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

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?

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 The four track cassette was originally made as a dictation device, but advances in tape manufacture and head design soon gave them a frequency response that came close to human hearing's limit, signal to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: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

[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

[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.