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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.
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
Cue the vinyl fanatics who will whine about how "warm" their vinyls sound
Don't worry. I think I've managed to kill tham all.
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.
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.
I have quite a few CD's purchased in the 80's that work just fine. It's the CD-R versions that degrade over just a few years, the commercially pressed ones last quite awhile. reference: http://computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/st ory/0,10801,107607,00.html
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."
DVD-R[W] vs. DVD+R[W] vs. DVD-RAM was a true format war, but it has been completely resolved. (ie. -RAM is completely dead and almost all burners on the market support +/-R.) The only active format war right now is HD vs. Blu-ray, and while it far from over, there are drives that support both.
> 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.
You said, it brother.
I once witnessed the following discussion between a sales droid and a customer in a major department store:
C: (looking at blank media) What's the difference between the DVD minus R and the DVD plus R?
SD: The DVD plus R, you can read and write to it. The minus R is, well, you can only write to it, you can't read from it
*jesus fucking christ*
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
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.
Technology progresses quickly, but humans aren't quite as fast, it seems
No, people just don't really care about the original meaning of words, nor should they. Do you get bent out of shape every time someone talking about "dialing" a telephone, even though 99% of telephones no longer have a dial? There's hundreds of examples like this where the original etymology of the word was forgotten and the words takes on a modified meaning of the original. That's just how language works.
AccountKiller
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".
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.
-- Mean People Suck