Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
Which is why I specifically mentioned the Star Wars soundtrack.
Pearl Jam's album likely isn't going to be mixed for 5.1, sadly, though I'd buy that in a heartbeat as well.
But the Star Wars score was recorded and mixed in 5.1 so it isn't a stretch if the format really existed to release some movie scores in DVDA.
By the way, DVDA also has another meaning that I can't link to because it isn't safe for work.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
A number of classical labels (BIS, Naxos, CC...) offer DVD Audio (or SACD). Classical music fans tend to be more concerned with sound quality than the average listener of popular music, so it makes sense these formats would be targeted at them. However, the OP may be right that a CD is good enough. One may question the need for a special format to give 5.1 surround when IRCAM developed software (Spatializer) that could simulate the movement of sounds in a 3D space. I discovered it through the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Boulez's Repons though I wonder why it hasn't been used more widely, and in other music genres as well.
Also, the famous Why has the compact disc 74 minutes of playtime is explained there:
bash$
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
Mini-disc _could_ have completely dominated back in say '98-99ish, but Sony held it too tightly. At the time mp3 was just starting to have an impact, but you couldn't get decent players for a few more years. Meanwhile CD-Rs hadn't really taken off yet and portable CD players were always too big.
I don't just mean for music either, at the time I was carrying a zip drive to uni and back to move my research around. $35AUD for a 100Mb disk. Meanwhile Minidiscs cost $5-10 and held 120Mb. Bring out a player that acts as a portable 120Mb disk drive which cheap disks, that could also play all the mp3s that people were starting to get off Napster and it would have exploded at any point up until 2002 or so when Ipods started to get affordable.
But Sony were too scared of piracy, so everyone used someone else's technology to pirate Sony music anyway, and Sony didn't own the hardware market, which they could have.
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)
Yep, I'll agree with that, but that doesn't stop some people. Len Lye is a classic example. Much of his body of work was unproduced at the time of his death, the materials being either not readily available or (most often)technologically possible. Lye never expected to live to see most of his work completed and only now are some of his smaller works being produced at full scale, many of the pieces in galleries at the moment are only scale models.
The Len Lye Foundation, set up shortly after his death, aims to produce each one of his works, in full scale where possible, as a tribute to the energy, vitality and pure joy with which he approached his life, his art, and everything he did.
THUD~*
actually, 44.1 kHz is an 'interesting number' -- it is the product of the squares of the first four prime numbers, that is, 2**2 x 3**2 x 5**2 x 7**2. It therefore has a whole host of small integer factors. I don't believe that such relationship came about 'accidentally'.
I have to say I'm honestly shocked. The way fickle America is, I would figure they would go "BluRay? What's that?" and then go "HD-DVD? Well, it has DVD in it, and I know HD has a better quality picture, and it is a DVD after all." I personally wasn't going to buy either until a. A good quality cheap BluRay/HD-DVD/DVD/VCD/CD player came out or b. Someone in this worthless battle of the new "awesome" formats actually won. I'm still going to hold out, but it looks like I'm going to eventually be getting a BluRay player for my home this Christmas, or next Christmas if it's still not solved.
I run Ubuntu skinned to look like a Mac on a PC. Go figure.
If you can't tell the difference between 128kb and lossless formats, its quite likely that your source either sucked originally, or your speakers aren't good enough.
If you try "audiophile grade" earphones, headphones or speakers (Grado, Shure, Klipsch, Etymotic Research etc) you will likely hear a big difference between the two. The side effect of buying higher end audio equipment is it makes your mp3s harder to enjoy, I've since switched to ripping my CDs in FLAC.
http://www.intellexual.net/bose.html
I was walking through Best Buy and immediately stopped and said, "man this TV looks great!"
Then I looked and saw it was playing a BluRay movie. I'll never understand why people attempt to sell these really expensive TVs and in the stores generally just hook up a a standard cable signal. If you want to show off what the TV is capable, pump some HD content into it at the store.
Maybe 'round Christmas time there will be a decent price break on the PS3, and if the $500 version comes down to $400 I'll bite.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yet a recent study (that I believe was posted here in Slashdot) said most people couldn't tell the difference between $400 headphones and $5 ones from listening to them.
I get tons of compliments on how good my sound-setup sounds.
Given that lossless formats have a good chunk of their size coming from areas beyond the capability for the human ear to perceive, I'm not sure why everyone is so down on lossy formats.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.