Are CD clubs a good deal?

CD clubs are a good way to build a basic CD collection of popular titles at a pretty reasonable cost IMO. In years past I've belonged to both BMG and Columbia clubs and purchased a lot of CDs from them. As to sound quality, I've not noticed a consistent difference between "club" CDs and those from typical music stores. Cheers. Craig

Viggen,
I even heard the difference in mobile stereo between the club and store versions no $hit!

As to Columbia House they realy cary an original versions compared to BMG.

IF you guys are into classical its a great place to get it from, some(read some not most or all) of the stuff they get is the real deal. All Telarc CD's I have gotten over the years from BMG do NOT have the little Mfg. For BMG... on the UPC code- and every now and again you get a regular type cd that doesn't have it, it seems very label dependent. On my last order(15 cd's) I had 6 that had the Mfg for BMG... marking on it- not bad odds seeing as even with shipping the average price of a cd was 6.87- though even I will admit your NOT going to find XRCD quality cd's at BMG- when you want the really special stuff you gotta pay for it :(

BMG is using the same master digital source code as the original manufacturer. I've never heard anyone say the store bought BMG CDs are of lesser quality than other lables, so how can these be worse? BMG does not have a special factory that makes the club CD's. They come out of the same factories as their own store lables. Manufacturing them under license in their own factory is just cheaper for them, and easier to control supply.

It is interesting that a Sterophile article discusses CD's made specifically for the Columbia Club, so it is not true they only sell store CD's. It may be possible Columbia doesn't mark their "club CD's" like BMG does.

Stereophile and others have done laboratory tests of club and store CD's of BMG and Columbia, measuring them every way imaginable, and they could not find any differences. They actually did find variances between the quality of some Sony/Columbia factories, (amount of jitter) but not connected to clubs releases. So if there is some difference it can even be among different store copies (for Sony/Columbia anyway).

See this link for more information....

http://www.stereophile.com/showarchives.cgi?55