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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."
don't you mean HD-DVD?
The flames are out ther, let the war begin!
When all else fails, try.
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
4-8GB of mp3 space vs 800MB for a CD-R.
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
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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!
Sounds great. Who adopted it?
If I could go buy say that Star Wars soundtrack on DVD-Audio tomorrow, I would. But I don't believe I can.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
If I could go buy say that Star Wars soundtrack on DVD-Audio tomorrow, I would. But I don't believe I can. If I had to guess nobody wanted to go through 25 years of CDs and remix them to 5.1 channel surround sound. Can't say I blame them, but it pretty much killed the format.
No, what killed DVD-Audio was some top-brass exec being asked by his 12-year-old daughter why the kids at school were laughing at her. Apparently they'd found out her daddy "made DVDA albums".
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
the difference is obvious
I'm guessing that it is the 24-bit rather than the 192khz?
As Flanders and Swann said about much earlier technology:
Flanders: All the highest notes neither sharp nor flat,
Swann: The ear can't hear as high as that.
Flanders: Still, I ought to please any passing bat,
Swann: With my high fidelity.
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
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.
Not to mention solid-state blue lasers.
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.
Look at what you're saying. Improving the sample rate from 44.1kHz to 192kHz moves the Nyqvist frequency from 22.05kHz to 96kHz. Increasing the sample size takes the SNR from 96dB to 144dB.
Now I'm pretty sure I don't care about frequencies between 22.05kHz and 96kHz. Double blind tests make it unlikely most people can even hear them. In fact I suspect the ones thay say they can would fail the test, and so they are actually kidding themselves.
And are all those signals below 96dB are vital to my enjoyment of music? I don't remember be annoyed by vinyl or tape in terms of quality and both of them are a lot worse than 16bit at 44.1kHz. Come to think of it MP3 will cut off at a lower frequency than 22.05kHz, and discard low amplitude components at lot more ruthlessly than even 16bit@44.1kHz and it sounds the same as CD to me.
Hell most of the music I really like I first heard in very low fidelity environments, much worse than even an MP3.
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;
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;
about 74 minutes.
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~*
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'.
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?
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.
Look up the concept of a difference tone. Per Norgard creates some weird sonorities in his Symphony No. 5 by having a dog whistle blown at the same time as a tone is produced by one of the traditional orchestral instruments. The sound on its own would be beyond human ears, but the combination of the two sounds is audible. Norgard's not the only one who writes stuff like that, there's a whole wealth of repertoire that takes advantage of the phenomenon. If you listen to a low bitrate lossy file that has the high ends thrown out, you miss the mix of sounds as it was when the music was performed and recorded, making it sound flat.
iTunes is way, way too difficult to mess with
What? You fill out your name and address, plug in a credit card number, pick a password.
When you're ready to buy you click on one button and re-enter your password. You can even check a box so you never have to re-enter your password, and reduce that step.
How's that hard?
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
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
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