Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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!)
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.