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!"

Comments

AOL Coaster CDs

[KovaaK]

Remember when AOL used to spew out those CDs to pimp their dialup service? I use to use them as coasters for my coffee cup.

I also remember AOL giving out so many floppy disks that I never had to buy my own since neighbors/friends just gave them to me saying "here, you can use these, right?"

Then when they changed to CDs, it took about two years before some people caught on that I couldn't reuse those in quite the same way...

CD question I'd like to know the answer to...

[damn_registrars]

Does anyone know how the CD came to be 5.25" in diameter?

Were the designers intentionally working with from the size of the floppy disk, which happened to be right for car CD players?

Or were they working to fit the same size as car stereos, which happened to be the same size as 5.25" floppy drives?

Or did they ignore both and just happen to end up that size?

Or did someone happen to have a 5.25" floppy drive in their car, and thought it would be great to read more than 1.2mb worth of data on a disc?

Bright future

[Fri13]

CD is still good format for storing normal data in offices. I dont now mean any games what needs DVD's or HD movies, but normal office data. For sending photos it is great because you need to store photos in JPEG (or other) format so you get them to small size. CD is good unless you need to send all RAW photos what you toke in weddings or other similar situation.

What I really like about CD, is it's lifetime. It has be used to store music what can be still played. Only thing what makes it worse, is these new ideas to push DRM's to them what makes CD's more like use-and-throw-away medias. That is the about on music business. That feeling I have got from music corporations.

So I can still listen those 15-20 years old CD's on my computer or car stereos, but I am not sure can I listen CD what I can buy today from store.

Same thing is happening on technology, television gets digitalized and all standards starts to be changed every 3-5 years. Reminds me just from the Microsoft Office format.
I hope that Blu-ray disk is now such media, that can be keeped next 20 years. Altought personally I am scared that there is coming next media around a 2015.

Is it really so that old medias actually stored the data better way because it could be used longer? Like VHS, CD, Vinyl, paper etc? The problem is not the technology itself, it is on companies who wants money and more money by "inventing" better versions after a next one and pushing them out faster rate.

Re:h h h pppp p p yyy b b b b bir th d d d day

[TheRaven64]

Transferring music phone to phone has been pretty easy for a few years. On my (three-year-old) Nokia handset, it's select the track, menu, sent, bluetooth, wait for it to find the other person's device, and then select it. Transfer rate is about 50KB/s, so it would take about 20 seconds per MB, around a minute or two for a song to transfer (although you can put the phone back in your pocket after starting the transfer, as long as you stay within a few metres of the other person). Transferring an entire album, obviously, would take a lot longer, although with newer phones supporting WiFi it's probably pretty easy. On the other hand, a modern phone has a 2-7Mb/s connection to the Internet, so why not send the files directly to the other person's PC at home?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[sm62704]

Forget not the humble 8-track tape!

The eight track is a format best forgotten, as I said in Good Riddance to Bad Tech a few years ago.

The 8-track tape
This sorry piece of crap is proof positive of American stupidity. The cassette - the (now obsolete) four track, two-spindle, 1/8th inch, 1 /78 IPS shirt pocket sized tape cassette was produced before the 8-track. The four track cassette was originally made as a dictation device, but advances in tape manufacture and head design soon gave them a frequency response that came close to human hearing's limit, signal to noise ratio low enough that you had to turn it up very loud to hear the hiss, and inaudible harmonic distortion which made them ideal for music.

Nevertheless, the 8-track was born anyway. With its transport speed at twice the 4-track cassette's speed, it should have been audibly superior. However, the "powers that be" decided that 8-tracks were going to be for automobiles, which at the time were not as well insulated from outside sounds and wind as today's cars, and with the auto's horrible acoustics, it was OK for a car's music to sound like effluent.

But the deliberately bad sound wasn't bad enough. The eight track tape had a single spindle, a very clever design where the tape fed from the center of the spindle, around a capstain roller inside the housing and back to the outside of the roll of tape. This made for an expensive setup, and one that was prone to wow and flutter, as well as having the tape get "eaten" by the tape player. And unlike a cassette, if your 8-track got ate, you might as well throw it in the trash.

But wait, there's more! This thing was deemed to be for the car, while cassettes were going to be (by about 1970 or so) for the home.

This made no sense whatever, since the "portable" eight track took up as much space as four cassettes, without being able to play any longer than a cassette. In fact, you could buy a longer playing cassette than 8-track.

But the one thing more than anything else that made 8-tracks suck like a Hoover was the fact that it had to change tracks four times during an album. This usually necessitated at least one song and usually more being interrupted in the middle!

Folks finally, after about ten years, started figuring this stuff out for themselves and replaced their 8-track cartriges with 4 track cassettes. Me? I never had an 8-track, although all my friends did. I, the geek, used the far more logical cassettes since about 1966 or 7. Hah! The geek gets the last laugh again!

Oh, btw I am old!

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Anonymous Coward]

Technical error: There are three track changes during an album, not four since the last track change happens between the end and the beginning of the tape.

Re:h h h pppp p p yyy b b b b bir th d d d day

[novakreo]

As soon as 'the kids' can transfer music phone 2 phone there goes the music biz.

That can be done now in countries where phones don't routinely have their Bluetooth crippled.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Enderandrew]

iTunes is the single biggest retailer of music on the planet, surpassing Wal*Mart. That happened a year ago.

Keep up with the times.

And there was a DVD audio format, but it will never catch on.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[NotBornYesterday]

You mean like Digital Audio Tape?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[thogard]

In 1987 a Phillips CD player cost me about US $ 325.
Its sound is much better than newer DVD an CD players.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Darinbob]

The four selectable tracks were a slight advantage for cassette tapes, since you could skip ahead or back much more quickly to get to the song you wanted.

But it was just way too big. You'd think something designed for a car would be smaller (our 8-track was in the home stereo and not the car). It makes sense for cars in that it is easier to insert into a player while driving than a cassette would have been. Sound I don't know about, I was too young to properly discern but it didn't seem any worse than LP to me on our generic stereo.

Cassettes may have been earlier, but I never saw a music cassette until after 8-tracks. They didn't seem to take off until the Walkman.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[CRCulver]

There are rare exceptions. While humans can't hear frequencies that high, they can hear the beats that are produced when those frequencies interfere with lower sounds. There's a part in Per Norgard's Symphony No. 5 where one of the percussionists blows through a dog whistle while the rest of the orchestra is playing certain tones. It works amazingly in concert, but is of course inaudible on CD. I've long wished for a SACD recording of this (well, and the tens of thousands of euro that I would need to buy the speakers for this unusual setup).

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really consider CDs all that convenient?

Yes

They're big and scratchable, and not particularly reliable.

They're cheap though, and you can buy them by the hundreds. Scratched disc? That's okay just burn another one. At a computer shop I worked at I had CDs for a number of different situations. Computer infected with spyware? Use this disc. Need drivers for a Dell Inspiron laptop? Use this disc. It was way cheaper than multiple flash drives and if they're lost/stolen/damaged they're cheap and easy to replace. Plus the fact that most of the computers I worked with don't support USB 2.0 so file transfers over USB were painfully slow.

Flash will eventually have more bang for the buck, but that would be only on larger sticks. I can't picture ever seeing a spool of 100 700MB flash drives for $10 due to production costs, but sometimes you really only need to give someone 700 megs of data, and a 32GB flash drive might be a little overkill.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[maeka]

While humans can't hear frequencies that high, they can hear the beats that are produced when those frequencies interfere with lower sounds

It works amazingly in concert, but is of course inaudible on CD.

Bogus.
If the interference beats are in the audible range than they can be captured. When you capture the product of the high-frequency interference in the field you don't need to deliver said high-frequencies to the home.

Re:It's not entirely about dynamic range...

[bitrex]

Although 44,100 samples sounds pretty impressive, whatever is in between those samples is lost in the final recording and can make a noticeable difference to the human hear (especially in fast-paced music).

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.

An interesting detail is that Shannon's sampling theorem has a bit of fine print: that a signal sampled at twice its highest frequency is perfectly reconstructable provided that the bit depth is infinite. This makes intuitive sense; the minimum AC voltage level change that is detectable by an n bit ADC is V/2^(n-1), where V is the maximum RMS voltage swing. So for a 16 bit ADC with a 2 volt RMS input that's 60 microvolts. In an ideal ADC signal level changes that are less than 1/2 that amount are going to be quantized down, and vice versa for above. Since you can divide an analog signal into an infinite number of divisions it follows that you'd need measurements of infinite precision to capture the signal with "perfect" resolution. Of course in practice even with a 16 bit converter those levels are probably well into the noise floor - but mathematically it truly is impossible to digitize a signal and then reproduce it perfectly.