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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."
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
don't you mean HD-DVD?
The flames are out ther, let the war begin!
When all else fails, try.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, they missed an 'm'. They deserve to die.
Nope, not Tchaikovsky. The CD was enlarged from 11.5 to 12 cm to be able to fit 74 min of music, the longest known recording of Beethoven's nineth symphony.
OK, a look at the Wikipedia answers my question. Looking at the NTSC article, it states "Each frame consists of 486 lines out of a total of 525 (the rest are used for sync, vertical retrace, and other data such as captioning)" (Divide the number by 2 because of interlacing). The corresponding PAL article states that PAL is "a video format that has 625 lines per frame (576 visible lines, the rest being used for other information such as sync data and captioning)". OK, so they could use a few, but not many, lines in the "vertical sync" to store more PCM audio. And that is exactly what they did.
So why 44.1 instead of 44.056? PAL-based PCM systems had a 44.1 sampling rate; NTSC systems 44.056. They chose 44.1 because it was an easier to remember number.
So there you have it. More than you ever wanted to know about why CDs have a 44.1 sampling rate.
And, oh, I like CDs more than MP3s. Thank you, I care about audio quality, and hate the sound of 128k mp3s. Especially the crappily encoded ones that sound really metallic.
It wouldn't help anything. Today's optical discs are based on the continual refinement of manufacturing processes. You could go back in time and explain how to make a BluRay disc and player, but no one would be able to manufacture discs with tight enough tolerances or microchips of sufficient speed and power to play back the data stream. And that's leaving out the issue of finding an HDTV set to make full use of the format. (HDTV was invented in 1969, but wasn't commercially viable until the 90's.)
Most people don't think about it, but inventions are driven as much by infrastructure as they are by smart people. If you lack the necessary industrial base, having all the technical knowledge in the world won't help you. (Witness a lot of third-world countries. The knowledge for a lot of technology is available, but they can't manufacture it.) To close the gap you still need to build tools which you refine and/or use to build better tools which you refine and/or use to build better tools, so on and so forth.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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?
It's because the black and white TVs of the 50s and 60s (when color TV was standardized) had pad time between each frame to allow the electron gun to move from the bottom corner back up to the top. Since the powers that be in the US (although I doubt this would have been the case today) decided that the new color standard was to fully compatible with the old b&w standard, this padding had to be present in the new standard as well. It's the same reason FM stereo signals are encoded jointly (That is, one channel is put on the carrier and then the difference between that and the other channel is encoded into it kind of like how Dolby 5.1 is encoded into a stereo signal (involving complex mathematics and analog hardware). As opposed to sending out two channels separately.). People like backward compatibility. The audio part is probably for much the same reasons. IIRC, PAL doesn't have this padding because Britain decided to screw over b&w TV owners instead.
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
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.
The last part of your answer is incorrect.
In the UK (As in other places) the same PAL encoded UHF signal can be received and decoded by both Colour & B/W TV sets.
Some 80%+ of the signal is actually the B/W information. The remainder is the colour stuff.
B/W TV's ignore the colour stuff obviously.
The missing lines (here in the UK) are used for vertical sync data and TELETEXT. I was involved in desiging some of the early text inserter kit back in the early 1980's.
I demo'd a CD-ROM in Cannes in Sept 1985 at a Trade Show. It was connected up to a DEC MicroVAX System and we showed installing software from the disk.
We still occassionally use the very high quality Phillips drive (1X speed) to read disks that other drives just give up on.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
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.
"Dolby 5.1" cannot be encoded in an analog stereo signal; the .1 implies you're referring to Dolby Digital 5.1, which is a 6-track discrete compression system using digitally encoded audio. Dolby Pro-Logic, which is what I think you're referring to, is matrix-encoded in analogue stereo audio. It is a four channel system, where audio that's in-phase across the left and right signals is routed to the center, and audio that's near 180 out of phase is routed to the (mono) surround channel.
Not to mention solid-state blue lasers.
He's probably a audiophile. A single bit error in their music causes them to haywire and then explode. This is the same effect applied to text.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
"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."
Is that where they hide the data for closed captioning?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
As many audiophiles will tell you, though humans cannot generally perceive tones above 20kHz, they are able to use high-frequency information for things like localization, and an entire high-resolution sound recording market, based on 96 and 192 kHz recording formats is built around it. The quote from the website above sort of tries to reason the 44.1 issue backwards: why didn't they just do 44.0 or (44.2 even?) if they were trying to find a sample rate that didn't convert so well? Particularly when the best analogue formats, like 30 ips 2 inch tape, can record up to 30 kHz?
Here's the story my recording engineering teachers passed down to me, accept it if you wish:
A long time ago the only way you could make a digital recording (without building a cleanroom or spending $10 grand on a 1 Gig hard drive) was to take your digital bit-stream and record it on some kind of helical video tape. Sony was the first company to sell these devices, which were basically black boxes with audio in on one side, and video out on the other; you would then take this video signal (which looks like "checkerboard" noise on a TV) and send it to a VCR to record. The best commonly-available video recording format at the time was 3/4" U-Matic.
U-Matic can record the full 525 lines of an NTSC image at (nominally) 30 frames/sec. In tests, the Sony engineers found they could squeeze about 47,040 bits into a frame. (There's some way this worked out into an integer number of bits per an integer number of lines, but I can't remember the math right now. It averages about 90 bits per line.)
So, if you have 47,040 bits per frame, you have 1,411,200 bits per second, which is 176,400 bytes/sec, which is the data rate of 44.1 kHz stereo PCM. The system also works for PAL, which only runs at 25 video frames per second, but has 625 line to record on, making up the difference.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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
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~*
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.
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'.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
Nonsense. The article is right.
Oh you're just pissed off because I didn't use first post for another Harry Potter spoiler (sad), or a 'Yay! First Post' post (sad), or some gibberish internet slang (insular rubbish).
THUD~*
You appear to be very confused about how TV works. The blanking during retrace was an issue for NTSC; hence the 7.5IRE pedistal, but this has nothing to do with the subject. The main issue here is that the NTSC changed the horizontal and vertical frequencies of broadcast TV from 15750/60 to 15734/59.94 (retaining the 525 lines) thus altering the harmonic spectrum and reducing a beat that occurred between the sound carrier and colour sub-carrier. Sound mastering continued on video/PCM machines at 15750/60 using the common (with PAL 15625/50) sampling frequency of 44.1KHz. The moment you want to synchronise this with pictures, the sampling frequency will change to 44.056 due to the slight field rate difference.
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?
Probably because it was one of the first computers (although originally sold as a console, you could get it with mouse and keyboard) to come with CD ROM as standard rather than an add-on. Why mention the Mac? Is "first Macintosh" worth of a category on its own?
use high-frequency information for things like localization
That sounds suspiciously like hearing to me.
>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
And barely a trailblazer. Atari had the Atari CDAR-504 out in late 1985 (sort of) for the ST line although there was only something like half a dozen CD-ROM titles available including such stuff as the Boeing 747 parts manual.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
exactly. The blue laser is a much more important invention that it will likely ever get credit for.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Capacitance is a physical phenomenon, and so is laser.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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
> An open question...why 44.1khz for the sampling rate?
In 1996 I started doing CD-R support for HP. Back then it was a Philips-OEM HP 4020i with an AdvanSys SCSI controller. The things were expensive as hell, and hard to use given the state of computers and FirmWare at the time. Buffer Underrun was the most dreaded message around as CD-R disks retailed for 25 Guilders (10 Euros, 13 USD) a pop.
Anyway, during my initial training on CD's I got a technology overview where it was explained that the typical human ear can "hear" a sampling rate of 20 Khz. There is a rule called the Nyquist Criterion that says that digital sampling must double that to not hurt audio quality for human consumption. Why exactly 44.1 was chosen and not, say, 42 or the more logical 48 had to do with the fact that the original CD mastering equipment was pseudo video equipment. I believe this page explains it nicely:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/audio/44.1.html
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.
This just means that your 20 kHz non sinusoidal wave has frequency components above 20KHz which can not be reproduced by sampling at 40KHz and have to be either filtered out before sampling or aliased. * If I sample at 40KHz and do not have aliasing issues, then waveforms with frequency components up to 20 kHz may be reproduced accurately including the amplitude within the limitations of quantization and other errors.
* Actually a 40 kHz sample rate limits you to reproducing frequency components UP TO half the sample rate or 20 kHz so a 20 kHz sine wave sampled synchronously at 40 kHz is not reproducible as it aliases to 0 kHz. A 19.999KHz sine wave is.
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.
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.
It seems the Digg crowd is invading Slashdot...
Get a life.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
HD-DVD seems quite doomed.
It seems poised to follow Betamax. The main difference being that Betamax was really better than VHS and some people still use Betamax-like technologies in professional settings. HD-DVD has no such future.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
...(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.
I'd give you more mod points but you're already at 5. This is such a major concept that gets ignored in all sorts of areas. My favorite example is when people talk about 'living off the land' on the moon or mars. We'll have these incredible fabrication machines that will build what ever we need from the materials found there! Bull! Only the most basic basic basic items can be fabricated this way (i.e. walls, windows, tables, chairs). Try 'fabricating' a PC. A PC might only require a few kg of materials, but the entire infrastructure that went into building that PC covers hundreds or thousands of manufacturers, numerous plants, machines, assembly steps, additional materials used to treat the parts (organic solvents, WATER - lots of WATER), etc. You don't just sift some dirt and make a PC! Today's technology is only possible because we have yesterday's technology to build it. That's true for BluRay and HD-DVD as much as anything else.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
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.
Television standards in the states were essentially the creation of RCA.
Introducing compatible color makes perfect economic sense when there are tens of millions of existing black and white sets and you are the dominant manufacturer and broadcaster.
Peter Goldmark was demonstrating field-sequential color in 1940, a hybrid system that used color wheels in both the camera and the receiver.
Prototype sets were massive even by console radio standards --- and it became perfectly clear that CBS didn't have the resources to develop all-electronic color.
Broadcasting on the VHF band meant that you could get deep penetration into suburban and rural areas without building a network of repeaters.
Tuning the UHF bands - which is what you need for field-sequential - wasn't all that easy in the vacuum tube era.
O.k. So we go back in time and keep early tech from dying. Zip back to our own time and DUDE! We're living on a world orbiting Alpha Centari!
...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.
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.
Double blind tests make it unlikely most people can even hear them.
That's precisely what I just said. Thanks for the clarification.
Oh you're just pissed off because I didn't use first post for another Harry Potter spoiler (sad
Dumbledore is dead...
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
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).
People are kind of snotty about plastic, but can you honestly imagine anything resembling the modern world without it?
And speaking of plastics and materials in general, what about all the materials developed over the past (say) 25 years? The kind that you don't even see, and probably aren't aware of because they're hidden or don't look any different to older plastics- but whose properties are essential to modern inventions.
I don't know much about the science of materials, but having thought about it, I'm pretty convinced that it's another of those "unsung hero" areas.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
That's perfectly valid english. Natural languages don't work like computer languages. (ZOMGWTF--I'm saying that both natural languages and computer languages fail to work? No. If you have an obsolete or incorrectly-implemented parser module that does not fully support english, try the sentence "Natural languages and computer languages work differently.")
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
Un-sung is probably not an apt term for it. Engineers designed materials working for company X, and most of them got a decent bonus/promotion/raise for their work. My professor for Semiconductors1 knew the person who thought up the idea of using a single silicon crystal to control the voltage on a MOSFET device. It's an advance, not a breakthrough. He got a decent raise, a good bonus, and a promotion so that he would be able to have a few people work under him for further research.
My grandfather designed parts of the engine for the SR-71. As the result of his work (some of which he still can't talk about), he still receives a pension. At the time, he was promoted to management.
We can't reward every advance as a breakthrough and put it in the history textbooks. At some point it comes down to "Here is the problem, we need a solution". Some people go out, research a solution and sell it to a company. Or maybe they become private inventors. Just because you solved today's problem in materials science as a material scientist doesn't mean that you get a shiny medal and the Nobel Prize.
Well yes and no. If you give someone a hearing test, and send the headphones a tone at 30 kHz, no normal human will raise their hand. On the other hand, if you send them a 3 kHz tone with a 30 kHz overtone, and the overtone to their left ear is +20 deg late in phase, they're likely to say that the sound they're hearing is coming from their right side.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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).
I didn't mean that- I was talking about the materials and concepts themselves being the "unsung heroes". Yes, these are incremental improvements, but the overall effect of these improvements is still significant. They deserve (or at least warrant) prominence, if only because so much wouldn't be possible without them.
Let me put it another way; people notice computers, and the way they improve, even though those improvements are mostly incremental- especially Intel and AMD's processors. But they don't notice the everyday developments without which the modern world wouldn't be possible. This isn't about rewarding people, it's about considering things that we take for granted.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Thanks for the belly laugh tonight!
Libertas in infinitum
Don't be pendantic.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
> Why bother mentioning the CDTV?
Maybe because, thanks to its CDXL format, the CDTV could play quarter-screen full-motion video with just an A500-standard motherboard!
In effect, Commodore's CDTV was the forerunner of today's DVD movie-playing technology - with VideoCD as the next intermediate step along!
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
"Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name."
Thanks for the wikipedia link!
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
Your suggested rephrasing was awkward.
And, what, because he has a website means he's right? This isn't the first non-error I've seen on that site.
[quote]Yes, it is syntactically perfectly valid. But it is semantically utterly and completely fucking wrong because it doesn't say what is meant.[/quote]
It does say what is meant. The fact that you don't understand (or pretend not to understand) what is said does not mean it is in fact different from what is meant.
Putting "not" after the verb negates the sentence as a whole. "X does not Y" means !("X does Y") - "one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc" means !("one individual did invent every part of the compact disc"). The fact that you don't understand this rule does not mean that it is not valid.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
Oh, and this rule does not "reduce the expressiveness" of the language - there are no concepts/situations/etc that can only be expressed by using this phrasing to mean what you want it mean that can't be expressed in some other way. This is like saying that array indexing from zero reduces the expressiveness of C because you expect it to be indexed from one.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
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.)
How is 'THUD' even slightly insular? A good solid impact is something that EVERYONE can enjoy. Whereas an 'orly' is far from family entertainment.
THUD~*