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Compact Disc Turns 26, Has a Bright Future
javipas writes "The Compact Disc was created 26 years ago, but apparently it is as healthy as 15 years ago, when computing versions of this format (CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW) made the market explode. Nowadays CD has been replaced in some segments, but not on the music industry, that continues to support it massively. The shy return of vinyl and the absence of real competitors make CD's future very bright, so it seems this birthday will not be by any means the last one we celebrate. Happy birthday!"
Yes it's the casette tape. Happy birthday CD!
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
I am shocked that the summary lists the music industry as the reason that CDs have endured as long as they have. The music industry enjoyed record CD sales during the 1990s. Those days are long gone. Online distribution is the medium of choice for that.
CDs have been relegated to the ranks of $0.50 disposal media storage for 650 MBs at a time. When this disc space is used so ~200 Mp3s can be "backed up" in case of Mp3 device or harddrive failure... then you can argue that the "music industry" is being supported by the continued usage of CDs. But don't be fooled... the only reason to keep CDs around is because of the need to cheap, disposal media distribution. Neither e-mail, online storage, or UBS memory sticks quite fit the same niche as the standard CD.
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The truth is that vinyl never went away.
A few years ago someone at worked asked me what the last Rush album was that came out on vinyl and after some poking around I found out that they all had up to the latest (Vapor Trails, IIRC). The thing is that many people lost touch with vinyl but the die-hards* kept with it. I don't know if it's the nostalgia factor or even if it's true that vinyl is making a comeback but the bottom line is that it wasn't a matter of the vinyl not being there but rather listeners who didn't know where to look.
* Yeah, if you're one of the small percentage of all people over the age of 17 who can really hear the difference. Otherwise you're probably only fooling yourself.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
but how the heck do I return an MP3? When on the road, I've always turned to renting audio books from cracker barrel.
It's great because, depending on my time, I stop and get a new book if I want one. I couldn't do that with an MP3 or USB stick without my computer. I know ATT would pitch a fit if I tried downloading 12-16 Cd's worth of book Over-the-air.
I know of nothing online that rivals something like what Cracker Barrel has going on for $4 a week.
import system.cool.Sig;
The iPod spells doom for the pop music CD. All the other music genres are doing fine on CD.
Does anyone know how the CD came to be 5.25" in diameter?
Um, mine are all 12cm?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Mod parent funny. 8-track tapes were a mountain of shit. No rewind. Terribly narrow tracks combined with slow tape speeds resulted in asstacular sound quality. The bits of foam glued to the plastic cartridges that pressed the tape against the heads would lose their springiness over time or simply come unglued. Head alignment in players was a major problem. Four "programs" per tape resulted in long songs getting split into pieces. The metallic splice in the loop that triggers the program switch would come unglued, resulting in a loop that was no longer a loop, merely a bunch of tape being pulled out of a cartridge, into a tape deck, and not being returned to the cartridge - an eaten tape, in other words. No rewinding, it's worth mentioning it twice because it was so damn irritating. They get credit for being cool looking. Nothing more, and nothing related to its performance as an audio format.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
Wikipedia is your friend
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Ummm... they're still being sold new today.
Indeed. I used to love getting AOL floppy disks in the mail. Back when a megabyte of storage space was actually useful ;-)
sudo eat my shorts
Sure they are. You run them through very lossy analog compression where you remove frequencies that aren't recordable on the medium. With vinyl it is important to remove low frequencies that can cause the grooves to overlap. Cassette recordings use a bandpass filter to remove high and low frequencies. This doesn't go in to compression schemes such as Dolby noise reduction, which was an analog compression scheme to store more of a dynamic/frequency range than the tape would allow.
Man, you really need that seminar!
You are sadly misinformed, as was nearly everyone else at the time. I had this very same discussion with a guy I was stationed with in the Air Force in 1971, and when he heard my cassette deck he agreed that there was no discernable difference between my cassette and his eight track. In fact he bought a cassette deck that very same day after hearing mine!
I have a copy of Deep Purple's Machine Head that I bought when it first came out (1971), and it still sounds very good. There is more tape hiss on my vinyl copy of Aerosmith's first album than on my cassette of Machine Head.
Chrome and dolby made cassettes rival CDs, if you have a good enough cassette deck.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
No really they were, I used to program/build CD players for my job for >5 years.
The old mechanisms were lovely metal framed affairs will bushed bearings, metal worm drives or fast moving arms for the optics. The optics were proper optics on well balanced, nicely made actuators and the whole thing just stank of quality components and care and attention. Because they were well made, the characteristics of the system was consistent from one unit to the next, and the analogue servos were all tuned to match the system. They could play CDs with horrible scratches on them much better then modern ones and the sound quality was generally better because they had a proper DAC.
When I left that field we were using "low cost" mechanisms. This mean moulded plastic gears, one single senser fits all (if you know how long it takes to reach the end of the disc, why bother with a sensor? just ram it against the end stop) The lens is bubble of resin, the actuators were often horrible. On top of this the tolerance in manufactruing was bloody awful. The resonances, the bandwidth changed considerably between units so the SW was expected to compensate and that was almost impossible with any degree of succcess. They'd hobble through a CD painfully, but put on a scratched disc or one with defects and all bets were off. Thats what a $15 CD player gets you. And do not even get me started on "1-bit bitstream DAC" rubbish.
Then there is the cost reduction on CDs themselves. Old CDs were nice thick well pressed affairs made of quality layers. They has a nice satisfying gap between songs (incidently this allowed the original analogue CD systems to jump from track to track looking for a certain signal from the subcode in the pretrack gap as it skipped across the disc surface - on the datapath/audio was digital in those days).
Last but not lesat is CD cop yprotection that erodes the CIRC scratch protection systems, if I start on that I'll begin ranting - thank god thats dying a death.
When I get a CD these days, when it is shiny and new I rip it, MP3 it, and then put it on the shelf where I look at it wistfully. I'm afraid, I'll scratch it and rended it paperweight.
That's surprising - I generally rent from Dollar (because I actually like Chryslers), and every one I've rented in the last two years has had a line-in 3.5mm jack on the dashboard. Since I usually have my iPod with me, I take full advantage of it...
This has been brought up before. Basically, movies are cheaper because a movie makes a good deal of its money from a theatrical release. CDs don't have the equivalent of a theatrical release, so they have to cost more.
That's nothing! I had a 286 machine 15 years ago that didn't have a CD drive.
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
Vinyl audio has less information content than CD audio. The frequency content is approximately the same between the two, but the dynamic range in vinyl recordings is less (about 75 dB v. 96 dB).
Er, no. It's all about frequency content. Whether events in a musical piece occur at 10 Hz or 3 Hz, a sample rate in the multi-kilohertz range will have no problem picking them up. The signal in between the samples is perfectly reconstructable up to frequencies of half the sample rate.
When audiophiles prefer vinyl it's because the sound is different, not because the fidelity is higher. There certainly are elements in the processing chain that could hurt CD audio -- such as the steep anti-aliasing filters needed to kill aliasing while preserving as much of the frequency range as possible -- but vinyl audio processing also has its drawbacks. Just say, "I like vinyl better," and leave it that. CD audio is not inherently inferior.
I hate to break this to you, but you need to spit out the audiophile kool-aid.
Binaural beats do happen only in the human mind - but those are not what you were talking about. Interference beats, which are what you were talking about, happen when pressure waves in the air (get this) interfere.
Perfectly capable of being picked up by a microphone.
Yes (to all the other posters, not just you), I realize the technical deficiencies and maintenance problems of the 8-track. In fact, toying with those is part of the appeal of the hobby. Some people buy and rebuild old cars. I buy and fix 8-tracks, since my budget is less spectacular. Even recognizing that 8-tracks never benefited from the technical improvements that the cassette received, I must correct you on a couple of technical details. First, 8-tracks used 1/4" tape, and 4-track cassettes use 1/8" tape. The track widths are just the same. As for slow tape speeds, that would be a cassette "problem," as they run at 1 7/8" per second as opposed to the 8-track's 3 3/4" per second. (Unless you're comparing the 8-track to 7 1/2" or 15" per second reel-to-reel, in which case there really is no comparison. Still, 8-tracks vary a *lot* in production/audio quality, from nearly unlistenable to nearly indistinguishable from my CD collection.) Also, one big advantage that 8-tracks had, which other consumer formats did not have until the past several years, was discrete surround-sound. There were various matrixed solutions on vinyl, but quadraphonic 8-tracks had two programs of four discrete channels each. It was only fairly popular due to the cost of the extra two speakers and quad 8-tracks, but are DVD-Audio and SACD surround sound solutions popular today? The Fidelipak infinite-loop tape cartridges still used somewhat in broadcasting are a close relative of the 8-track, and further add to its historical importance in music. It's not as good as the CD on any level except surround-sound, but it's definitely still relevant. Finally, on the issue of eight programs: The 4-tracks that Earl Muntz made profitable had only two stereo programs. It was Bill Lear (of Lear Jet fame) who decided to take Muntz's idea and split it in half again, then marketed the format to Ford for use in their autos. And quad, in a way, rectified the problem of having to rearrange or chop up tracks.
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.
Music CD's DO support metadata, and have since 1996: CD-Text.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cd_text
"CD-Text is an extension of the Red Book Compact Disc specifications standard for audio CDs. It allows for storage of additional information (e.g. album name, song name, and artist) on a standards-compliant audio CD. The information is stored either in the lead-in area of the CD, where there is roughly five kilobytes of space available, or in the Subchannels R to W on the disc, which can store about 31 megabytes. "
I remember seeing support for CD-Text on car CD changers almost 10 years ago, and most non-cheapo CD players these days support it if they have room for text on their display. But CD-Text never seemed to catch on for some reason. Maybe because the record companies never bothered to add the data to their pre-recorded CD's. Or that a lot of CD player displays only consist of Track Number and Play Time, so there's no way to display text.
Most burning programs like Nero, and even iTunes, support both burning CD-Text and reading it from discs that have it, so you can add it to your own CD's if you feel like it...or if you even bother burning music CD's these days.