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The History of the CD-ROM
Gammu writes "The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records; Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts."
...and give him the designs for the bluRay.
THUD~*
Here I was thinking what I'd be doing for the next hour, and up comes this article! I'll get researching the history of the CD-ROM! Wooohooo! Thanks /.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
Wasn't there a Slashdot story recently proclaiming the CD to be obsolete?
Even though digital music sales are up, for many people, the CD is still the way you carry and purchase music.
People came up with formats like DVD-Audio, but what is the point of that? A CD isn't too large to be cumbersome, and it holds enough data for an album. In fact, if you burn MP3's to the disc, you can hold tons of albums on it.
It is cheap, burns fast, and is still used for data and software installs.
It has been a very resilient medium, and given how long floppy-drives stuck around (far, far too long) I don't see CD's disappearing anytime soon.
There are "beter" alternatives, but it is so universal, it is here to stay.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
How much longer will the CD be used for?
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Ralph Wolf: "Mornin' Sam." Sam Sheepdog: "Oh, good morning Ralph." Ralph Wolf: "SLOW NEWS DAY!"
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Commentor's Cut: I hated hauling around a 50-100 cd carrier back in the day to hold all of my music. Ipods didn't exist yet, the only mp3 players (with a HDD) were horrible - fragile and with about 2 hours of battery life. So when I noticed the mini-disc played mp3s I was intrigued. I could hold all of my 50-100 CDs worth of music on (i was hoping) 10-15 mini discs. Even if they were 1:1, a mini-disc is much smaller than a CD. So I bought one.
Turns out it _didn't_ play mp3s. It "supported" mp3s by converting them to a proprietary Sony format. Which still could've been okay but the compression ratio wasn't very good for "better quality". I returned my space saving mini-disc player a day or two later, as soon as I realized it wasn't the answer I was looking for.
The mini-disc was cool in my eyes. Very compact and writable, it could reduce my carry-around music collection to something manageable. But it didn't support mp3s. This was back in the napster days. This single change could've made it a great format even today. I wouldn't be surprised to see a graph with the CD-R market booming, and the mini-disc market failing.
I remember my father bought one of the original Sony audio CD players. It was a CDP-102, the second version released in 1984. It looked quite a bit like the one in the article, but it was shorter and longer... the typical stereo component profile. That thing weighs a ton, and when you inserted the CD it had a clear window so you could watch the tray lower itself and the CD onto the motor. I thought that was the coolest thing.
Built like a tank, too. It was still in regular use until just recently, and still worked flawlessly without so much as a cleaning over 20 years later. They don't make them like that, anymore. Maybe it was better components, or simply nostalgia, but I thought it had a better sound quality that most CD players these days.
Bah, this must be just another proprietary Sony format that will never catch on, like the 3.5" floppy disk. When will they ever learn?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It really is. Before it even launched, it was dead. Most of the studios backed BluRay, and it was going to be in the PS3, which whether you care for the PS3 or not, provided a larger installed base almost overnight.
Not only is BlockBuster no longer ordering HD-DVD, but many large retailers are canceling all orders of HD-DVD.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
(Note this doesn't mean the BluRay is guaranteed success, but simply that the HD-DVD is dead)
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This article ignores the significant previous work by David Paul Gregg which led to the Laserdisc and the derivative CD tehcnology. I therefore dispute the validity of James Russell, because Gregg was the first one to put music digitally on a reflective disc to be read by laser. I attended a Laserdisc demonstration Gregg gave to Mensa members in Los Angeles sometime in the early 1970s at his home. Russell may have conceived of a technology, but Gregg was the first to actually implement a working means to digitally handle audio and music on a disc for mass consumption. He did a lot of work and should get proper credit. CDs came after his efforts.
I had the honor of meeting Mr. Russell in NYC during the Audio Engineering Society's conference in 2003. He was an interesting person to speak with and was very understated. He sat next to my fiancee on the shuttle bus returning from the conference to Times Square and it was only after chatting with him for 10 minutes or so that he revealed (after much prodding) that he was at the conference as part of the AES Historical section and that he felt like it was a waste of effort to be present. He said that nobody was interested in meeting him.
At that, my fiancee turned to me and my other friends, sitting behind them, and introduced us.
We chatted for the remainder of the bus ride and he told us a little of what the invention process was like and how he hadn't even made a dime from something that we noted had changed the world. (He wasn't bitter, BTW.)
I got his autograph (as did several others) and a short line formed. I still have the CD I had him sign.
It's nice to see him getting some recognition.
Jory
They just don't make it like they used to!! I was given a Discman D-50 (hand-me-down) around 1987 and it is still running GREAT today. Fact is I never had a need to upgrade. The newer units were made out of plastic (d-50 is METAL) and tended to have lower quality D->A as well as inferior processing. It is still hooked up to my stereo as I never used it as a "portable."
Chalk one up for Sony's quality during it's power years of the 1980s. I plan to keep using it for many more years!
Why bother mentioning the CDTV? It was an expensive out-dated hunk o' junk. The PC Engine CD ROM was fairly successful in Japan, released two years earlier, and cost far less than $1000.
Sampling rate of 16-bit @ 44.1khz vs. 24-bit @ 192khz.
For 74 minutes of audio to the latter spec, you're talking about 2.5GB.
But, admittedly, most people couldn't care less about the quality difference with most music. But if you've ever heard the same recording on both formats, the difference is obvious, since you're basically getting a copy of the studio master.
"...Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts."
Capacitance.
It seems to me that if the designers had stuck to the original 115m diameter, we wouldn't have called this thing a *compact* disc. Quite a typo to repeat twice in the document.
The RIAA want to move to more locked down formats and pay per play. Despite iTunes, most people prefer CDs because it's DRM free and an excellent archive format. The leading reasons for the decrease in CD sales are closed stores and reduced floor space in places like Walmart.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
An open question...why 44.1khz for the sampling rate?
OK, I know the answer...because VCR-based PCM audio systems of the late 1970s used the 44.1 sampling rate. Indeed, the PCM1630...the only way to master a CD until the mid 1990s or so used a U-Matic VCR along with a PCM encoder?
So why did the PCM system use 44.1? The answer is that a NTSC video signal has 245 lines of resolution, updated 60 times a second; a PAL video signal has 294 lines of resolution, updated 50 lines a second. The technology could store 3 samples in a single horizontal line, either at 14 bits with some error correction, or at 16 bits with almost no error correction. Well, except for the fact that a NTSC signal actually has 259 lines, not 245 lines. I have never gotten a straight answer on why we only use 245 of the 259 lines. I think it has to do with the vertical sync part of a signal not being recorded on a video tape, but I can be wrong here.
So, does anyone know why late 1970s PCM systems used only 245 of 259 lines of vertical resolution to store audio?
Bill was in Sydney on the day he became a billionaire* and was surprised to find a bunch of locals wanting to hear more of his recently published thoughts on the then still prospective new medium, but was happy enough to participate in a breakfast discussion quickly arranged by his then Australian representative Linda Graham.
CD-ROM was arguably his last time Bill was close enough to the leading edge that others who made a living at that edge sought his opinion.
*M$ had listed overnight Australian time.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
from the fine article:
Tell me, where do you keep 115 meter disks? I can imagine them being immortal, impervious to dust and scratch proof but very heavy. The mechanism would also be next to immortal but would be loud and take a lot of power by today's standards.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
there's a term for people that prefer 12 inchers: size queen.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It seems to me that if the designers had stuck to the original 115m diameter, we wouldn't have called this thing a *compact* disc. Quite a typo to repeat twice in the document.
Remember, they were working with pumped ammonia masers! Instead of a diode, they had one of those horn shaped things you see on the old Bell towers. Those were brave days, when EE and Civil Engineers were both called on.
You don't want to know about the Hollerith version that really started it all as part of the Manhattan Project. I worked well but consumed more energy then the bombs released. To make the servos, the national silver supply was nearly depleted.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Also, the famous Why has the compact disc 74 minutes of playtime is explained there:
bash$
Link
But, I hope you're correct.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
FTFA: Many other decisions were made that year, such as the disc diameter (115m)...
The disc diameter was changed from 115m to 120mm to allow for 74 minutes of playback with the sampling rate and quality chosen.
Thank god. I'd hate to imagine the storage rack I'd need to keep those 115m discs.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
However, Sony vice-president Norio Ohga, who was responsible for the project, did not agree. "Let us take the music as the basis," he said. He hadn't studied at the Conservatory in Berlin for nothing. Ohga had fond memories of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ('Alle Menschen werden Brüder'). That had to fit on the CD. There was room for those few extra minutes, the Philips engineers agreed. The performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, lasted for 66 minutes. Just to be quite sure, a check was made with Philips' subsidiary, PolyGram, to ascertain what other recordings there were. The longest known performance lasted 74 minutes. This was a mono recording made during the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1951 and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. This therefore became the playing time of a CD. A diameter of 12 centimeters was required for this playing time.
In this way the specifications of the CD were determined by means of intensive contact between Philips and Sony.
http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/dossier /optrec/beethoven.html
Just thought you'ld like to know
qz
The submission mentions CD-ROM, but the article talks about Compact Disc Digital Audio...
If I recall correctly it was Ron Kok, a Dutch entrepreneur, who came up with a *MUCH* more efficient production method to make them cheaper. He put the separate components inline and improved the sequence, thus taking away a lot of the media handling which caused quality issues. Quality went up, volume went up, price came down.
Did the guy get rich off it? No, because in those days he was naive and thus had it stolen and copied from right underneath his nose. He's fared better since, but he's the guy that's responsible for CDs being so dirt cheap (AFAIK, been a while since I heard this).
Insert
Very few people own music systems capable of revealing the difference between a well encoded lossy track and a CD, let alone the difference between identical recordings on CD and HD formats. Even then, the differences are subtle when played on the same system. If you think you are hearing an enormous and obvious difference, it is probably the result of a different mix. Don't get me wrong. HD recordings can sound great. They can also sound like crap if mastered poorly, just like any other format.
This, however, is a pointless conversation. DVD-A and SACD are not totally dead, but they're not exactly on their way to widespread acceptance either. I see them as a transitional format for the audiophile, sort of like Laserdiscs were for the videophile. CD's will be around for quite some time yet, just as VHS lived on long after Laserdisc died. The question is, what are we transitioning to? I think the answer is high quality lossless files. I have some FLAC encoded rips of HD music and they sound great, but they're currently not very common. (Bloody freaking rare is more like it!) However, I can see this as becomming the audiophile's preferred format of the future. Computers and media hardware are converging, and these HD files offer all the advantages of other music files. You can have your entire music collection in one device so that you can queue up weeks if not months of continuous high quality music and access anything you own nearly instantly. This beats the pants off of getting up and trying to find that SACD you bought years ago to physically stick it in the player. The only thing missing is that you can't really buy tracks like this yet.
The masses, of course, don't give a rats ass about quality. They could set up a decent home listening rig, but instead buy the latest crappy iPod dock/speaker combo. Who cares if it will be useless junk within a year or two when apple changes their dock connector design? The quality of sound on these docks typically isn't anywhere near being good enough to reveal the difference between a 128 kps AAC file and a lossless file anyways. Ergo, these people can get all their music off of iTunes. Yum! In almost all respects a CD would be better, but being able to order it from the comfort of your chair trumps all for most people.
No, the CD is not dead. SACD and DVD-A aren't going to kill it, just like laserdisc never killed VHS. Lossy file downloads won't kill it either because the quality just isn't as good. CD will live on just fine until high quality lossless downloads become common, rather than the very rare exception.
I still have my very first CD player. Oversized unit that was an addon component for a stereo I bought in the 80s. Last I checked it still works too.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
All this time I thought the primary medium for listening to music were either speakers or my ears...or the air...here I was all wrong.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I always felt it was a missed opportunity that metadata never took off on the compact disk. With the (relative) gobs of storage it is trivial to add album and tracktitles to a CD, or even lyrics. There is CD-text, but somehow it was an afterthought that never took off. It it had been part of the CD spec (as in: add metadata in order to be spec compliant) manufacturers would have been more likely to implement it in their hardware, especially as displays became more advanced.
Slashdot previously covered an article on How To Choose Archival CD/DVD Media
Well, I looked, but could find no reference to James Russell in any of the official histories. The nearest person to a single producer of the CD appears to be one Rudiani (hope I remember the name right!), who worked for Phillips in the 1950s. Russell was 1965. Obviously lots of people were working on light-operated recording then!
I did a bit more research, and found the OP had been copied from a list of American Inventors which was obviously designed to boost American prestige - one of these 'American Inventor of the Day' sites which ignore all prior foreign work.
Celebrate the CD by all means - but don't believe the Americocentric propaganda that is so common on the Web nowadays as Americans try to pursuade themselves that they're still successful.
hold 72 minutes of audio, because Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was that long. Philips proposed the 36-kHz standard, because it made a smaller, more compact disc and matched a telecom standard that would make downloading and transferring music easier\x{2014}which I find rather ironic. Sony preferred the 44.1-kHz sampling rate, because it matched the upper reaches of audible sound at 20,000 cycles.
The final decision was made in a meeting in Hawaii, according to Richard Bruno, who was a Philips executive and one of the company's CD project managers. With final arguments running into recreational time, Bjorn Blutgen of Philips and Toshi Doi of Sony took to surfboards still bickering. One of them had the bright idea of challenging the other to a surfing match: Whoever fell off the board first would lose. The Dutchman lost. Hence we have a 44.1-kHz sampling rate on today's CDs. Now you know.
(Resources: from my own memory when ages ago i read this while taking a shit on the john: From John C. Dvorak's Inside Track, PC Magazine http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1573633,00.as p)
CD was not the first technology to read discs without physical contact. RCA had a turntable capable of "reading" vinyl records with a light-beam in the late 1930s.
s g_0000018187.shtml
The RCA Magic Brain Victrola/Radio "was advertised as being able to play both sides of a record without turning it over and used a jewel-lite scanner that eliminated the needle and you could stack up to 15 records at a time."
Sometimes seen advertised on RCA 78rpm record labels of the period.
http://www.phonoland.com/archives/mboards/18100/m
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
It's very strange that they left this part out in the story. Otherwise it would have been good. As far as I know, it was when the lead researcher showed it to his wife, she asked how much fitted on that disc. SHE then complained it's rubbish if it didn't fit.
They could set up a decent home listening rig, but instead buy the latest crappy iPod dock/speaker combo.
I plug my iPod (and more than a few Apple Lossless tracks) into an Adcom GTP-350 connected to a Parasound HCA-500 driving 1998 Paradigm MiniMark-3s.
I'd argue that when playing Apple Lossless or direct 44.1/8 rips, the sound from this setup gets within discerning distance of 8-track digital tape through studio clean amps driving NS-10Ms.
My whole setup cost ~$390.00 on eBay. And I, for one, am glad most people plug their iPods into Bose-esque "all highs, all lows" setups.
It makes the quality home listening equipment cheaper for the rest of us.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
CD-DA was the first format (the "Red Book"), was belatedly recognized by the IT industry as a possible data storage medium, and so was adapted with improved error correction (the "Yellow Book") and later extended to multisession capability. Philips Interactive CD-I (the "Green Book"), CD-R (the "Orange Book"), etc. all have their roots in the CD-DA spec.
Not the first time an audio or audiovisual technology was adapted for "plain" data, same thing happened with DAT (after the record companies' lobbying killed it as a consumer format).
that looked into the future of household technology. It foresaw a digital playback system that used the same binary format as the compact disc but the media was credit card shaped. From what I remember (and we're talking 25 years since I last looked at it) the player would still spin to read the data on the card, which made the scanning area about 8" (20cm) in diameter and would require far more oversampling than exists in the best CD players. It can only have been a few years before the first CDs appeared.
From TFA: The disc diameter was changed from 115m to 120mm to allow for 74 minutes of playback...
Maybe they thought it might be hard to get consumers to put a 115 meter playback device in their room. And of course they would get complaints from record stores who should have to get bigger doors to get the disks through, not to mention storage space.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
>The disc diameter was changed from 115m to 120mm
Now that's what you call size reduction.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The maximum frequency that can be determined in a digital sampling system is half the sampling frequency. That is the Nyquist limit.
However, the Nyquist limit has NOTHING to do with amplitude. So you can accurately determing the piccolo harmonic that says "it's a piccolo" rather than "descant recorder at the same fundamental frequency" as long as the harmonic is less than 1/2 the sampling frequency.
However, if you don't think accurate amplitude is worth worrying about, turn your treble control up to +30dB. The frequencies are accurately reproduced. So why's it sound shit?
Amplitude is not kept.
So for sounds with harmonic shapes that are more important to its' reproduction (else everything would sound like a sine wave), you need to sample more than twice up and twice down to work out what the amplitude and therefore effect of the harmonic means on the SHAPE of the sound. That means no longer a basic of 20kHz but a basic that could be as low as 10 or even 8 kHz.
you can hear higher than that, can't you?
Sony and Philips, to be precise. Can't believe that TFA didn't mention that.
There is a reason why the hole in a CD is *exactly* (and I mean *exactly*) the size of the old Dutch 10-cents coin. Also the size of the CD was derived from the fact that it needed to be able to hold, on a single disc, a 78-minute long Mozart concert which was the favorite of the wife of one of the developers.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Why do people need every invention to be invented by someone from their country? James Russell??? The CD is possibly the best example of a joint development between a Dutch and a Japanese company. That an American would try to fit in an American somewhere in here is a bit pathetic. Nothing against Americans, everyone does it. Sad.
Actually, even with all that it wouldn't be possible. A 115m disc would have a surface area of 10382m^2, let's say 10000 less the hole. Let's say a man can lift 100kg, that'd require it to be 10g/m^2 which is thinner than the thinnest paper I could find, which comes out to about 25g/m^2. Obviously it doesn't have the rigidity required to be lifted, and if you dragged it you'd rip it. And you sure as hell wouldn't want to purchase it on a windy day...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That Americans want to crowbar in an American inventor into the history of the CD..
Sadly the reality is, that CD was a European/Japanese concept/product..
Surely TFA is actually about the history of the CD, not the CD-ROM, unlike the title of the slashdot article.
You do know that Sony killed off the $500 PS3 in the US?
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
115 metres? How much data did they want to store?
I, for one, am glad they dropped the size down to 120mm.
Sadly, NS10s were some of the worst sounding studio monitors used. The premise of them is that if you could get your mix to sound good on NS10s, it'd sound good on nearly anything. Also, they were ubiquitous. So, like knowing Protools, if you were used to mixing on NS10s you could mix at most studios in the western world.
I wouldn't willingly listen to music on NS10s for pleasure.
And who is that individual who didn't invent every parts of the compact disc and why should he be so important?
After all, I didn't invent every part of the compact disc! Indeed, I did even invent no part of the compact disk! Surely that is even more notable than not having invented every part?
I think you mean something like "The inventor of the compact disc [...] is often disputed as not one individual did invent every part of the compact disc".
Please, everyone, either learn basic propositional logic or shut up.
Have you noticed how when you're listening to the radio the quality seems good, until you actually pay attention? I assume the brain fills in the missing information (if you're familiar with the song) and you don't notice it at all. It still bugs me right away if I play a 128 kbps mp3 on my pc though (even though its quality is higher than radio's)...
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
...(the one pictured near the top of the article) at my college radio station. WMHD, at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, is in Terre Haute, IN, just a few miles from the Sony DADC plant. They gave the radio station its first CD player before I entered college (probably 1984 or '85, I came in in late '86), along with a small stack of CDs (mostly pop stuff that we rarely played). That player was a frikkin' tank, and lasted in heavy service for probably at least four years. I'd almost totally forgotten about it, but that eject button on the CD drawer itself,... definitely the one.
From the article: "... the most common being 12 cm in diameter (known as maxi singles when used for storing music)." As far as I know, the 12 inch vinyl 45 rpm singles were known as maxi singles. I never heard a 12cm CD being referred to as a maxi single. Only in America one could find this mixup.
Maarten
When Philips held the patent to create the CD it also patented the creation process, thus forcing companies who wanted to make a CD on their own to create a decent product which had a life span lasting at least 25 years, the golden CD's could even live for a hundred years.
This patent has ended quite some time ago and so everyone is free to make CD's in the way they want. The result? Prices are indeed cheap but the lifespan and overal quality have also heavily dropped. To me the CD is proof that not all patents are stupid.
...it's an English paper written by a 10th grader! And apparently, SiliconUser doesn't employ editors, they just reprint submissions from users. Here are some examples from the "article", not including the terrible opening sentence that appears in the summary and the "115m" joke you've already seen 115 times:
;)
"The compact disc first surfaced the public eye's scope..." WTF??
"The sales and production of LPs began to suffer in the 1988..."
"With the work of Sony and many others, the CD finally an industry standard..."
""Sony" and its logo is a registered trademark of Sony Corporation."
Things like this, coupled with numerous paragraphs that struggle (and fail) to stay on topic made me wonder how this made the front page at slashdot. Ick! Do slashdot's editors moonlight at SiliconUser (or vice versa)?
ON DELETE CASCADE
...driving NS-10Ms.
I hope it doesn't sound as bad as that. Good tools for mixing, but they sound dreadful in 'hifi' terms.
The original mastering equipment used videotape.
Apple hasn't ever changed the dock connector design much. Even the oldest dock-connector speaker system will work with the newest iPod.
But hey, a little dose of FUD makes Christmas come all that faster.
Ah, so what you're saying in a nutshell is that everyone you know are horrible thieves who don't care about the artists they are listening to or the music industry in general? Good to know.
There are plenty of artists who understand that making a copy is not theft. They have already provided more music than you could listen to with the rest of your life. See the internet archive's live music depositories and magnatune for a start.
I would rather have a tangible backup for when my hard drive crashes. ... t may take time, but I'm going to be more than happy to re-rip 900 CDs than spend another $900 to buy the albums again.
That is one service the music publishers actually provide. Pressed CDs are tangible and durable. This small service is more than outweighed by predatory practices that screw everyone but a few executives at three big music companies. If you want to look for harm to artists, look no further than the monopoly distorted market for music. They are not doing well in a non-free market. The user is faced with the fact that CDs and albums are the only legal way to get your hands on the vast majority of recorded music history.
I'm not so happy about re-ripping. The beauty of free music is that you can copy your properly ripped and tagged archive as often as you like. My entire music collection is never more than an grsync away from another jukebox.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What? You fill out your name and address, plug in a credit card number, pick a password.
Those are just the start of your restrictions. I'm not too keen on giving a non free application my credit card, just so I can run it. That sounds like a porn scam, but is a little less risky because you might trust Apple not to screw you. Other nasty, porn like tricks include saving all of your music in a way that you can't tell what it is. The music is renamed and stored in separate files from the tags. Then, Apple extends control beyond the reach of porn masters into copy protection so that the number of devices you can "sync" with is limited.
There are no such limitations with free music or normally ripped CDs. That is easier for me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
on a full disk.
Double blind tests make it unlikely most people can even hear them.
That's precisely what I just said. Thanks for the clarification.
Optical media has been around for a while so I have to wonder if this guy simply looked at the optical media at the time and thought "golly gee, I wonder if I could put music on this?"
Remember the original Laser Disc format for movies? Analog. This basically what this guy did except instead of using analog data the music CD used a digital file.
Still, is interesting.
Appa rentl y pr oof reding is a think of t he pass.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Perhaps they were transcoded, but AFAIK even without that, the quality of the encoder can make a lot of difference. Therefore, it's maybe not so helpful to damn 128kbps audio without judging it in the best case- or to at least mention the quality of the encoder as well.
(*) Which I believe is a derivative of the well-regarded LAME.
(**) Technics, although for £20, I know they're probably just jumped-up Panasonics. They even use the same case as a cheaper Panasonic model. But for the money, they're quite decent.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Thanks for the belly laugh tonight!
Libertas in infinitum
You insensitive clod, I'm handling 12" since you were in diapers, it's not the size that matters but what you do with it ;) Turn it up!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Let's hear it for some other inventors of an enabling technology used on CD's: the Reed-Solomon code! It was invented by mathematicians Irving Reed and Gus Solomon. I happened to know Gus Solomon when he was alive, and he often quipped (in a humorous way), that they never gave him a goddamn dime for using Reed-Solomon codes on CD's. (Nor as I understand did Reed, nor Elwyn Berlekamp, who came up with an efficient decoding algorithm which made R-S codes practical.)