a quasi religion, which in turn drove demand for the recordings into future generations.

 

The modern "consumerization" of music really started with the ability to bring recordings into the car. There were some early, rather quaint attempts to play records (worked until the car started moving), to 8-Tracks, cassettes, CDs, and finally, DAPs. That last step (DAPs) wasn't driven by the record companies. It was a capitulation to the inescapable fact that consumers were not only extracting content from the CDs they purchased, but compressing and sharing that content on the internet. The incredible ease of amassing a digital library of tens of thousands (or more) of songs drove down consumer's notion of the "value" of recorded music. And the record companies have never recovered from that degraded notion of value among consumers.

 

Fast forward to Apple embracing DAPs and legitimizing compressed, lossy, digital music. If anything, consumers' estimation of the value of recorded music has only declined further, and the record companies now have to exploit this mindset. Witness the ubiquitous sound of most western pop music today.

 

Video didn't kill the radio star. Consumerism did.

[crenca]

 

The modern "consumerization" of music really started with the ability to bring recordings into the car. There were some early, rather quaint attempts to play records (worked until the car started moving), to 8-Tracks, cassettes, CDs, and finally, DAPs. That last step (DAPs) wasn't driven by the record companies. It was a capitulation to the inescapable fact that consumers were not only extracting content from the CDs they purchased, but compressing and sharing that content on the internet. The incredible ease of amassing a digital library of tens of thousands (or more) of songs drove down consumer's notion of the "value" of recorded music. And the record companies have never recovered from that degraded notion of value among consumers.

 

Fast forward to Apple embracing DAPs and legitimizing compressed, lossy, digital music. If anything, consumers' estimation of the value of recorded music has only declined further, and the record companies now have to exploit this mindset. Witness the ubiquitous sound of most western pop music today.

 

Video didn't kill the radio star. Consumerism did.

 

Interesting write up SamuelTCogley, much to ponder. I do believe that the "value" equation started going against "the industry" not because of the ease of library management enabled by digitization (or illegal "sharing"), rather because consumer habits changed and they started to spend more time and value the screen more and more. In other words the Video and Consumerism factors are strongly linked. Thanks!

[Jud]

There've always been "oldies" channels. The Baby Boomers are the pig moving through the demographic python worldwide, so media offerings reflect their tastes, which for many/most of them appear to be frozen in time. Very amusing to hear the same sorts of remarks about today's music ("How can they call that music, it doesn't even have a melody!" "It all sounds the same!") that our parents made when we were young. I'm excepting the packaged stuff from the music companies, which I consider on a par with the "teen idols" phase of American musical history (Frankie Avalon, Fabian...). This is innocuous enough for virtually anyone to listen to (unless, like me, the only music you're offended by is that which is calculated to be completely inoffensive).

[Samuel T Cogley]

There've always been "oldies" channels. The Baby Boomers are the pig moving through the demographic python worldwide, so media offerings reflect their tastes, which for many/most of them appear to be frozen in time. Very amusing to hear the same sorts of remarks about today's music ("How can they call that music, it doesn't even have a melody!" "It all sounds the same!") that our parents made when we were young. I'm excepting the packaged stuff from the music companies, which I consider on a par with the "teen idols" phase of American musical history (Frankie Avalon, Fabian...). This is innocuous enough for virtually anyone to listen to (unless, like me, the only music you're offended by is that which is calculated to be completely inoffensive).

 

I think there's a bit more to it. Unless I missed it, Frankie Avalon and Fabian never achieved the longevity of Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones (for example). There are twenty somethings today avidly listening to some of the music of that era. I freely admit that it's "grandpa music" today. Just acknowledging the longevity.

 

And regarding that second part, we used to have a saying at a certain entertainment company known for its "family friendly" fare:

 

"When you attempt to create a program that's offensive to no one, you succeed in creating a program that's offensive to everyone".

[sphinxsix]

CEC 1954-2017 RIP..

CD belt drive was such a brilliant idea! I loved it and didn't trust it fully at the same time. But it worked! And looked so good

 

 

[bluesman]

While some digital audio Luddites might mourn the end of the days when friends would gather at someone's residence and gather around the phonograph to "just listen" and marvel at the dazzling artistry and palpable emotion of the vaunted musicians of the love generation, others just think Bob Dylan could never sing.

No disrespect intended, but I'm having a lot of trouble connecting the subordinate clause that starts this sentence with the fact that Dylan's vocal prowess is not universally admired. I think those Luddites miss the social aspects of the collective enjoyment of music, not the acoustical properties of the systems and sources we used. If blame must be assigned, I think it goes to earbuds (through which Dylan sounds even worse than he did through AR3s).

 

The modern "consumerization" of music really started with the ability to bring recordings into the car. There were some early, rather quaint attempts to play records (worked until the car started moving), to 8-Tracks, cassettes, CDs, and finally, DAPs. That last step (DAPs) wasn't driven by the record companies. It was a capitulation to the inescapable fact that consumers were not only extracting content from the CDs they purchased, but compressing and sharing that content on the internet. The incredible ease of amassing a digital library of tens of thousands (or more) of songs drove down consumer's notion of the "value" of recorded music. And the record companies have never recovered from that degraded notion of value among consumers.

Once again, I'm not sure what you mean. Car radios "consumerized" music long before any in-car sources were available. Mobile radio increased market exposure to artists and drove (pun intended) more people to buy the recordings they heard and liked.

 

But there are far more artists and available works today than ever before and they're widely accessible - and as supply goes up, cost falls. As demand goes down, cost falls. Technology's part of the driver, but so is the proliferation of artists using pocket recorders to create digital recordings of commercial quality that are much more easily marketed and delivered because they require no hard copies. 140 million records were sold in 1927. In 2015, there were a total of 100 million "albums" sold in all hard media, of which 50 million were CDs, 43.8 million were digital, and 6.2 million were vinyl.

 

 

Fast forward to Apple embracing DAPs and legitimizing compressed, lossy, digital music. If anything, consumers' estimation of the value of recorded music has only declined further, and the record companies now have to exploit this mindset. Witness the ubiquitous sound of most western pop music today.

Radio was probably the worst offender of any medium when it comes to compression and loss. The frequency spectrum was short-sheeted and the signal was so heavily modulated that your stove was a more dynamic range than what came out of your radio.

 

Value is generally defined as worth divided by cost. As described above, the consumer cost of recorded music fell dramatically for 2 major and many minor reasons. But technology begat many new substitutes for the pleasures of music in people's lives, which reduced the perceived worth of music when for the same money as a CD you could have a video game or a pay-per-view sporting event to which you'd otherwise never be able to go. The perceived value of music hasn't changed, but its cost had to come down to make it competitive with other pleasures of equal worth.

 

 

Video didn't kill the radio star. Consumerism did.

This is a good thing. Remember that consumerism is defined as the protection or promotion of the interests of consumers. Whadda we want????

 

[Norton]

 

representative: Kenichi Ishiwatari

Production is commissioned in China and Taiwan companies

 

2 things that came as a surprise. That Ken Ishiwata? And not Japanese made (at those prices)?

[kumakuma]

That Ken Ishiwata?

 

Different people with similar names (Ishiwata Ken vs Ishiwatari Kenichi)

[Samuel T Cogley]

No disrespect intended, but I'm having a lot of trouble connecting the subordinate clause that starts this sentence with the fact that Dylan's vocal prowess is not universally admired. I think those Luddites miss the social aspects of the collective enjoyment of music, not the acoustical properties of the systems and sources we used. If blame must be assigned, I think it goes to earbuds (through which Dylan sounds even worse than he did through AR3s).

 

Based on time spent in music subforums of other sites, I might be lumping together the fogies of the love generation with the Luddites. They are often difficult for me to distinguish. Dylan's near mythical stature is difficult for me to reconcile with his body of work. I'll just leave it at that.

 

Once again, I'm not sure what you mean. Car radios "consumerized" music long before any in-car sources were available. Mobile radio increased market exposure to artists and drove (pun intended) more people to buy the recordings they heard and liked.

 

Radio certainly drove consumer demand, but it was not an example of consumerism in an of itself. It was marketing. The "charts" (Billboard, et al.) tracked sales, not radio play metrics. Not saying they weren't related.

 

But there are far more artists and available works today than ever before and they're widely accessible - and as supply goes up, cost falls. As demand goes down, cost falls. Technology's part of the driver, but so is the proliferation of artists using pocket recorders to create digital recordings of commercial quality that are much more easily marketed and delivered because they require no hard copies. 140 million records were sold in 1927. In 2015, there were a total of 100 million "albums" sold in all hard media, of which 50 million were CDs, 43.8 million were digital, and 6.2 million were vinyl.

 

Really? Wow. Those were "singles" in today's parlance, no doubt. Are those U.S. numbers, or world wide? Roaring Twenties indeed!

 

Radio was probably the worst offender of any medium when it comes to compression and loss. The frequency spectrum was short-sheeted and the signal was so heavily modulated that your stove was a more dynamic range than what came out of your radio.

 

Perhaps, but I still have fond memories of end-to-end analog renderings of AOR on FM in the 70s. The key was line-of-sight to the transmitter. There was much dynamic range compression in the mix then, no doubt.

 

This is a good thing. Remember that consumerism is defined as the protection or promotion of the interests of consumers. Whadda we want????

 

In my life experience, consumerism is never about what the consumer wants to purchase. It's always about what the consumer can be persuaded to purchase. The ultimate goal is to persuade the consumer that the purchase idea originated in their mind, wholly organically and utterly independent of any marketing or advertising. Consumerism, as it exists, has zero to do with "protect[ing] the interests of consumers". See Edward Bernays.

[Jud]

I think there's a bit more to it. Unless I missed it, Frankie Avalon and Fabian never achieved the longevity of Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones (for example). There are twenty somethings today avidly listening to some of the music of that era. I freely admit that it's "grandpa music" today. Just acknowledging the longevity.

 

I obviously didn't make myself completely clear in that part of my comment. I was comparing Frankie Avalon and Fabian to "packaged" acts of today, artists who fly in to put Auto-Tuned vocals on "rap/hip-hop" lyrics and hooks written by Scandinavians in studios and offices, who can be seen among the best selling artists of today: Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Justin Timberlake....

[Jud]

Dylan's near mythical stature is difficult for me to reconcile with his body of work.

 

 

Fair enough. This is how I look at it: Imagine just the artist(s) and acoustic instrument(s) in your home, playing for a party - no production, no amps, etc. So just the bare songwriting talent to compare. Dylan, especially with his early stuff, could put chills down your spine in that context. (Of course some folks couldn't get themselves past his voice, and I understand that. But the songs are friggin' amazing.) If you look at some of the early Stones videos, where they were playing through house PA systems and not very loud, Jagger looks more the London college boy than the threatening nasty blues hollerer of later years. Imagine Satisfaction with no mic for Mick and Keith trying to bang out the famously dirty hook on acoustic! So just on pure songwriting, especially lyrics, Dylan really deserves his rep, I think.

 

And flipping it the other way, think of Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower," George Harrison's cover of "If Not For You" - pretty decent songs, eh?

[bluesman]

In my life experience, consumerism is never about what the consumer wants to purchase. It's always about what the consumer can be persuaded to purchase. The ultimate goal is to persuade the consumer that the purchase idea originated in their mind, wholly organically and utterly independent of any marketing or advertising. Consumerism, as it exists, has zero to do with "protect[ing] the interests of consumers".

You're using the sociologists' definition of consumerism, which (at least to my simple medical mind) is a perversion of the functional definition found in most standard dictionaries. There are virtually identical first definitions for consumerism offered by every "lay" source with which I'm familiar, e.g.

 

• Webster: "the promotion of the consumer's interests"
  
• BusinessDictionary: "organized efforts by individuals, groups, and government to help protect consumers from policies and practices that infringe consumer rights to fair business practices"
  

Sociologists (whose livelihoods depend on how effectively they can caricature society and rail against the features they dramatize out of proportion to their actual significance) use it as a pejorative description of aberrant behavior. You're clearly following them down that path. Colin Campbell defined consumerism as "a social condition that occurs when consumption is 'especially important if not actually central' to most people’s lives and even 'the very purpose of existence.' When this occurs, we are bound together in society by how we channel our wants, needs, desires, longings, and pursuit of emotional fulfillment into consumption of goods and services". Bauman took this a step further to define it as "a type of social arrangement that results from recycling mundane, permanent and so to speak ‘regime-neutral’ human wants, desires and longings into the principal propelling force of society, a force that coordinates systemic reproduction, social integration, social stratification and the formation of human individuals, as well as playing a major role in the processes of individual and group self-policies".

 

The sociologists are much further down the path than most economists, who seem to see consumption (speaking in economic terms) as generally good for a society and its economy. Your view can be traced backwards through a long line of angry sociologists to Veblen ("The Theory of the Leisure Class"), whose philosophy and life's work were based on his firm belief that making useful goods and pursuing profit are mutually exclusive. He believed strongly that women were the property of men, and that a man should display his unemployed wife as evidence of his own high status. Veblen also believed that sports were a waste of resources, that religion was a valueless waste of time, and that churches etc were unproductive use of land and resources. The dude was a miserable grinch!

 

True consumerism is neither marketing nor advertising. I assume your deep mistrust of marketing includes having read such works as Vance Packard's "Hidden Persuaders". Packard certainly describes some heinous behavior - there's still a lot of psychological coercion in the marketing of many products we all know (and love...) 50 years later. This is the behavior that you're calling consumerism, but it's not - it's just social sickness.

 

Really? Wow. Those were "singles" in today's parlance, no doubt. Are those U.S. numbers, or world wide? Roaring Twenties indeed!

Actually, many "albums" in the era of 78 rpm records were multi-disc sets in order to encompass an entire work. I have all of my family's records dating back to about 1917, including some by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1917-19. Classical music was the major sales driver before the "jazz age" hit, since few working people could afford Victrolas, and one 78 cost about $1 in 1920. The "upper class" (i.e. wealthy) thought that jazz and blues were the devil's music. There was no country music until 1923, when Fidlin' John Carson recorded the first of the genre on Okeh Records. So although country was the largest selling record category for many decades in the US, it was a nonentity in the 20s.

 

The "roaring twenties" did give popular music its start, so "singles" started to sell as more young working people could buy records and the machines on which to play them. I can't find any data to support this, but from the hundreds of 78s in my family and my experience with the collections of others, I suspect that at least half of that 100 million was classical multi-disc sets and another 1/4 was non-scandalous popular music like show tunes and mainstream bands / vocalists. My family was not elite - my maternal grandfather was an official at the local synagogue and an auto mechanic who never owned a car (he rode a bicycle everywhere he went until he died of a stroke). My paternal grandfather did many things but none of them well. So their combined record collections are probably representative, if not skewed toward the pop end a bit. My mother and her sister were "flappers" and their brothers were allegedly cool cats. My father's sister was an early hipster - she graduated from Penn in 1925 (almost unheard of for a woman, let alone a Jewish woman). Yet 2/3 of their records were classical.

[Jud]

When my parents moved, I must admit I did not save their small record collection, including the classic "Ida the Wayward Sturgeon" by Dwight Fiske and His Orchestra.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Computer Audiophile

[wwaldmanfan]

I know this is off-topic, but amusing. My dad bartered his financial expertise with a business associate whose son worked at a radio station. The young man was into audio equipment, and my dad ended up with a very good stereo component system, circa 1961. Specifically, an H.H. Scott 299c integrated amp, matching Model 350 mutiplex FM tuner, a Sony/Superscope reee-to-reel, a Garrard turntable, and a pair of AR-2a's.

My parents were not into music at all. They owned only a handful of LP records, show tunes, mostly. Honest to God, I don't think my dad even knew how to turn the system on. My mom would put on the radio occasionally.

 

It didn't take long before I appropriated all that gear up to my bedroom. That was my first stereo system. Not bad for a kid in elementary school, huh?

[bluesman]

When my parents moved, I must admit I did not save their small record collection, including the classic "Ida the Wayward Sturgeon" by Dwight Fiske and His Orchestra.

"My god Ida - you've shared! It's caviar!"

[crenca]

You're using the sociologists' definition of consumerism, which (at least to my simple medical mind) is a perversion of the functional definition found in most standard dictionaries. There are virtually identical first definitions for consumerism offered by every "lay" source with which I'm familiar, e.g.

 

• Webster: "the promotion of the consumer's interests"
  
• BusinessDictionary: "organized efforts by individuals, groups, and government to help protect consumers from policies and practices that infringe consumer rights to fair business practices"
  

Sociologists (whose livelihoods depend on how effectively they can caricature society and rail against the features they dramatize out of proportion to their actual significance) use it as a pejorative description of aberrant behavior. You're clearly following them down that path....

 

Bluesman, your picking and chosing here - you quoted entry #1 from Webster but left out #2 which is the "ism of the sociologists". Yes, it is a moral evaulation but so is #1. Perhaps we should speak of consumer interest vs. consumerism. In any case I think SamuelTCogley is on to something here, though the problem with his thesis is that consumerism as normatively understood would lead to the increased desire/consumption of music, not its opposite de-vauling which in fact has happened so I am unsure how he is connecting the dots. However his point about cosumerism not being about the interests of consumers stands as a matter of definition (whether you agree with the underlying sociology/anthropology or not)...

[Samuel T Cogley]

Bluesman, your picking and chosing here - you quoted entry #1 from Webster but left out #2 which is the "ism of the sociologists". Yes, it is a moral evaulation but so is #1. Perhaps we should speak of consumer interest vs. consumerism. In any case I think SamuelTCogley is on to something here, though the problem with his thesis is that consumerism as normatively understood would lead to the increased desire/consumption of music, not its opposite de-vauling which in fact has happened so I am unsure how he is connecting the dots. However his point about cosumerism not being about the interests of consumers stands as a matter of definition (whether you agree with the underlying sociology/anthropology or not)...

 

I was simply articulating what consumerism appears to be from my point of view as a consumer. I have no interest in the utopian or textbook definition. "Comsumer power" is an illusion in my experience.

 

Back to the recorded music/physical media angle, recorded music has been devalued primarily because the labels themselves have devalued it after the content was unlocked from the media. I readily concede there is movement among the major labels to nix free streaming (youtube, et al.) and attempt to establish a revenue generation model that is devoid of physical media. But they're not there yet. And the new value proposition story hasn't gelled yet IMHO.

 

Bringing this all the way back to the CD player (if those pictures above are correct, sexy as hell), I often wonder if CDs will enjoy a renaissance in the future the way vinyl seems to be enjoying one now. Are we at peak vinyl now or just past it? It feels like just past it.

[The Computer Audiophile]

HI Guys - I received an email from CEC today about this. It appears that there's more to the story.

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Chris,

 

today, we - as CEC - received some nervous inquiries from our distributors.

Which took us a lot of time and explanations today.

 

 

For what? - CEC is establish 1954 - and we will survive much longer than our competitors are able to imagine...

 

 

I would like to ask you to spread the real news at your website

and give a statement of truth.

 

 

I think it was a open blog - which you are not control as webmaster,

but I hope that you clarify - about this real FAKE NEWS.

 

 

 

 

We - as CEC - founded the new operation: CEC Holding Co Ltd in Japan.

(with some integration of new shareholder`s)

 

 

At the same time we closed the CEC Co Ltd. after closing CEC Co Ltd it took nearly 2years for legal liquitation.

 

 

Two years later, it has officially been announced on the paper.

I believe, will be in April and everything finished with CEC Co.,Ltd.

 

 

We, CEC Holding Co.,Ltd took over all activities for CEC Products in connection with CEC International GmbH.

if you need further information pls let me know. There are no secrets at all about it.

 

 

It would be very desirable - If you publish a official statement as Webmaster into this blog -

Thanks in advance.

 

 

best regards

julien stegner

 

 

- president - CEC International

 

 

1) Pls find more information at:www.cec-international.com

 

 

2) You can find some Reviews at: www.cec-international.com/Reviews

 

 

CEC International GmbH

Wacholderweg 16

22335 Hamburg | Germany

[sphinxsix]

CEC is dead, long live CEC!

[DM]

CEC is dead, long live CEC!

 

Agree, long live CEC!!!!

 

So CEC is no longer pure Japanese and manufacturing is done in Taiwan and China as it stated on the Japanese CEC website? If this is the case, the original CECs which were made in Japan may become a collective item and goes up in value

[mordante]

I'm happy the brand continues. They made some of the best CD transports in the business. The TL0 is a piece of sonic art.