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The CD Turns 25 Today
netbuzz writes "Seems like only yesterday to those of us of a certain age, but the CD turns 25 today. Philips, maker of the first CD on Aug. 17, 1982, estimates that more than 200 billion have been sold since. The younger set might have trouble appreciating the difference in auditory quality that the compact disc represented over vinyl or cassette tapes (some have probably never even seen a record). And all but true trivia buffs will have trouble coming up with the name of the artist on that first disc."
Happy Birthday Compact Disc! Now wheres my isolinear optical chip I was promised by Star Trek?!?!?!
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
He also forgot the part where they re-released a few new or live tracks on a disc just to make the die hard fans buy into another medium. That kind of practice really makes me sick. Of course, we're doomed to see it repeated until the end of time in the name of making another buck.
My work here is dung.
Bruce Springsteen, was it?
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
I remember when they released. I commented something to the effect of "Bah, perhaps for classical music they'll be great but for stuff like Motorhead or Slayer? Why? So I can say 'this is the cleanest distortion around?'
Boy was I ever wrong. I still miss the large album covers and inserts from the LP days. Other than that vinyl is dead to me.
Trolling is a art,
Judging by the lack of Philip's logo on most (if not all) music media sold today (due to the inclusion of DRM efforts violating the standards), I'm not altogether sure CD-DA has lived long enough to reach 25.
I can't believe the artist that was first recorded on CD. What, were the Bee Gees unavailable? And now I've got one of their damn songs going through my head. Damn you first CD trivia!
----- Connection reset by beer
i wonder what percentage of cds released 20-25 years ago actually work nowdays :)
Happy Birthday CD. Try not to melt yourself on the candles. Does anyone know how old the hard drive is?
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
WTF? I thought CDs stimulated the olfactory sense.
Man, it never made any sense that people could get off on shoving CDs up their nose. I've been doing it wrong all these years!
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
I always thought of CDs as new and cool when I was growing up, I didn't realize that they're only slightly younger than I am (I was born in Feb of 82). It's kind of ironic though that in the last 5 years I've bought way more vinyl records than I have CDs.
-1 (Troll) is antihammer
False for freshly pressed vinyl. True after a few dozen plays.
5..4..3..2..1.. discuss!
As cool as you may like to think you are because you were born when records came out. Nobody else cares. Nearly everyone has seen a record.
You mean music once came on a PHYSICAL thing and you didn't download it?
Wow. How 20th Century.
Next you'll be telling me that there were all sorts of these physical things that had music on them and gave them funny names like "Tape" (why? did it hold stuff together?) or "LP" or "45s" or "78s"
I get the giggles just thinking about a world where you actually had to leave your house to buy music...bizarre
Oh well...the history lesson in TFA was nice to read
Oh, gotta go... my Pizza that I ordered over the 'net has just arrived at my front door.
Maybe CDs are more scratch resistant than LPs (which isn't saying much), but they're still ridiculously fragile. Maybe music piracy wouldn't be so prevalent if CDs were more durable. I know that I hesitate to buy CDs because I don't want to spend 15-20 bucks on something that could end up being worthless in 6 months if I don't treat it with extreme care.
I still don't see these newfangled CD Devices going anywhere. As long as I can still get my Fame Soundtrack and Toto songs on cassette, I'll be happy.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Me and CDs have a love hate relationship. When I was a kid, the CD just started coming out and becoming popular. At first I was in awe and treated the CD with respect. Now, I have literally hundreds of CDR/RW that I consider disposable and burn, use, and forget about. I guess this is an apology CD... I hope you can someday forgive me.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
I'm 25 today too. And before anyone says it, yes I know this is off topic.
Even though I was born a few months prior to, I remember the CD's becoming popular in the late 80's and early 90's. Granted, I was a Wee-One... but none-the-less, my memories can be traced back to 1984 on (of my life). Good to see a format change the way we listen to music... or should I say "Good to hear [enter rest here]"
I may be a bit wrong on this but I remember UK show tomorrows world covering the CD before it was launched, they showed how you could scratch the surface with metal pads and it still played. IIRC they had a Dire Straits album on display next to it (though not necessarily the first CD). It took me a while to get my first CD player (my parents had had one for a few years), I think it was around 1994 - which happened to be a 2x SCSI CD-ROM drive for some PC work I was doing. The CD needed inserting into a cartridge first before you could put it in the drive. I remember friends with HI-FI CD players were amazed at the track seek time I had (practically instant) - I had to remind them that this was optimized for read access, 4-5 seconds they were experiencing would kill it for PC applications. I also experimented with ripping, but soon stopped as my hard drive space was an order of magnitude smaller than the CD, and compression consisted of re sampling at 12Khz 8bit if I wanted to play about with loops and do silly things off the hard drive, no MP3 (that I knew of or had software to process) for me in those days. It was only a year or two later that as a student I could afford a CD HI-Fi sperate unit (and amp, and speakers) of my own. Within another 2 years I had a 2x CD burner - then the fun really started. :-)
Now a days people are so confused by so many warring, deliberately incompatible media. CD-R, CD-RW was one schism, that looks trivially comprehensible compared to the acronym soup of DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-ROM, etc. Then the HD/Bluray war.
People eschewed Betamax, the memory stick, the mini-DVD all Sony offerings. One would think people really understand the need for open standards, supported by multiple vendors, all fighting to get your business and thus delivering all the glorious things free markets and competition are supposed to deliver. But when Microsoft deliberately muddies the waters by confusing the "choice among vendors and products" with "choice in standards" people don't reject it summarily.
May be because hardware is tangible and people get a feel and they have demanded and obtained complete interoperability in brake fluids, car tires, radios and garden hoses, they expect the same in electronics. It would take a while before the consumer understands the similar need for fully open standards for software too. Till then MSFT will continue to rake in , wait a minute. When did I go so off topic?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The CD is 25 years old, yet my parents still refer to every recording (audio, video, digital or not) as a "tape." They also refer to all acts of recording as "taping."
:-(
Technology progresses quickly, but humans aren't quite as fast, it seems
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It's great to see that the format is still in use and still popular after so long. Equally impressive is how so many formats after it have the exact same form-factor (DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Rays). Can you imagine watching a movie off of a disc the size of a vinyl record? Oh, thats right... LASERDISC.
But CDs didn't sound any better than records... at least the first time you played an LP.
I got into CDs because they still sounded as good on subsequent listenings without going through a High Holy Ritual of cleansing and handling whenever you wanted to hear something. Even then, the LPs eventually degraded. You also couldn't play records in the car, though I have a half-memory of some harebrained device that let you do that. Good luck leaving LPs in a hot car, though.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - technological and musical innovation Compact Disc was found dead in its Hanover, Germany home this morning. The cause of death is rumored to be Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy digital music, there's no denying its contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I was working at a Lazarus department store that fall in '82, in the stereo/camera department (remember when there was a Camera Department?) when we go our first CD player.
It was included in a new Fisher 100watt component stereo system right across the aisle from me. I remember the only CD's the salesman had to sell, or demo, were classical music.
I also remember watching the salesman carefully take one our of the jewel case, by the edges, show it to all of us carefully - then drop it on the floor and STOMP on it.
My boss nearly Shat himself. It played fine.
OT: That same Fisher 100watt system - we took the audio output line off the back of an Atari 800 (we sold 'em then for $699, I believe) and ran it into the stereo in an AUX input.
Fire up Star Raiders, and crank up the bass. Kids would come running in from the mall *downstairs* to watch and play.
I sold a *lot* of Atari computers that winter...
Cheap "Old Bastard" Engineer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
The story I've heard in reference to the creation of the CD and have always found fascinating is about the 74 minute length. For those who haven't heard it already:
Apparently (so the story goes), the discs were originally designed to hold 60 minutes of music. But the VP of Sony decided this was unacceptable, since it would not be long enough to allow uninterrupted playing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without a disc change -- the piece as usually performed is a little less than 1:15, or about 74 minutes.
According to Wikipedia, there was probably more than just a love for classical music in here; the demand for 74 minutes as opposed to 60 (which necessitated 120mm discs instead of 115) was strategic. Polygram (one of Sony's major competitors) already had an experimental facility set up to make 115mm discs, Sony didn't, and therefore it was advantageous to force 120mm in order to start the playing field off level.
Still, I've always gotten a kick out of the idea that the now-standard size of the CD (and DVD, and BluRay/HDDVD) could have been influenced by a piece of music written in 1824.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
From Sony: "...while Sony was launching the CDP-101, CBS/Sony launched the world's first fifty CD titles, the very first one being 52nd Street by Billy Joel."
"I get the giggles just thinking about a world where you actually had to leave your house to buy music...bizarre"
Why is that bizarre? You leave your house to buy virtually every thing else. Mail order was available back then just as it is today.
I think Klaus Schulze's "Dig It" deserves an honorable mention as the first *truly* digital CD: performed on digital synthesizers, recorded and mastered on digital tape. Nothing analogue until you popped in your player! Nifty. (Cool CD, too.)
I thought they were already here. I remember reading a multiplage newspaper story describing the technology while a grad student. That would place the time period as in the spring of 1980 or before.
In 1982, I had an idea that I described to a few people about using a CD to store aviation charts. The idea was to put a small display in an aircraft cockpit along with a small computer and using Loran radios to provide the current position to the computer so that it could display the location of the aircraft on the display for the pilot. Unfortunately, I didn't have any idea how to get the financial backing to try to produce the device. Now, of course, they have just that, but using GPS instead of Loran, and for far more than just aircraft. It would have never occurred to me to use them for cars.
In 1983, I wanted to store images of title records on CDs and had a customer of mine who was very interested in doing that. The customer was ready to foot the bill to send people to the local county courthouses where he did business to photograph the title records, page by page, for this purpose. But it never came around.
Later, in the early 1990's, my brother's company was publishing data on CDs and it cost quite a bit to write the data out every two weeks. He was going to buy a CD-writer so he could avoid sending them out to be done by an outside company. I think the cost to create the master at the time was $1,000. After that, pressing a few hundred CDs was not too bad. I advised him to wait a little while for the cost of the CD writer to decline in price from about $50,000 each. He bought his first CD writer for about $4,000 a year or so later.
Early on, I figured the audio CD players would never catch on unless they could bring them under $200 each. So I watched the newspapers and when one sold for $199.50 or so, I went to the store and bought one. At the time, everyone was fascinated by the idea that you could scratch them without affecting the sound. So every demo CD in the store had scratches across the bottom as people would test that out for themselves.
At that time, I lived near a large record shop. Their entire selection of CDs were on a table in the store that was about 3 ft by 3 ft and had plenty of empty space on top. Sure enough, they caught on and CDs really began to replace records in the store about a year or two later.
Plenty of us /.'ers are old enough to have bought CD's in 1985 and '86. Like the others here, all of mine work just fine, except for the occasional deep scatch, or one where sand got in the case with it. :)
damaged by dogma
Anyone care to guess how many of these wre AOL coasters?
Car analogies break down.
The many reasons for poor CD fidelity have been amply delineated but hip-hop sounds (I hesitate to call this stuff music) are awful no matter how well recorded.
They must know by now I'm in here trembling
In a terror evergrowing
Crackin' up
(I have been waiting for these visitors)
My whole world is falling, going crazy
There is no escaping now, I'm
Crackin' up
humans work.
The most surprising thing I discovered during the mid-90s (before recordable CDs were ubiquitous) was how good metal tape with DBX or Dolby C could sound. The biggest revolution brought about by CDs wasn't at the home side, it was at the production side. Pre-CD, bass was arbitrarily rolled off to reduce the cost of making records and increase the capacity of a typical LP (low bass = wide grooves = reduced LP play time, loud bass = deep grooves = thicker records = increased manufacturing cost). It wasn't COMPLETELY universal (as rap/dance 12" singles showed), but for all intents and purposes, it was just the way mainstream records were mastered. As a result, mainstream home audio systems couldn't handle bass, either (remember the sudden appearance of subs and satellite systems almost overnight circa the mid-80s?) Because they couldn't handle bass, and to reduce mastering costs, cassette tapes had the same eq curve applied, and were bass-free as well.
I still remember the favorite album of my childhood -- the Star Wars Christmas Album ("Christmas in the Stars", which, ironically, had Jon Bon Jovi (still a teenager) as its lead singer). At the time, I had no idea why it sounded so incredibly good with headphones on my Dad's stereo, but it did. Unlike the rest of my records, it almost felt like you could reach out and touch the music. It was a feeling I never experienced again until almost a decade later, when CDs were a few years old, and DDD mastering became the high-end norm. For Christmas in 1999, my parents bought me a copy of the newly-(re-)released "Christmas in the Stars" CD (my original record was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew... or more precisely, my parents' disinterest in trying to salvage what to them was just an old record that got wet and moldy along with everything else in the living room). Anyway, it was from reading the cover notes that I finally realized *why* the original album sounded so incredibly great: it was digitally-mastered almost a *decade* before most professionals had even *heard* of "digital mastering".
bt nerd only requires cd-r.
Nice bias, jack ass.
Good Hip-Hop is a blend of many sounds and nuances.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I was working for an outdoor supplies store after my freshman year of college in 2002. I worked in the marine accessories department where we sold boat radios and stereos. One day this guy came in with his kid who was maybe in the 6-8year old range and was checking out the lower end stereos that mostly came with cassette decks. His kid asks "what is that hole for" to which the father responded "that is for cassette tapes". To which the kid responds "what's a tape"? I had never thought about it before, but I guess by 2002 cassettes were pretty dead. Still it seemed weird when I remembered buying and trading tapes with my friends for years on my first jambox. I wonder how long it will be before a kid asks you "what's a CD?"
Ordering Pizza Hut delivery through everquest was the greatest productivity boost evah! Now if only they'd come right in and feed me that'd rock.
"Technology Changes, people don't"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I submitted the same story an hour or two ago after seeing This AP story at.
I like netbuzz's story better than mine, because it sets up a classic fight: Digital vs. analog- which is better? The answer I gave in MFA was that each has strengths and weaknesses, but it's plain that analog/digital hybrids, like a digitally mastered vinyl record or a CD mastered from an analog tape, are the worst of both worlds, having the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither.
My best sounding CDs are ones I made myself from vinyl, so the above paragraph isn't absolute; many CDs that are remastered from analog originals (Led Zepplin's Presence or Blue Öyster Cult's first album) have horrible remasters, making a digital sample of the vinyl album sound better than the remastered CD. Presence especially; my homemade CD has more dynamics, higher highs and lower lows. BOC sounds especially good in the car, that's what I play when I want to show off my car stereo.
After hearing some remastered albums I'm sure the RIAA's labels have hired deaf engineers, and wonder if the poor sods ever learned to read an oscilloscope? For you younger folks: any new vinyl album should be inferior to the CD, unless the master was sampled with a far higher sampling rate and bit size than Red Book. But compared to what they could do with a high speed analog tape with dolby, Red Book suX0rz. If my sample of Presence sounds better than the store-bough CD, imagine how good the actual vinyl sounds?
But anyway, happy birthday, CD!
-mcgrew
The upper cut-off of the nuances bandwidth is at IQ 85.
http://www.cdman.com/technical/howdocdswork7.html
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hydrator? Is that what the old people used before we all got matter compilers?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
OK, I posted this earlier. Both vinyl and CD have advantages over the other. But a vinyl album from digital source will generally be inferior to the CD (late model vinyl after about 1979 or so) while a CD made from an analog master (especially one remastered by one of the RIAA labels' deaf engineers) will be far inferior to the original vinyl.
If I played Van Halen's first album cranked up to "9" with the stereo I had in 1978 and closed my eyes, Van Halen was literally in the living room. I have never heard a CD on anyone's stereo that could fool me into thinking that it was a live performance.
With any analog player, the quality of your device matters a LOT. A CD will always sound better than vinyl played on a cheap turntable. OTOH I have CDs I sampled from cassette on a used deck that originally cost $600 that you would swear were factory CDs. As to "a few dozen plays" that also is variable on the quality of the equipment; I've seen turntables that would ruin an album after a single play (and people who would ruin an album as soon as it was out of its sleeve) but had a Dual from germany that never seemed to ruin a record. I did, however, limit the plays, recording to tape on the first play.
-mcgrew
Mark Goodman I think had one and was talking about how
"these are going to replace albums"
Damn I'm old.
CD caddies were a good idea that was botched. Early players enclosed the disk in a thin box, a "CD Caddy", with a sliding access door for reading, like a 3.5" floppy. But for some idiotic reason, the caddies sold for about $10 each. So each disk didn't come in a caddy. Caddies were built to be openable, so you could change the disk inside. The caddy format was standardized, so all players used the same caddies.
The first version of audio CD packaging involved tall boxes, about a foot tall. The idea was that these would fit in retail racks sized for 12" vinyl records, offering backwards compatibility to retailers. (Not to end users; extracting the disk required destroying the box.) "Jewel box" retail packaging came years later.
If the caddy had been used as the retail packaging and the storage case, the media would have been much better protected and the whole system would have generated less trash. But for historical reasons, that didn't happen.
It was in a Service Merchandise store. I was 14. It was 1983, I think. The man at the stereo counter was showing me and a friend how they worked.
Him: "Listen to how incredible they sound!"
Us: "Wow!"
Him: "Listen to how clean it is during the silence as I turn it way up!
Us: "Whoa!"
Him: "And look! They're nearly indestructible!"
Us: "Cool!"
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
Who prefers the sound of a vinyl to the sound from a digital medium? Not a scruffy vinyl, but a nice vinyl, with minimal pops et cetera?
One that I still see all the time is calling a ~6 song album an EP, even if it never touches vinyl. I don't blame'em as I can't think of a better term to use myself, but I do find it funny that the common term for a short album is still "Extended Play".
We of the singularity have memory of matter compilers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Aww ... this is so cute. Please excuse me, I've got something in my eye ;_;
Today it's the 25th anniversary since the first time-paradox took place in our universe's history, as a result of one RIAA lawyer travelling back to the year 1982. Apparently, while browsing a nerdy news site (suspected of hosting "copyright thiefs"), he came across with evidence of the first illegal copy of copyrighted music on a Compact Disc.
"Those scientists clearly were infringing intellectual property!" said the lawyer, before being sucked in a wormhole created out of pure evil, while laughing frenetically.
Now we know from several witnesses that, once the world's first time-traveller arrived, he accidentally stomped on a cockroach, triggering a time-paradox known as "the Granfather paradox". He wasn't available for comments, since he's currently trapped in a hell of a space-time singularity that will last forever.
Great, another reminder of how old I'm getting. My self-esteem just went into a corner and shot itself, leaving me another mess to clean up.
The three most important words in a relationship are "I love you." The two most important are "Humor me."
the difference in auditory quality that the compact disc represented over vinyl or cassette tapes
There has been much argument about whether CDs or vinyl sound better. Here's some actual facts.
Essentially, the vinyl fanatics are correct that a vinyl record will sound better under ideal circumstances than a CD. But making (and keeping) circumstances ideal takes time, effort, and money. In circumstances any more than marginally below ideal, a CD will sound better. Unless you're in the most extreme two or three percent of audiophiles, you're better off with CDs. That's why CDs won, and that's why they deserved to win. I'll keep my record player and my vinyl collection, and I'll tell you how much better vinyl can be than CDs, but CDs are indisputably the right choice for most usage.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
I thought "Flim and the BB's" were first but they may have been the first to record in a strictly digital format. Their CD's have two D's "DD" on the cover instead of the traditional three "DDD". If I remember correctly 3M asked them to come in and record to test out some of their new shiny digital recording equipment.
A Q1CS8
http://www.amazon.com/Flim-&-The-BB's/artist/B000
I'm 40 and I owned a record player, an 8-track, and a tape player. I didn't even buy a CD player until around 1990. SO BFD to all the wannabees out there who think they're cool just because they've seen a record. I've walked through the 8-track jungle, baby.
The CD has been such a huge success story, most people don't realize how hard it was to bring about. It's easy to look back in retrospect and think it was easy, that it was inevitable.
I'm old enough (sad to say) that I remember following the development of the technology in the years before CDs ever hit the market. It seemed to take forever! There was bickering between the different companies over formats and standards, there was delay after delay. I knew what the technology promised, and I wanted it badly. . . but for several years it seemed like the industry was just going to talk, and talk, and argue, and negotiate, and fiddle around, and never actually produce anything. When CDs and players finally hit the market, it seemed to most people like a technological miracle out of the blue. I was glad to finally see it, but also annoyed that it had taken so long for the industry to get their act together. (And I feel the same way now, only much moreso, about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They still haven't got their act together.)
Although the CD was a great advance, there were problems in those early days. . . The first players were terribly expensive. CDs sold for at least double what we were accustomed to paying for LP records and cassettes. Recording engineers had no experience mastering digital recordings, and a lot of the early CDs came out with weak bass and painfully boosted treble (and some of those are still available today in the back catalog, they've never been remastered). There were also a lot of defective CDs on store shelves for the first few years; mostly they seemed to come from Germany.
How about the first CD coaster (bad burn)? [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
how those under a certain age have probably "never seen a record" more bands are releasing vinyl now then probably were at the height of cassette popularity. It is FAR more likley they kids today haven't seen an 8-track or cassette than a vinly album. Dunno why but this cliche drives me up a wall...
Ah, but did you have a home 8-track recorder? I used to stay up late on Sunday night to record the Dr. Demento show on 8-track.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I was going to post some witty reply about the first CD to be blended.
However, I'm either being stupid (it's the weekend after all - well almost) or can't find a search facility for WillItBlend
Anyone know if they've ever tried to blend a CD, and which on it was?
Complete nonsense. You've clearly invented or bought into some kind of mythology about analog signals magically being different in a way which prevents them working correctly once transcribed to digital (and vice versa). (How do you think digital mastering happens? There is always an analog-to-digital converter somewhere in the signal chain.)
The mastering process happens one way or another, and then you've got a waveform which is to be transcribed into a medium which can be mass produced. The ideal is to reproduce that waveform (the end product of the mastering process) with as much fidelity to what the guy in the studio heard as possible.
And when you look at it from that perspective, there is simply no doubt: CD is unquestionably the superior medium. Hands down. No contest. Whether you're talking about technical measurements (frequency response, noise floor, harmonic distortion, wow, flutter, etc.) or listening tests, CD is practically on another planet. Vinyl just can't compete.
For starters, at the end of that mastering process, you must take the signal and mangle it quite thoroughly just to make it recordable on vinyl: there are numerous physical limitations of needle-in-groove recording which would otherwise prevent the system from working. Low frequency content is merged to monaural to avoid making records that always skip. Frequencies below ~200 Hz and above ~15 kHz are completely removed because the medium just can't support recording them (yes, a handful of special 20+ kHz records were made, but it required special master cutting equipment and the resulting vinyl lost nearly all HF content after just a few plays). Finally, RIAA equalization is applied, dramatically attenuating low and high frequency content, necessary once again because of physical limitations. Because the customer's circuit to undo RIAA equalization is never a true inverse transform of the mastering equipment (impossible to accomplish with analog electronics), you never end up with flat frequency response. You also end up with less SNR in the low and high frequency bands.
None of this signal mangling is required for CD. 0% channel intermodulation. 90+ dB SNR. Flat frequency response from 0-20 kHz.
The shortest way to say it is that CD-quality digital audio (16 bits 44.1 kHz) can always be used to make a recording of a vinyl record which is 100% indistinguishable from that record, but the opposite is possible only if the signal on the CD doesn't even come close to exploiting the possibilities of the medium.
http://www.dailywav.com/0699/noabba2.wav
I was at the Ohio State Fair last week and asked my 9-yr old daughter if a fried Twinkie sounded yummy. Her answer, "What's a Twinkie?" But then, she has lived most of her life in a Russian orphanage so I have had to introduce many, many commonplace sundries over the last year. My point? Don't assume a child's ignorance of a device suggests technological obsolecence. Twinkies aren't obsolete.
In the late 80's most CD singles were on 3" discs.
Why did they stop doing that?
Does anybody know if radio stations played rock music from vinyl records or tapes?
Because I remember going into a radio station one time (I can't remember why) and I thought I did see a turntable being used. But you never heard "pops" and static over the air.
I wonder what kind of turntables they were that had this ability...Anybody know?
What is this past tense? I *still* own an 8-track recorder (3 in fact)
and a few 1/4" reel-to-reel tape recorders. I haven't made a recording
on anything except video tape, video disk (My TiVo *does* get me), or
CD/DVD in years,
Excellent post, howlingfrog.
My parents have an old vinyl record player made in the 1950's and a small library of vinyl records. The record player is no longer being used (as arthritis and shaky hands make it difficult to put the needle on the record without damaging it), so I'd like to convert the vinyl records to CDs so that they can listen to their old library with a CD player.
Any recommendations as to which converter is best? Eg the "Ion Audio iTTUSB converter" or the "NuMarkTTUSB", or just piping it through a soundcard? And how to clean up the hiss and pops?
The Phillips engineer they quote keeps saying over and over again how CDs took off because they were designed openly by companies sharing ideas. Goes to show why the FairPlay/PlaysForSure/etc. du jour don't take off (CDs are still more popular than downloads).
I'd be hard pressed to believe anyone is releasing professionally pressed CDs from master recordings that clip. I've also not heard a recording that sounded worse after peak normalizing to 0db. That'll give you good dynamic range, but won't ever clip. Some of the newer all-digital gear doesn't have as much headroom as the old analog gear, but you also don't have to push the levels as hard to get a clean recording.
Still comes from records - 16bit/44.1K isn't as accurate as a record - much like a digital camera isn't as good as a film camera. That said, with 24bit/192K we're certainly getting pretty close. (same with the uber-pixel cameras)
At no point in history has a CD produced better sound than a new record and it's sheer ignorance to claim otherwise. Digital sound is worthless, which is why people don't pay for it anymore.
I did some work for a friend about 7 months ago, and rather than pay me with Money(tm) he gave me an 8-track recorder and two 8-track car-mount players (one with a AM radio and the other with AM and FM radio). There is always this tendancy that people repay me with things rather than Money(tm), so I guess you can say I've entered the market with some popular equipment 30-years late. Just about 1 month ago, I pulled a 8-track casette collection and case out of a dumpster; it was full of old Johny Cash albums, with some song names I've never heard before. I'm a big fan of Johny Cash and I thought I heard him all, and this is new to me.
PS: coincidence or divine intervention from the man who named him Sue?
without prejudice
I loved the improved sound quality and lack of scratching sound effects, but the one thing I've never liked about CDs is their degree of fragility.
;-) I have a drawer full of old CDs from the early 90s, but I virtually never look at them.
Of course, this is largely a moot point for me anywayz. These days it's all mp3 to me.
Interestingly, a couple of my CDs contain stuff I haven't been able to find online. I've got one old CD of Christian rap, Tha Mad Prophets, by E-Roc, and the album from the group Culturebeat, Serenity. Mr Vain as a single from that album has apparently survived the online transition, but virtually nothing else from the album seems to have. It's a shame, and inexplicable...I was usually only a single track person, but that entire album is fantastic...there's nothing on it that I don't like.
better than vinyl? not hardly...
Anyone remember on Tomorrow's World they showed CDs playing fine after being coated in jam etc.....
Nowadays a single thumb print or spec of dust seems to be enough to cause some CD players (and this seems to be regardless of make, price etc) throw a hissy fit...
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Does anybody have any 25 year old CDs that still play flawlessly? How about a 25 year old player? I have some 45 year old vinyl that still plays like new. Can't say the same for the stylus. I guess diamonds aren't forever.
What?
And the first track on that CD, was appropriately enough, "Death of an analogue"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_Only_Memory
Liar. 40? You didn't own shit.
Never mind what was the first released CD, what was the first you actually bought? Mine was the inevitable "Dark Side of the Moon" and also a performance of Holst's "The Planets". This was in 1988. The reason I came so late to the CD party was that the first ones were disappointingly crap.
I'd avidly followed the CD development story from about 1979 in publications such as "Electronics Today International" and was looking forward to a hiss-free format after carefully optimising tape and vinyl playback for years. So in the week when the first CD players went on sale in the UK (1983), a friend and I made the pilgrimage to the next town to get our first CD experience. The demonstrator was very proud to show off the (very expensive) equipment using the four discs that were actually available. I can't remember what all four were but one of them was Roxy Music's "Boys and Girls" album. With great anticipation I looked forward to the utterly hiss free inky black depths of noiseless music - but it wasn't there. The first thing I noticed was the tape hiss from the master and that just ruined the whole thing. Granted, it was quieter hiss than a typical home cassette, but not by that much. The next thing was the harshness of the sound - very brittle and "ringy" which again turned out to be a typical problem of first generation players.
The upshot was that I felt cheated by the CD hype - all that spreading marmalade on the discs they went in for on Tomorrow's World, et. al. The fact was that the sound quality wasn't "perfect" as claimed. Thus I stuck with vinyl for another 5 years until players were much cheaper, much better (they had oversampling playback by then) and there were far more titles available which had DDD production or at least remastered from better source material.
My CD collection went from 2 to about 300 discs in the space of about 3 years, but hasn't grown that much larger since. (Anyone remember the Virgin record store in Oxford street having its own CD pressing plant on show to the public behind glass? Oh it seemed so exotic back then!) I'm only on my second CD player (not counting CD playback on PCs etc) and that's only because the original 1988 one I bought eventually broke down a few years ago through overuse. While I still buy the occasional CD the rise of the format has coincided with both a declining interest in mainstream music and the ageing of my ears. To me the remaining great advantage of the CD is that it's DRM free, which sad to say is probably going to be its downfall.
I celebrated by taking some of my extra *cou-AOL-gh* CD's and turning them into a lamp! (Now I have 2)
When CDs came around, they were a much more reliable product. That's when I really started building a collection.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I was late getting into CD, simply because the cost of a deck for my car was too high for higher cost media, and the battery life of early cd walkman sucked. Vinyl I was late getting into as well simply because I liked cassettes being very very very portable.
But don't feel too special about owning an 8-track. Even if you are older than my self, the only reason to get into 8-track even in the 70s was the fact that the cars often came with a deck stock, and often stereos came with it stock.
Now, if you were a member of a record club, and got 10 for a penny, then you can be joe cool on slashdot.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I'm only 30, but I had an 8-track...
In fact, my first car had a portable 8-Track instead of a tape deck.
There's only so much crap music you can listen to that was released on 8-track before you rip the damn thing out of the dashboard though!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo-Pak
Another anecdote, or perhaps urban myth, is that the size of the spindle hole in the CD was specified as the size of the (pre-Euro) Dutch 10c coin. They wanted the hole to be larger than the one of an LP, but smaller than the one in a single. "Make it the size of a dubbeltje" (the name of the 10c coin), is what a designer purportedly decided.
The official specifications probably have it as 15mm. But for a fact, the coin is an exact fit...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...