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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."
i wonder what percentage of cds released 20-25 years ago actually work nowdays :)
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
Actually the distortion used by Slayer, etc. is incredibly nuanced from an audio point of view. If you start dropping the higher harmonics, the distortion gets progressively more "dull" sounding and eventually just ends up sounding like you're clipping your speakers. Marshall amps have been legendary partly because their brand of distortion is highly distinctive. CDs allow you to retain some of the higher harmonics dropped by an audio cassette, so IMO the difference between Slayer on CD and tape is more immediately obvious than the difference between a classical track on CD and tape.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
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
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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
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."
Actually, there's a bit of truth to that (and ditto on valve amps). Transistor amplifiers, and digital electronics also, suffer from a phenomenon known as "clipping" if you give them too large an input. (For an amp, that would be the at the amp's input, for digital, it would be during the conversion to digital process, if the input peaked over the ADC's max input, or during processing which causes the sample's value to overflow).
If you take a decently powerful headphone amp (decently powerful - most headphone outputs on devices are very weedy), and plug its output into the line level input of another device, say, your soundcard, then playback the audio, it sounds like crap. Clipping is very harsh to the audio, and just sounds so bad. (People should do line-level checks as well - you can clip on those, but it's harder to come up with a decent demonstration).
Or, take an MP3 or other audio file on your computer, and open them in Audacity or other audio editor. Simply apply the "Amplify" effect to 200%, then listen. A mess - you may be able to make out what's happening, but it sounds just plain bad. Unfortunately, a lot of MP3s are apparently created like this... people don't seem to know how to rip CDs, so do the D/A/D thing without properly setting levels.
Valve amps, and vinyl don't clip when subjected to out-of-bounds input. Instead, they distort (which is why good guitar amps are valve based). This distortion makes the audio less accurate, but still much more pleasing to the ear. (And some argue that when it's distorted properly, even better). That's why valve amps are almost always in the power amplifier section (never preamp - the input levels to a preamp tends to be fairly standard (line-level, minding above)) - the preamp can easily overload the power amp inputs, which should trigger the distortion. If there are transistors in front of the tubes, they must be set so they don't clip before the tube distorts, or it's all for nought.
(In vinyl, the distortion comes because the needle cannot move very far before it impacts the neighboring grooves).
Alas, the vast majority of people don't actually configure their hardware correctly.
No one has pointed this out, but early CDs actually sounded like shit. They were WAY under compressed so the noise of the signal path was very significant. Also, they were mostly encoded at the studio in 16 bit, so mulitiplies and stuff going on in the mastering process (most were mastered on analog equipment but there was a required digital transfer to the master). The early CDs I heard in the mid 80s were really trashy. Better than tapes, but not as good as records on a decent hi-fi. This was pretty much common knowledge amongst people who liked music. The real selling point, and what made me get on eventually, was the random track access. That was huge, and I believe that is really what made the CD take off.
Interestingly, there was a kind of golden-era of CD sound in the late 90s when we had high dynamic range mastering equipment, before the loudness war pissed it all away in a hail of clipping.
Who are you, The Hulk? CDs aren't indestuctible, but I would say they are far from "ridiculously fragile." I often pile nekkid CDs or transport them stacked in spindles and have never had an issue with scratches.
But what I really want to respond to is:
That's just stupid. You can justify breaking DRM to rip and copy CDs because of concerns from handling disks, but piracy? I don't want to be troll-ish, but that is just stupid. Do you justify kidnapping? Would you want to carry in your body for nine months something which will end up being worthless if you don't treat it with extreme care?
Of course, this post misses an actual good point--not that a CD might be worthless in six months because Hulk smash, but that a CD will be worthless years later because they just aren't stable for long term storage. Again, not to justify piracy, but certainly to justify breaking DRM to make back-ups.
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".
IMO the difference between Slayer on CD and tape is more immediately obvious than the difference between a classical track on CD and tape.
For me, the biggest difference was the dynamic range and IMO, that stands out a lot more on a classical piece compared to Slayer (yes, I have them both on LP, cassette, and CD). Unless you were using a Nakamichi Dragon deck or some of the upper tier models, the dynamic range of a cassette was horrible because it was a combination of the noise or hiss and the limits of the tape, even with a metal tape and Dolby B/C or DBX applied (which introduced their own artifacts).
Of course I have not listened to an actual tape in probably 15 years and I'll never have (or want) a decent tape player or 4 track reel deck like I had in the 80's but the first thing I noticed back then about CD's was the dynamic range closely followed by the relatively flat frequency response.
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Hmmmm. The real reason early CD's were dissed by audiophiles is because the CD's had the "harsh" sound. Original audio masters were mixed to make up for the extreme deficiencies of vinyl. When CD's came out these masters were transfered directly to the digital domain with no compensation at all. These early CD's sounded awful because all the enhancements for vinyl were not removed (not because of 16 bit transfers). This "harsh" sound of CD's was the largest complaint by audiophiles. No doubt because LP's have a long roll off of high frequencies (compensated for in the master) where this "harsh" sound comes from. LP audiophiles jumped all over this and some of the less intelligent ones today still hold LP's are better because of this early effect that has long ago been fixed.
Once masters were re-mixed for true fideltiy there is no LP in the world that can compete with CD's. Even a 16 bit transfer of a master properly re-eq'd blows away the earlier vinyl based master.
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The most irritating thing about CDs is that, like DVDs after them, they use a spiral data track, rather than a set of concentric circular tracks. This makes it marginally cheaper to create players, since linear reads are easy and you don't need to buffer for a few KB on a track change, but it makes random reads significantly more expensive, since you can't easily calculate an exact lateral jump, you need to jump a little in and then follow the spiral around.
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I doubt this statement to be true.
The most common areas to afflict buyers with DRM have tended to be Europe and Japan, with the least common being the US. And yet it has all been met with such a poor reception all over that even AVEX TRAX, a Japanese label that was the biggest user of DRM on their discs during 2000-2004 have effectively given up. Every single disc that they could put it on they did, with a giant No-Copy logo sticker on it. And now they're all gone. Sony had a copy protection system they used and now no new CDs use it. In fact I just got two CDs, one released in '05 and one this year (weeks ago even) that are SRCL CDs that have the CD-DA logo on them.
So no, standards-corrupting CCCD technologies seem to have been rejected soundly. It's idiot plans like were executed by the US Sony Music heads that don't violate the standards but likely violate laws that need to be watched.
"Sounds better" and "realistic" don't always go together. I don't have any vinyl records (well, I do, but I don't have a deck to play them) but IIRC vinyl sounds warmer because of the compression needed. Depending on the music this might be nicer to listen to!
In a similar way, FM radio is more realistic than AM radio. In the UK, BBC Radio 4 is broadcast on both. If they play music, it sounds better on the FM. If they're broadcasting speech, the longwave broadcast sounds warmer and more pleasent, but it isn't realistic.
(I'm xaxa, but I already moderated this discussion)
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.
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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).
And the song was "Compact Disk Killed the Cassette Tape Star".