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

Absence of real competitors

[p3d0]

...except mp3s...

Re:Absence of real competitors

[obergfellja]

since I am only 26, I have to ask, is there anything before CD's?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Kamokazi]

Basically....there's no competition because it would be pointless to waste money on a new physical media format with the primary intent of content distribution.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[cyberzephyr]

Yes it's the casette tape. Happy birthday CD!

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly greed killed off DVD-Audio and SA-CD.

They could be the standard today, offering a real benefit over MP3s being shared online, but they're nowhere. Presumably that's because the licensing fees were too high, and then the media was too expensive on top.

So CDs it is.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Torontoman]

True... I don't recall seeing a Disc player at the Gym in a LOOOOOONG time. I guess it'll have it's niches but it'll be squeezed more and more into irrelevance.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[tristian_was_here]

You mean like was there anything before DVD's?

I head about VCR's but I believe that's only a legend.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MilesAttacca]

I'd like to think that MP3s are not so much competition as existing on a different level. CDs are physically tangible high-quality audio, and they do a good job of that. MP3s are *medium-transparent* audio that uses human audio perception to deliver high quality in a small file size. The thing is that these days, consumers want audio in a format that will work across many mediums, instead of being limited to CDs.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[glavenoid]

Yea, wax cylinders or analog reel-to-reel (which, IMO, is still the most fun way to record audio).

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MilesAttacca]

Forget not the humble 8-track tape! I have a few hundred of them (before you call me old, examine my UID...I'm 17). For tapes that were made in the age of "disposable music" up to 40 years ago, and as early as 20 years ago, they've really held up to the test of time. And unlike digital, a scratch can't ruin the entire product; at 3 and 3/4 inches of tape per second, minor blemishes don't matter and you can even cut out and resplice segments of tape as needed when a tape does get "eaten" by its player. That being said, my music collection is a healthy mix of 8-tracks, cassettes, vinyl, CDs, and of course several thousand MP3s.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MightyYar]

Neither was tape or vinyl, yet those media sold quite well for decades.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MightyYar]

Well, for starters, most studios don't even use the full dynamic range of CD, so DVD-Audio or SA-CD are kind of a waste... they'd just compress the audio to make it sound loud and we'd be in the same boat that we are with CDs.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[ksd1337]

Pshhh... You can keep your "MP3s" and "CDs" and all kind of stuff like that. I just hum in the shower, that has enough quality for me.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Junior J. Junior III]

You can put mp3 files on a CD, and play them in a CD player that has a mp3 codec in its embedded firmware.

Of course, .WAV or FLAC is better quality, but no one cares about quality for it to affect the market, apparently.

CDs compete with Flash memory and hard drives.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[FLEB]

I suspect you would still have the same apathetic response that HD disc media did (where "BluRay and HD-DVD fought it out, and SD-DVD won"), where the increase in quality isn't dramatic or important enough to warrant the move to a new media, new players, and (often) new DRM. The future is not in another 12cm disc media-- 12cm disc players for current formats are widely owned, a wide base of tools exists to work with the formats-- even CSSed DVD, and the quality is more than adequate for all but those who spend more time analyzing sound than listening to it.

I suppose multi-channel audio could be one exception, although that still would struggle to make it out of a niche. It's a matter of relatively few multichannel PCs and stereo systems versus an overwhelming base of stereo receivers, players, boom-boxes, and portables.

If anything, the evolution of media is going to focus on physical form factor, deliverability, and perhaps durability. Sound quality is a finished game-- the challenge is now convenience and usability.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MightyYar]

So YOU'RE that guy in the next apartment! Honestly, I thought you were slaughtering sheep!

Re:Absence of real competitors

[g0dsp33d]

Some of us happen to store those on CDs, you insensitive clod!

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

[value_added]

Forget not the humble 8-track tape!

I've tried. That, along with mullets and a few other things. ;-)

I have a few hundred of them (before you call me old, examine my UID...I'm 17).

Congrats! Since you're old enough to drive, it's time to start saving up for that used Firebird to go with the 8-track tapes. Alternatively, a fully decked-out van would work, though if you live down south, an old pickup truck might be more appropriate.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[m.ducharme]

What's a DVD?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Mix Master Nixon]

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.

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:Absence of real competitors

[Zakabog]

How did you get modded "Insightful"?

CDs are a storage medium, MP3s are a file format. You can rip all of your CDs and make a bunch of MP3 files but unless you have something to put them on they're useless, that's where CDs come in. If you haven't noticed, CDs are cheap, easily available, easy to write to, and they don't require a computer or an internet connection for transferring media (you can't just go into a store and buy a bunch of MP3s, you need something to put them on, like a CD.)

Re:Absence of real competitors

[ucblockhead]

They offer no real benefit for the vast majority of the music buying public. For 99.9% of people buying music today, CDs are good enough. That's why other formats failed. Only audophiles will buy those, but their too busy buying $500 ethernet cables to notice new physical music formats.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Nullav]

A small Laser Disc or something. It'll never catch on.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[p3d0]

How did you get modded "Insightful"?

Perhaps because the mods realized I was making a point about the approaching obsolescence of physical media.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[50000BTU_barbecue]

But oh so expensive.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Wansu]

  since I am only 26, I have to ask, is there anything before CD's?

Sure, records. And they were still being sold until you were 5 or 6 years old.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[BlackSnake112]

Those files will still have to be stored somewhere. Either on a hard drive, in RAM, flash drive, someplace. You can download the mp3, but you still have to save it to something.

Also when the music was originally recorded, do they record right to mp3 and send it out on the intenet? They usually save it on a master recording which is .. wait for it... physical media.

Perhaps cds are not as popular for some sections of the consumer market. I would not say all sections. I (and a hell of a lot of other people I know) still back up to CD and DVD 9depending on what is being backed up) in case the hard drive dies. Better to have your music/movies/files on a medium that you can readily use to restore in case something bad happens.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Dogtanian]

since I am only 26, I have to ask, is there anything before CD's?

Uh, seriously? If you were listening to and buying music at the age of (say) 7 onwards, that'd have been the late 1980s.

CD players back then were falling in price quite fast, but they still weren't that cheap compared to what they are today. Even in my early teens I went for the cheapass hifi without the CD player (£100 vs. £200, more like £175 (US$325) vs. £350 (US$650) in today's money). Perhaps your family was well off, but...

You only bought original music, and never copied anything off your friends? Although the CD-R spec was defined in 1988, I'll happily bet that *any* burners at that time would have been mindbogglingly expensive- they didn't get affordable until the late 1990s. In the meantime, most of us used cassettes. Neither you nor your friends used them?

I can quite believe someone your age not having used vinyl (except as a curiosity or something slightly archaic), but never to have used cassettes? That's surprising.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Hatta]

It wasn't greed that killed DVDA and SACD. It was the imperceptible improvement over CDs for most peoples equipment and ears. It's the same reason Blue-ray is languishing.

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

[jason.sweet]

Yeah! 8-track was AWESOME!

Except when the track switch screwed up your air-guitar solo.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[pleappleappleap]

Ummm... they're still being sold new today.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[pleappleappleap]

Tape and vinyl aren't compressed, hence they aren't lossless.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[NotBornYesterday]

You mean like Digital Audio Tape?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[E IS mC(Square)]

>>And there was a DVD audio format, but it will never catch on.
Time-traveling too much?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[galoise]

or betamax!

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Gription]

Uhhh, no.
He was asking about 8-track.

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

[tchuladdiass]

The main advantage that an 8-trak had over cassette for cars is that it was continuous play -- that is, before auto-reversing cassette players were invented.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Uhhmm I think this is in the wrong place. By your comment history, it doesn't look like you are a troll and you actually did post on topic a few minutes after this. So, I was wondering if you'd mind sharing how it came to be that this was posted on this page. And most importantly: are you sure the gas was turned off before you posted?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Zakabog]

Perhaps because the mods realized I was making a point about the approaching obsolescence of physical media.

Yes, I understood that point, it's still not insightful. MP3s made CDs more popular as a storage medium by allowing people to download a collection of songs from their favorite source, then burn it to a cheap CD to share with their friends, listen to in the car, sell in Chinatown, etc. The CD isn't going away any time soon, it's still a very convenient method for getting data, whether it's music, movies or even games.

This is especially true in less populated areas where broadband is still limited to a few places, or the speeds are too low to do anything useful. You can just go to the local Walmart and buy a CD in areas where you can't get anything faster than dial up. Plus CDs are perfect for people who aren't very tech savvy, sure there are some people who are hopeless (I had to explain to someone their DVDs weren't playing because they were putting them in upside down) but there are also plenty of people who can't figure out computers but can understand something as simple as playing a CD.

I know this is slashdot and we're all for getting rid of the record companies, but CDs aren't evil by nature, they're perfect for what they do. The death of the old distribution methods (record companies charging $20 for a cheap round plastic disc with audio information on it) doesn't mean the death of the CD.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Life Liberty Freedom]

Huh? I'm younger than you (not by much) and have cassettes, 8-track tapes, and vinyl records.....

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The Philips Compact Cassette was originally a 2-track device, designed as an improvement upon the 3" rim-drive reel-to-reel recorders popular in the low end of the market. The sound quality sucked, and continued to suck (especially on commercially released tapes) until the advent of CRO2 tape and Dolby noise reduction in the late 70s. Only then did the cassette become competitive with the 8-track in sound quality of home-recorded tapes, and the sound quality of pre-recorded tapes still sucked for several years after that. You may claim that the 8-track was unnecessary due to the existence of the cassette, but the cassette was a dictating machine or a toy until the late 70s and the need for a reasonable-quality in-car sound source was real, and was met by the 8-track.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Random Destruction]

Well, I tend to play my music more than I walk on it. CDs dont get eaten, don't stretch, don't get overwritten or demagnetized, etc.

But by all means, keep walking on your good ol' tapes

Re:Absence of real competitors

[The End Of Days]

No matter however you want to ignore improvement in quality, it's there and it's real.

Yeah, but you forgot the most important part: that it may not actually matter to anyone.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Hatta]

Not really. CD samples at 44.1 khz, which is sufficient to exactly represent all frequencies up to 22.05khz. Humans can only hear frequencies up to 20khz.

Like most things recommended by audiophiles, there's no science supporting the assertion that SACD/DVDA would be better suited for listening.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MightyYar]

Yes, they are compressed.

If you still have a stereo around that accepts phono inputs, try plugging in some other source into that jack and listen to the difference in the sound compared to playing through any other jack. That is the analog compression.

Similarly, every cassette that I have has "Dolby" printed on it.

In addition to compression, not only are the LP or cassette copies inferior to the original master, the analog master itself degrades a bit every time you play it - as do the copies.

Finally, the medium (LP or cassette) cannot reproduce sounds within the human audible range - so they are simply lost forever.

How is that not lossy?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[changa]

I am old enough to have used 8-tracks when they were still being released and because of that there are songs I still to this day expect to fade out in the middle and then make a CLICK-CLICK sound before fading back in.

At this point I only have a copy of the Rutles on 8-track autographed by Eric Idle in my collection.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[sm62704]

The main advantage that an 8-trak had over cassette for cars is that it was continuous play -- that is, before auto-reversing cassette players were invented.

I had an auto-reverse cassette deck in my car in 1974. But I never considered it an advantage, since there was no reason to want to hear the same album over and over. Cassettes did have the disadvantage of having "dead air" on the shorter of the two sides. Having to turn the tape over never bothered anyone, since everyone had to turn records over since their inception.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[LunaticTippy]

Tape and vinyl aren't compressed, hence they aren't lossless.

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.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Kamokazi]

That's just a pointless physiical media format, period.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[sm62704]

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.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Just Some Guy]

Somehow, I knew - knew! - that you'd be chiming in on this one.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Mipsalawishus]

No, I'm not slaughtering sheep. Yes, they are real though.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[whitelabrat]

I don't agree about Blu-Ray, but I will agree that you need some horribly expensive Hi-Fi rig and the hearing of a dog to notice the difference.

Frankly a good CD player beats a ho-hum SACD any day.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[PitaBred]

I'll bet you get 40 rods to the hogshead in your car, too. And that's the way you likes it.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[p3d0]

The CD isn't going away any time soon, it's still a very convenient method for getting data, whether it's music, movies or even games ... they're perfect for what they do.

Do you really consider CDs all that convenient? They're big and scratchable, and not particularly reliable.

The death of the old distribution methods (record companies charging $20 for a cheap round plastic disc with audio information on it) doesn't mean the death of the CD.

That's a good point, but I think Flash memory will give it a run for its money. Flash cards are much smaller; they can be given arbitrarily durable casing materials; and there are no moving parts involved in reading or writing them. Flash is currently at $8/GB and CDs are at $0.60/GB, but Flash is falling fast, and CDs will probably never break $0.50/GB.

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

[sm62704]

How could I not? =)

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Just Some Guy]

Sadly greed killed off DVD-Audio and SA-CD.

Yep, but you're wrong about which kind of greed:

SACD has several copy prevention features at the physical level which, for the moment, appear to make SACD discs impossible to copy without resorting to the analog hole. These include physical pit modulation and 80 bit encryption of the audio data, with a key encoded on a special area of the disk that is only readable by a licensed SACD device. The HD layer of an SACD disc cannot be played back on computer CD/DVD drives, nor can SACDs be created except by the licensed disc replication facilities in Shizuoka and Salzburg.

Overpriced media that I can't copy or digitally rip, and that is locked in a deadly stranglehold by a tiny cabal of manufacturers? Sign me up!

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Hatta]

I don't agree about Blu-Ray, but I will agree that you need some horribly expensive Hi-Fi rig and the hearing of a dog to notice the difference.

I think it holds for Bluray. You need some horribly expensive HDTV and the vision of an eagle to notice the difference between BR and a good upscaling DVD player. And even if you notice the difference, chances are you don't care, the important stuff is visible even in SD.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MaWeiTao]

I had to replace my 5-disc CD changer just recently and happened to get one that supported SACD. So I decided to look into the format and pick up a few discs.

From what I've learned, the format is best suited for recordings of live performances because it's greater dynamic range. It doesn't really help with studio recordings because of all the processing they do. SACD audio is apparently sharpened, but how that affects the music I hear I'm not certain.

According to some tests it's been found that people can generally only hear a difference between standard CDs and DVD Audio and SACDs when volume is set to uncomfortably high levels.

So it becomes clear why those formats haven't been adopted. The level improvement is far less noticeable than it is with Bluray versus DVD. There's no reason for adoption other than the adoption of a new technology. One big concern with these formats is that they open the window for DRM, although that has been rendered a moot point with the advent of buying music online.

I have two big problems with MP3s and the like. First is the lack of a physical medium, and more importantly the degradation of audio quality. I guess convenience has trumped all that.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Abreu]

Mod parent up.

One of my uncles still has an eighties Phillips CD player and it runs perfectly and with crystal-clear sound today.

Most consumer electronics you can buy today is entirely disposable, compared to that...

Re:Absence of real competitors

[treeves]

I have a Kyocera CD player I bought in 1989 (not the first one I bought, but one that I still use) that sounds very good. Probably better than most available today. It has real wood sides. Do they still make things like that?

I bought my first CD player, a Sony Discman, in 1984, and I had to buy a disc to listen to on it, since I had none. I still have that CD, a sampler of mostly classical pieces from Telarc, and it still sounds good, unlike cassettes from that long ago. I do wonder if the CDs I have burned myself will last as long.

I remember sitting on a plane going to a conference in SF in 1993 or so with a guy who was reading a book about the new standard for CD-ROMs. I think he may have worked for Microsoft. I was amazed at the thought of putting that much data on a disc.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MightyYar]

Actually, my point was that there would be no benefit to the average consumer. Sure, the niche markets for classical and jazz would benefit - but the hip-hop masses would not hear a quality difference.

And I think that the niche markets are already served by DVD-A and/or SA-CD

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Kjella]

Run a cassette over with a truck, tape any broken sections back together and re-spool it, that thing's fine.

Maybe the problem is that it sounds no worse?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[philicorda]

You are forgetting...

When DAT first appeared, there were no cheap CD burners.
You either mastered to 1/4 inch tape or to cassette.

DAT was incredibly useful to studios and production houses as:
It was high quality.
Literally identical backup copies became possible.
The media was cheap.
Some players supported timecode so you could sync to picture or vice versa.
Up to 180 minutes of recording time, about three times longer than a CD. Or 6 hours in LP mode.

It was a revolution at the time. The only alternative was some horrible lash up with video recorders and A/D converters that I don't really want to remember. Or early computer digital, which mostly sounded awful, was unreliable, and you'd still have to archive to magnetic tape or optical WORM drives as hard drives were tiny and expensive.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[galoise]

yeah, you could say it was in the wrong place, but my reply is a comment on the post quoted by GP, so i think you're being a little too overzealous. not that i care, anyway...

Re:Absence of real competitors

[rgviza]

Yes, you end up with an average dynamic range of 4db (maybe 3db by now?) with most popular music. The medium is capable of 90db(usable) at 16 bit. The dynamic range is there when it leaves the studio for the mastering desk; that's where people who care nothing about sound quality, but have all the money, pencil whip the mastering engineers into ruining it with extreme overcompression in the name of being "competitively loud". The mastering engineers have to make a living so the grudgingly comply, despite knowing it's pure stupidity. They have to pay their mortgage right?

Hopefully with the downfall of the recording "industry" and the rise of independent studio work this trend gets reversed.

>they'd just compress the audio to make it sound loud and we'd be in the same boat that we are with CDs.
yup...

Sad. We have the capability to sound *better* than a 1 inch tape deck and we toss that 20db advantage out with the garbage.

The worst part is a properly mastered recording sounds just as loud as an overcompressed one on the radio, only it has dynamics and sounds better. The radio stations apply their own compression to even things out. This works with the overcompression on the CD to completely ruin it.

It boggles the mind... The result: music radio stations are switching to talk radio format in droves, because nobody will listen to music on the radio. I wonder why...

-Viz

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Tragedy4u]

The audio quality of MP3's can't compare to CD audio quality. Yes they're a competitor to the CD, however for those who buy top quality audio systems listening to a MP3 on them is painful at best. Your mom & dad and a fair percentage of the world's population likely can't tell the difference in sound quality, nor do they own good sound systems. When you play good or crap source media on crap hardware, it all sounds the same. When you play good source media on good hardware it sounds phenominal...crap media on good hardware, it sounds bloody awful. I feel MP3's are best used for DJ's at parties or clubs, and lots of music "on the go" where the sound systems are questional in quality anyway. So when you factor that in, MP3's have cornered a fair sized niche as have CD's.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Paracelcus]

Funny how people are nostalgic for LP's, I guess they don't remember the hiss, the skipping, stuck tracks, wear and tear and the fact that even dust affected the sound quality. I even remember 78's and steel needles that had to be replaced to protect the lacquer records (before HI-FI) like my mom's player when I was a kid.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Big_Monkey_Bird]

I think 8-track ... (click) ... is a cool format.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[kipman725]

actualy the CD sample rate is too low, it's imposible to create a filter with a brick wall response that cuts off sound totaly at a specific frequancy and filters that are made too sharp have resonant peaks and cause phase distortion. Therefor to represent audio to the limit of human hearing on a cd you must use sharp response filter that causes distortion. DAT with its 48KHz sample rate seems far more logical.

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:Absence of real competitors

[CRCulver]

Interference tones can't be "captured" because they exist only in the human ear when two tones in different tuning strike it at the same time.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[ryszard99]

ahhhh, a kiwi :-)

Re:Absence of real competitors

[sootman]

Greed, plus a small market. MP3s, let alone CDs, already sound better than FM radio, and 9 out of 10 people on the street wouldn't be able to hear the difference between ANY format on the typical home or car stereo system or iPod earbuds. And even if you can hear a difference when doing A/B testing, NO ONE CARES! Say it with me: ONE HUNDRED MILLION iPods sold. Hearing the best possible representation of music is no more important to 99% of the populace than getting the best possible gas milage or eating the best possible food or finding the shortest possible route to work or the best possible parking space. There are MANY other factors that are more important to most people than accuracy or features. Do you drink distilled water? No--bottled, filtered, or plain old tap is GOOD ENOUGH.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[TrickiDicki]

If you'd actually listened to some of the (admittedly small amount of) material available on SACD then you'd realise that the high cost and format lock-in are small prices to pay for an extraordinary step forwards in high-fidelity music. SACDs sound phenomenal compared to vanilla CDs.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[maeka]

Interference tones can't be "captured" because they exist only in the human ear when two tones in different tuning strike it at the same time.

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.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[lgw]

For home audio play, the CD format captures the full range of human hearing. DVD-A and SA-CD add nothing. Of course, there are individual albums that sound better on one of the HD formats because they were remastered, but not because of the medium. Also, the quality of DACs vary from player to player, and if you pay $500 or more for a CD player you'll get a good DAC, but again that's not the format (and now that TI bought Brown and Burr, top-quality DACs should become cheap - they're aleady down from about $500 to about $50 retail (for these $5 components)).

For audio engineering it's different, as mixing is lossy so you need more bits to start with to end up with CD quality, but pro audio has different formats entirely.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[kryptkpr]

If you'd actually listened to some of the (admittedly small amount of) material available on SACD then you'd realise that the high cost and format lock-in are small prices to pay for an extraordinary step forwards in high-fidelity music. SACDs sound phenomenal compared to vanilla CDs.

What difference does higher quality make if nobody buys your products? The high cost and format lock-in were clearly not "small" prices to pay, because today the format is pretty much dead.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Lachlan Hunt]

Yeah, HD DVDs are the future!

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Just Some Guy]

SACDs sound phenomenal compared to vanilla CDs.

Only if you like the sound of silence, which is all you hear when you're on the pro-liberty side of Digital Restrictions Management.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MilesAttacca]

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.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Nonillion]

Ah yes...... the 8-track. I have fond memories riding with my parents listening to Credence, Three Dog Night, Sgt Peppers, Partridge Family, Cat Stevens... The year(s), late 60's to late 70's. The car, 1969 Chevy Impalla SS 396 big block, 6 speaker 8-track... Memories, born 1963...

Re:Absence of real competitors

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I think grandparent was referring to DVDs as in the video kind, not that stillborn audio thing. They aren't perfect substitutes for one another; but video DVDs are arguably a very effective competitor with audio CDs for the customer's entertainment dollar(particularly in those perverse situations where the DVD is cheaper than its own soundtrack).

Re:Absence of real competitors

[delete X]

You can use cannabis to have this "rare exceptions" The music sounds great!

Re:Absence of real competitors

[holiggan]

Presumably that's because the licensing fees were too high, and then the media was too expensive on top.

Yeah, that and the fact that "Joe SixPack" might not tell the diference in sound quality between a standard Audio-CD and a SA-CD or a DVD-Audio.

For the vast majority of consumers, as long as it sounds/looks "good enough", there is no reason to change to another format. Sure, there is always a small something-phile market that can tell the diference, but the "visual-philes" couldn't save the Laser Disk either. And it's a superior format to VHS (or so I was told).

The DVD was diferent. A DVD has significant better quality than a VHS tape (even Joe SixPack can tell that), but on top of that, it offers much more content than a VHS tape.

I guess that "extras" are easier to sell on a visual medium than a audio one. Sure, we all love "b-sides" and unreleased tracks, but I don't think that many people would pay to hear a "audio comment" on Britney Spears new album ;) If its done on video... well, thats why sometimes an exclusive DVD is attached to an CD album.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[the saltydog]

Actually, vinyl most definitely *is*...

Of course, the namesakes of the process involved are complete and total bastards, but at least we've talked about them before;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

Re:Absence of real competitors

[QRDeNameland]

The thing I hated about 8-tracks was that, in my experience, the players were highly susceptible to playback head misalignment as the track change was accomplished by physically moving the head. The result was inevitably that in the silence between songs or in soft passages you could hear faint bleed-over from the adjacent tracks.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Wansu]

  Ummm... they're still being sold new today.

Yes, you can buy limited selections of reissues and "new old stock" at a premium online. Back in 1988, the records disappeared from the shelves of retail stores and were replaced almost overnight with CDs.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I can't find what you are referring to. I'm browsing at -1 and all I can see is a bunch of on topic stuff about 8 track players and audio cassettes. Am I blind? Could you post a link to the comment you are actually replying to?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[galoise]

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.

yes, it was blatantly off-topic. i was replying to GP, who quoted his post on old tech. just that. so look no more, the quote was from the quoted post, not his original comment. sorry?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Oh. Yeah that called a link. We don't click on them here on slashdot. They lead to scary pictures, and scary facts.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[djrobxx]

Yes, you can buy limited selections of reissues and "new old stock" at a premium online You ought to swing by a DJ oriented music shop some time.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[the eric conspiracy]

Here is an article regarding cannibalization of CD sales by DVDs for your entertainment:

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2004/03/cd_no_dvd.html

It is NOT outlets like iTunes OR piracy OR music quality that is depressing CD sales.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20070209/082603.shtml

iTunes is just ONE retailer of music that accounts for 75% of online sales. There are MANY CD retailers.

CD sales still account for the vast majority of music sales:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB117444575607043728-lMyQjAxMDE3NzI0MTQyNDE1Wj.html

Now mod my VERY insightful original posting back up.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[algae]

Um, several million DJs are pretty sure you're wrong. Virtually all new music that can be danced to is released on vinyl - not reissues or new stock vintage, but actual new pressings of new music.

Yes, there was about a 5-10 year period after 1988 where records were difficult to get, but that's long past. Get with the times, man!

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Enderandrew]

Except, iTunes is the single largest retailer for music period, these days. No one retailer sells more music than them. Digital music is growing an at exponential rate, where as CD sales continue to decline year after year.

Physical media will go away.

Please show we a link that digital music only accounts for 15% of sales.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[cayenne8]

"or analog reel-to-reel (which, IMO, is still the most fun way to record audio)."

Don't forget the tube amps (especially on the mikes) to give it a warmth and good sound, that is largely missing from todays music.

Actually...the thing that REALLY kills todays music more than anything, is te over use of compression on the final mixes..to make it sound louder. So much of the good stuff back then, had much more dynamic range...take Dark Side of the Moon for instance...quiet parts quiet...the BOOM...the loud heavy full stuff.

Unfortunately, on many reissues....some asshole compresses the old mixes...and we lose that great dynamic range...

Re:Absence of real competitors

[cayenne8]

"Cassettes did have the disadvantage of having "dead air" on the shorter of the two sides. Having to turn the tape over never bothered anyone, since everyone had to turn records over since their inception."

Not mine...I'd fill the rest of the tape with extra songs....

C'mon, no one that really wanted good sound back then, bought pre-recorded tapes...sounds was horrible, but, recorded off the album on good Maxell tapes...good stuff. I had timing down to a science back then...usually less than like 3-10 seconds leftover at the end of any tape I did...

Re:Absence of real competitors

[cayenne8]

"Congrats! Since you're old enough to drive, it's time to start saving up for that used Firebird to go with the 8-track tapes. "

Actually...I keep on watch on eBay...hopefully to in the near future, buy a '74-'76 Trans Am. My friend in high school had one...a '76 with a 455 4 speed...talk about fun!!

They had almost killed the muscle car in '76...but, you can take those...and with good exhaust and a few simple mods...can take it from the pitiful approx 240HP...to 400+HP now...

Hehehe...when I get it, I will have to don a cowboy hat, and throw a case of coors in the back...just for fun. I wonder if you can still find an 8track player and tape to play "West Bound and down?"

Re:Absence of real competitors

[billcopc]

No shit, my buddy continues to produce new ones to this day. Vinyl is still a favorite of many many DJs, due to familiarity and ease of production. Sure, it's easier to burn a CD, but for short mass-produced runs, vinyl is still king. It can also deliver much greater fidelity than CD, but only if it is specially produced to do so. Vinyl isn't magic, contrary to what many seem to believe.

I still have a working belt-drive, and I treasure my modest collection of records - most particularly my copy of Slayer's Diabolus In Musica... yeah, thrash on vinyl! It's one of the many albums that yield better quality than CD, owing to the specific compounds used in the material itself, as well as the extra care applied in the cutting process. Another album that sounds noticeably better than the CD release is Metallica's Master of Puppets.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MightyYar]

No offense, but why in the world should the consumer care about the trials and tribulations of the recording industry? These are the same people feeding us ultra-compressed garbage on CD. Whatever you think of modern music - it doesn't deserve to be so poorly mastered.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[theeddie55]

(before you call me old, examine my UID...I'm 17).

You may well be 17 but your UID does nothing to either confirm or deny this, is it just me or is this a very strange thing to say?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Audiophile kool-aid? How much? I just bought some tubolator for my opamps and some cool volumne controls for my stereo and I'm looking for a beverage that can enhance the experience further.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[mfnickster]

Well, it is possible to have a disc that is CD-audio on one side and DVD on the other:

http://www.dualdisc.com/faq.html

The obvious thing for the record companies to have done, IMHO, is:

1. create a single standard for high-quality DVD-audio
2. start marketing all audio discs as dual-sided CD/DVD-audio discs
3. push the manufacturers to market only players that are capable of handling both formats (meaning audio players, not video decks)
4. lower the prices on CDs, and keep the prices reasonable on the new dual-format discs

If they had done this, I believe they could have kept their sales numbers. The key thing being, consumers will buy the physical media if they are getting better quality - or believe they are getting better quality, and if they don't have to think about whether their player will play the disc or not.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[roguetrick]

Curious, but wouldn't the recording of the entire symphony include the resulting sounds? I'd imagine the only time it would matter is if you recorded the guy with the dog whistle independent of the rest of the orchestra.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[famebait]

It sounds better because the inevitable degradation from the vinyl chain is of a kind that suits your taste for this type of music. And possibly because because the sound production was done with that degradation in mind. Porting such masters directly to CD will indeed sound different from the vinyl, and quite possibly worse, for various subjective values of worse.

It would be entirely possible to build a digital filter to do the same with the CD signal, but you can't sell that to most consumers because it is then obvious that it is a distorting and lossy process.

On a modern, well-produced CD you do all that shit in the mixing room if you want it, not on the player without choice. Unfortunately, engineers barely had time to learn to produce well for CD before the volume wars made everyone compress everything to hell and make the CD effectively 8-bit.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[computechnica]

The last CD I bought was actually a MP3 version of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It was cheaper than the CD version (12 Discs) or the Audible downloads. It came on 2 CDs ready to be uploaded to my Iphone.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Barsteward]

I'd love to wax lyrical about me cylinders but i was born too late.. was that a tune?

Re:Absence of real competitors

[sm62704]

True, tapes you made yourself were usually (not always) better than the factory tapes, but often recording an album wasn't an option. I have a lot of factory tapes (although a lot more home made ones).

Re:Absence of real competitors

[BrokenHalo]

My in-dash Nakamachi TD-700 cassette player is, in my experience, sonically superior to any non-Nak CD car deck I've ever heard.

Which isn't saying much. Sorry.

I have lived through the entire cassette-tape era (suvh as it was), but I can't say I entirely regret its demise. It never really did stack up against vinyl. Now reel-to-reel is another matter, of course, but I never did see that on a car dash. That would probably have been very cool, though... ;-)

Re:Absence of real competitors

[MtViewGuy]

...except mp3s...

However, you really want at minimum 256 kbps variable bit rate MP3 files for a commercial release, such as what Amazon did with their MP3 download store.

(I'd wish Amazon would offer your choice of 256 kbps VBR MP3, WMA or AAC file download format, since server storage space is so cheap nowadays. AAC format covers all the iPods and many newer portable music players out there, and WMA covers pretty much most non-Apple iPod portable music players.)

Re:Absence of real competitors

[chasd]

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

Walmart dropped the hyphen and the upper case "M" this year. Keep up with the times yourself.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Zaatxe]

I have CDs recordeds with MP3 files. 12 or so hours of music. Is that a paradox?

Actually I believe the article is refering to CD as a media, not as a music format. I believe that because of this sentence from the article:

Since then everything from music, to photos, to video, to Grandmaâ(TM)s recipes have been stored on CD.

Besides, DVDs, BluRay discs and so are nothing but "more dense CDs", an evolution of the media itself.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[BrokenHalo]

There is nothing that sounds good through those Radio Shack earbuds that Apple supplies for their iPods. Trouble is (as I've found) that investing in something better results in an inevitable dissatisfaction with the compression algorithms when faced with a storage space to sound quality ratio.

The fortunate thing with iPods is that one (or I, at least) can arrive at a compromise where the signal is more optimal than the ambient noise, given that the whole point of the iPod is that it is typically used in situations where there is a high level of background noise.

This situation gets more tricky if one attaches better-quality circumaural headphones, especially since one is likely to run into the issue of headset impedance affecting battery usage. So I guess there is a take-home message for the iPod owner: get the best street headset that happens to suit your ears and lifestyle, and be a bit careful how you pick your bitrate for your compressed files.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[maeka]

Or are you claiming that some kind of nonlinear interaction (not just the beats between frequencies, but the actual creation of NEW frequencies) is happening in your ears when you listen live, but would not happen the same way in the recording / playback apparatus? If it were true, that might be a reason to spend the money.

Either the new frequencies are audible (and thus sub 22 KHz) or they aren't.
If the new frequencies are audible they can be reproduced by a 44.1 KHz CD.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[Yvan256]

All I want is a disc with a freakin' laser on its head.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[sootman]

Again: NO ONE CARES. (OK, technically, I guess I should say ALMOST no one cares.) I see a lot of people with a lot of iPods in several circumstances--work, school, walking around town--and I'm not exaggerating when I say that 90% of them use the distinctive, easy-to-notice stock white earbuds. Even students in school who could easily put a bigger, better pair of headphones into the giant backpacks they carry, don't. One more time: sound quality is NOT what people care about. They want portability and ease-of-use, and a tiny pair of earbuds you can jam into your pocket or purse fits the bill.

Most people are NOT music enthusiasts, let alone audiophiles. Music, for most people, is pleasant noise that they hear while they're DOING other stuff. Most people do NOT sit alone, perfectly still, in a dim room, equidistant from two stereo speakers, listening to Pink Floyd or Mozart. Music is background sound while they're driving, working, playing, etc. And thus, sound quality is NOT of paramount importance. In fact, it barely even registers.

Re:Absence of real competitors

[BrokenHalo]

Again: NO ONE CARES. (OK, technically, I guess I should say ALMOST no one cares.)

Thanks for the vote of confidence. Nice to know I'm not no-one but ALMOST no-one.

Clearly you are talking rubbish, though, otherwise Sennheiser wouldn't bother with their many product lines designed for precisely this purpose.

The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[Lumpy]

More and More car stereos, even factory stereos will play from an ipod or better yet a usb memory device filled with mp3 music. In fact Clarion recently released 2 new car stereos that cant play a CD, only digital memory formats.

I see the CD going away slowly as digital downloads become more and more popular, but that is completely dependent on DRM going away. I have enough friends and customers that are pissed at itunes DRM right now that they will not buy another song.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[Agent Green]

Not only does DRM need to go away, but with ever-increasing bandwidth there's no reason to NOT sell lossless audio.

If labels would sell music the way NIN has for their last two albums (Ghosts / The Slip) and include the artwork and all those goodies, I'd probably never actually buy another CD again.

Until then, it's rip to FLAC.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[timster]

Bandwidth isn't the issue so much as the migration to flash-based portable players. The iPod Touch for example is 32GB max with an 8GB option still available. When storage is that constrained many people will be space-limited and would be able to carry many fewer songs with FLAC.

As flash sizes increase and prices go down I wouldn't be surprised to see lossless formats crop up. At the present, though, the decision wouldn't make much sense for a large group of users.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[Colonel Korn]

More and More car stereos, even factory stereos will play from an ipod or better yet a usb memory device filled with mp3 music. In fact Clarion recently released 2 new car stereos that cant play a CD, only digital memory formats.

I see the CD going away slowly as digital downloads become more and more popular, but that is completely dependent on DRM going away. I have enough friends and customers that are pissed at itunes DRM right now that they will not buy another song.

Better than an ipod of USB jack would be a standard headphone jack connection. Every car stereo should have had this since CD became a viable format. Instead, it was impossible to play existing cassettes on a cd player, difficult and lossy to play a cd on a cassette player, and usually difficult and lossy to play mp3s on any system out of the tiny portable players most people have. Seeing proprietary (ipod) connectors makes me mad, USB is better, but people should be able to plug in any audio device and play. This would cost pennies per system. Hell, I'd pay more for a system with no cd player, no memory, and only a headphone jack than I'd play for any other type of car audio system without the headphone jack, and I'm not alone.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[pitchpipe]

In fact Clarion recently released 2 new car stereos that cant play a CD, only digital memory formats.

Uhh... somethings wrong with this statement, only I can't quite figure out what it is. 8^)

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[Zakabog]

Hell, I'd pay more for a system with no cd player, no memory, and only a headphone jack than I'd play for any other type of car audio system without the headphone jack, and I'm not alone.

I've never seen a car with just an ipod jack although I'm sure they exist. My current car is a 2008 Ford Mustang, it comes with a headphone jack in an out of the way location (it's in the center console.) I leave a little 3' wire with two male headphone connections so when someone with an mp3 player comes in my car we can listen to their music.

It's quite nice, although if I didn't have that it wouldn't be too hard to run an RCA to headphone connection to the back of the stereo, as most car stereos I've seen have axillary RCA inputs.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[Lumpy]

Wearing headphones in a car is illegal in most states, therefore you will never see a headphone jack.

Line in 1/8th inch jack? those are on lots of car stereos. Most cheap stereos have them. High end stereos have a line in on the back.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[thogard]

For my decade old saab it costs nearly AU$1000 for a 6 disk changer. Or $200 for a big ipod and bit less than that for a device that pretends to be the factory CD changer but allows all songs on an ipod.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[Colonel Korn]

Wearing headphones in a car is illegal in most states, therefore you will never see a headphone jack.

Line in 1/8th inch jack? those are on lots of car stereos. Most cheap stereos have them. High end stereos have a line in on the back.

I think you probably know what I meant, but yes, a 3.5 mm line in jack, equivalent in size to that used for cheap headphones. Not an audio-out jack.

I've seen a few in car stereos sold in electronics retailers, but I've never seen one in the stereo that came with a car. I rent a lot of cars, too, which is where I really want a line-in, and I've never seen one. It's also not advisable to pop out the car stereo and run a cable from the back of it in a rental car.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[IntlHarvester]

Hell, I'd pay more for a system with no cd player, no memory, and only a headphone jack than I'd play for any other type of car audio system without the headphone jack, and I'm not alone.

These are commonly sold, it's called an "amplifier".

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[IntlHarvester]

The issue is that the type you have all the electronics for iPod or USB integration, the CD mechanism is extremely cheap to add. Little point in knocking $10 off a $300 deck.

See the Ford Sync for example (sorry 09 Mustang only :)

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[Darinbob]

All of my songs on the ipod are either from CD, or some novelty songs from the net that don't have DRM (badgers badgers badgers). Buying one song at a time just seems wierd to me (all the other songs on the album often turn out to be very good). And buying music that will be obsolete and unplayable in a decade and which can't be or used in a different model of player just seems wrong.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[mshannon78660]

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...

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[Jeppe Salvesen]

FLAC?

I use the vastly superior Apple Lossless. The bits are perfectly aligned for optimum playback on my once-siny iPod Nano 2gen!

Anyways, what will happen once CD sales drop so far that we'll only be able to download our music. Then we'll be in trouble, since we won't have any CDs to rip from!

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[asv108]

"Vastly Superior, " because the way to deal with lossless encoding is to use a proprietary format developed by Apple. How is Apple Lossless superior to FLAC?

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[HungWeiLo]

My 2008 Subaru Outback basic trim model has a audio input jack, plus a hole to lead your audio cable out of the center console.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Remember, though, that compute power is also cheap and getting cheaper. FLAC isn't a good choice for anybody's 2gig jogging mp3 player; but buying FLAC and producing compressed versions for your space constrained devices, as needed, is fairly practical. It would even be easy enough to have the process happen automatically in the background; just assign an optimal supported format and desired quality for each device, and let the sync process produce whatever compressed copies it needs.

I don't know if anybody has made this task droolproof at the consumer level; but I've seen menu options pertaining to it in Amarok, and anybody with the slightest script-fu can obviously do it with a few minutes effort.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[TedRiot]

I have an AUX input in my car stereo's center console so I could use an mp3-player to listen to music in the car. I still go for MP3's burnt on CD's, because of a couple of reasons. First, I can control the MP3 playback with the steering wheel buttons or the buttons on the stereo. Second, I can see the track info on the car stereo screen.

What would be sweet is an USB-port that I could plug a memory stick into. This would allow the interface to be the car stereo and remove the minor inconvenience of using burnt CD's. Unfortunately in my car that was not an option in the preinstalled players. There are some cars that have this, though.

Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while....

[Jeppe Salvesen]

I was parodying fanboyism (and making an observation in the second paragaph).

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

[opencity]

IMHO the iPod et al spells doom for the CD. As soon as 'the kids' can transfer music phone 2 phone there goes the music biz.
However, as burning and archive mechanism, why not, but no room there for the 'labels'

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

[the eric conspiracy]

The iPod spells doom for the pop music CD. All the other music genres are doing fine on CD.

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

[LunarEffect]

I for one will never stop my indy-music CD collecting. I like to support the artists if they are with a good, fair lable.

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

[snowraver1]

Transferring music phone to phone has been pretty easy for a few years.

You, my friend, must not have Telus as your carrier. I have a Telus phone and those crooks disabled the file transfer bluetooth profile. Why, you may ask? Well, because that way you have to pay them $3-$6 to download the song/ringtone from thier store. Now, don't think that you will just download it elsewhere, or email it to your phone, as downloads are disabled (except from Telus of course) and all email attachements get stripped before arriving at your phone.

The current artificial restrictions that have been put on my phone have caused Telus to become my #1 enemy, I end up calling them about once a month to bitch about this or that. I likely cost them more in customer support then they make off me.

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

[fermion]

I am no fan of the 'long tail', but for music that is not pop or otherwise mass market, the CDs days are numbers. Except for concerts, the availability of indie music is limited. I increasing go to iTunes to download albums that are not otherwise available. I have even been at concerts where the artist directed me to iTunes, presumable because the cost of pressing and transporting every CD is impractical.

Furthermore i have notice that pop CDS are often cheaper than download, if not at retail then certainly in the used market. It is senseless to buy Rihanna when I could go down to the record store and buy it for a dollar less on the resell rack, or $10 new, delivered.

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

[future assassin]

mY girlfriends kids (9 AND 12) got ipods for christmas. The novelty lasted for a few months and the ipods are now collecting dust somewhere. Strangely they still listen to a lot of mp3's on their computers and cd's.

Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[Lucid 3ntr0py]

I think Cds have remained so popular because they're cheap to make, small enough to be convient, and simple to lock down.

Why shouldn't we switch over to flashdrives? They're even better than CDs(smaller,more space, very cheap and getting cheaper,can't scratch)But they're easier to modify. It's hard for the average user to jailbreak/mod a CD. Not so much for new forms of media.

Although the hyper vigilance of Blu-Ray firmware updates may seem to contradict me...

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[Tenebrousedge]

Are you perhaps conflating CDs with optical media? Otherwise your post doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Flashdrives have fairly slow read/write speeds, they only last a certain number of read-write cycles, they're more expensive per unit, they are easier to lose (if you've seen mine, let me know!), and let me know how many average users can modify a flash drive.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck are you saying with "Simple to lock down?!" The Redbook specification for CDs is quite clear on DRM: there cannot be any. Standalone players are designed to this spec, so anything on the disc MUST be readable. By definition, audio CDs cannot be locked down at all.

This is why all 'copy protection' schemes A) break the Redbook spec, so the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo cannot be included on the disc or packaging, and B) are ridiculously easy to bypass by disabling Autoplay and ripping with something like EAC.

The real list is that they are cheap, small enough to be convenient, have sufficient redundancy to last a long time, and by definition have no copy-protection systems. THAT is why they have remained popular over other formats.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[jellomizer]

Their slow speeds compared to a CD, I am not sure about that, CDs aren't that fast.

The numbers of reads-writes before they die, is actually quite high, I havn't seen one go on me yet. Besides you can only write to a CD once (for the cheap types) the more expensive only a few times.

Easier to loose, I would say about the same. It is just that the CDs scratch so easially we take better care of them. But you will be supprise when I reorganize or clean up how many Linux CDs that I burned I find. They just slip behind the smallest crack.

Being most are made for the computer to read it is easy for most people to modify a flash drive, much easier then a CD. However... I don't see any reason why they cannot make a normal read-only version.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[KovaaK]

... they only last a certain number of read-write cycles...

It is the write cycle that limits them - you can read from it as much as you want. Still, I was under the impression that most flash drives will last longer than a typical burned CD will (pressed CDs may be a different story) even if you very rigorously use the flash drive. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

...and let me know how many average users can modify a flash drive.

Let's assume that the parent was speaking of modifying the data on the data medium, and not opening up the flash drive to physically modify it.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[stewbacca]

Their slow speeds compared to a CD, I am not sure about that, CDs aren't that fast.

Not to mention a song would be a good 10-20 seconds in from a flash drive before the stupid cd player spun-up and started playing the tune.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[Tenebrousedge]

After checking my calculations again, I stand corrected on the speed issue.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[LehiNephi]

I think the GP means to ask "why don't the record companies start distribution on flash cards?" Seriously, it's an interesting proposition. Considering how horribly most music is processed, few people would notice a difference between a CD and a 128kbps MP3. It would be quite cheap to put a CD's worth of music on a 64MB flash card (heck, a lot of CDs would fit on a 32MB card...). Manufacturing costs would not be that much different, I don't think. You'd get a smaller package, which would reduce manufacturing costs and transportation costs.

If the manufacturer also burns a fuse in the chip to prevent overwriting, the number-of-writes issue goes away. Read speeds are plenty fast for playing back music. Heck, it doesn't even need to be flash--it just needs to be some sort of ROM.

There remains the issue of migrating everyone to players that take the new MusicStix(TM) cards, but the idea itself is not bad.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[Tenebrousedge]

Considering how horribly most music is processed, few people would notice a difference between a CD and a 128kbps MP3

*cringes* I know that's true, but please don't say such things. Just because that's the way it is doesn't mean that's the way it should be.

As far as the rest of the idea, I can't see a new physical medium taking hold, especially one that didn't offer an increase in music quality (or even one that did: SACD, anyone?). It loses in convenience to digital music players, and in quality to vinyl, and most of the distribution infrastructure is based around CDs. I don't know a whole lot about manufacturing memory, but I can't imagine that it would be cheaper than making a CD.

It sounds like an idea twenty years past its time.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[BlackSnake112]

I have burned CDs from 1996,1997 that still read and play fine. These were cheapo comp-usa branded ones. I wish I had bought more. The older CD-Rs last longer then the newer ones do. The same may be true for DVDs as well I don't have that many old DVDs (only from 2001-2002) but those I do still play fine. New CD-R and DVD-Rs from the last year I have worn out. (CD-Rs in a CD changer in car) and the DVDs were files that I burned off to make room on the disk drive. It looks like the older CD-R (DVD-R too) were made better then the ones that are made today.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Sandisk tried that. It sucked and died a well deserved death.

They started with the relatively sensible notion of using the MicroSD slot, so basically everything that wasn't an iPod was physically compatible; but they (of course) took the opportunity to puke out some ghastly abortion of a DRM system, so support was pretty much limited to some of their own devices.

I think they ran into a couple of problems: Unfamiliarity was one: MicroSD is common enough on geek gadget type devices; but not the boomboxes and cheap stereos and whatnot of the world. Useful amounts of flash memory still costs more than CDs pressed in quantity, so there is a temptation to attempt various "value added" gimmicks, most of which involve DRM and some sort of nickel and diming of the customer.

In Sandisk's case, rather disgustingly, the idea was promulgated that Gruvi(tm) content cards were somehow an advance for the user: âoeWe think this will be a disruptive technology, but will enable a whole new world of opportunities in the mobile market. Today content is locked to play back on one device. Now we have the freedom to enjoy content on whatever device consumers want to useâ. As their spokesweasel failed to note, content being locked to one device is an artificial problem, so introducing a DRM laden flash memory format to "solve" it is stupid, and going on about it like it is some sort of advance is even stupider.

Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown"

[Televiper2000]

"It would be quite cheap to put a CD's worth of music on a 64MB flash card (heck, a lot of CDs would fit on a 32MB card...). Manufacturing costs would not be that much different, I don't think. You'd get a smaller package, which would reduce manufacturing costs and transportation costs." I'm sorry but a CD is significantly cheaper to make than a flash card. I can get a 1000 CDs made right now for $450 USD. That's one-off low volume pricing, and would go down significantly with volume. Flash memory has become significantly cheaper over the last 10 years, but that's on a per byte basis. The problem you will find is that the cost of making the plastic case, the printed circuit board assembly, and testing have not. The manufacturing costs for a CD are insignificant when compared to the actual production costs. Unless of course you're recording in your bedroom.

26th?

[Spankophile]

Who the hell celebrates a "26th" anniversary?

Re:26th?

[gstoddart]

Who the hell celebrates a "26th" anniversary?

Someone who has already celebrated a 25th, but hasn't reached a 27th.

Seriously, I don't know about you, but my birthdays and anniversaries happen every year. The coolest parties happen on the ones divisible by 5, but people do acknowledge them as they happen.

Cheers

Re:26th?

[Jason Levine]

Who the hell celebrates a "26th" anniversary?

You do if you've been married to your wife for 26 years. Or you won't be celebrating a 27th anniversary.

Re:26th?

[backbyter]

It's a digital Silver Birthday.
1st=0, 2nd=1, ..., 26th = 25

Re:26th?

[aliquis]

.. and how is this news?

Re:26th?

[rkanodia]

Who wouldn't celebrate the Polycarbonate Anniversary? There's lots of good ones around there. You know. 24 is Neodymium, and 27 is Jungle Camouflage!

Re:26th?

[digitalderbs]

My mom does. At twenty-six candles, the birthday cake is pretty much butchered.

Re:26th?

[Junior J. Junior III]

People who base their counting systems on the phonecian alphabet, that's who!

Happy Zth, CD!

Re:26th?

[value_added]

Someone with a collection of burned CDs that are still readable?

Re:26th?

[sunking2]

Someone who is so desperate to get a story on Slashdot that they need some excuse to bring up a subject that has been hashed 50 times before. It was either this or some stupid Ask Slashdot like, 'Should I buy this CD or is the format dead.'

Re:26th?

[sm62704]

Who the hell celebrates a "26th" anniversary?

I celebrated my 26th anniversary. Got divorced the following year though...

Re:26th?

[the kostya]

Zth? Shouldn't it be BAth? If you take A to be a null value (essential for modern math), Z is 25 in decimal. 26 base 10 is the radix!

Re:26th?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Technically, you're probably right. However, I'll point out that there's no "Year 0" in our accepted western method of counting the years. There's 1AD, and 1BC, but no year 0. It's hardly a modern mathematical system.

Re:26th?

[the kostya]

Yes, we count years starting at one but our numbering system starts at 0. In all numbering systems I know of, if there is X symbols to be used for numbers, X-1 is the largest number that can be represented as a single character (and we will ignore Roman Numerals since they are outdated and stupid).

Re:26th?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Ah, but it was the Romans who appropriated the phoenician alphabet. So I think it's appropos to have a stupidly wrong base-26 counting system if it's based on phoenician glyphs.

Re:26th?

[OrangeCowHide]

As someone who write all of his jokes in base 13, this is the 20th birthday which everyone appreciates.

Re:26th?

[sharkey]

You say that like it's a bad thing!

Re:26th?

[antdude]

Wife on /.? Yeah right. [grin]

CDs are cheap storage

[RobBebop]

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.

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[Jason Levine]

The music industry enjoyed record CD sales during the 1990s. Those days are long gone.

And if you listen to the RIAA, then the sole reason for that is online piracy. They always point to that peak in the 1990's as being the point that CD sales should be at (or higher) if piracy was stopped. However, it is more truthful to say that it was a temporary high point in sales and that sales dropped afterwords due to normal market forces. (Normal Market Forces including piracy, but not as the main component... probably not even as a major component.)

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[gstoddart]

But don't be fooled... the only reason to keep CDs around is because of the need to cheap, disposal media distribution.

Well, that at the fact that everybody is set up to handle this particular kind of media.

Seriously, my car, my computer, my CD changer, the stereo in my living room ... they all support the physical medium. Coming out with the "new hotness" of form factor and expecting everybody to re-tool everything is stupid. Even if we can do better, CDs have the advantage that everyone has the gear to deal with them.

Once technology becomes that ubiquitous, throwing away the form factor because you've thought of a cooler way that people should pay you for would be stupid ... sounds like something Sony would do. Consumers don't want to replace every damned thing they own every couple of years just because some company has come up with a new shape or format.

It's be like saying "hey, I know, let's completely change all of the AC plug designs because this one is prettier". You're not going to get everyone rushing to your door to switch over to this new plug format, because the nuisance and cost of switching vastly outweigh any small benefit to the consumer.

Things like this persist because they work, they're well understood, and the technology to work with them is everywhere.

Got a new idea for a 1" cube to be a replacement for the CD player? Sorry, just not interested. But, don't think that it isn't the combined amount of places where we use the 5 1/4" media that's keeping it around as a form factor -- it's the standard, and we're not looking for a new one.

Cheers

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[Sloppy]

Online distribution is the medium of choice for that.

You can't buy online music from a band at 1:30 am inside a bar as you drunkenly stagger and give them the ultimate praise: "You dudes rock!" But you can reach into your pocket and pull out a $10 bill (you've been doing that all night anyway as you buy beers) in exchange for a plastic box.

CDs aren't going away yet. They, combined with T-shirts, are an important part of offsetting some bands' travel (and drinking) expenses. How can you replace that? Bring a laptop along on a night of drinking, and hope the bar has free wifi, so you can say "you dudes rock" as you peer at a little screen and give them the satisfaction of seeing you click on something, so that the band can then collect the money after they've already spent it on beer and gasoline? I don't think so.

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[sm62704]

Amen to that. You can almost fit Led Zeppelin's entire catalog, from Led Zeppelin 1 to CODA on a single CD if the tunes are in MP3 format.

I wish minidisks of MP3s would play in car stereos!

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[DorkRawk]

Digital download cards. My band is planning to release our next EP entirely digitally. Because of this need to sell a physical product at shows, we will be selling digital download cards (like gift cards) to buy the music from our site.

The new fan receives something tangible and the benefit of full album artwork. The band gets cash in their hands on the spot with a decreased cost of physical overhead.

Everybody

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[geobeck]

But you can reach into your pocket and pull out a $10 bill (you've been doing that all night anyway as you buy beers) in exchange for a plastic box.

If you've been doing that all night to buy beers, it's probably more like "C'monjus' gimmeone... You knowI' mgoodferit!"

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[Karlt1]

You can't buy online music from a band at 1:30 am inside a bar as you drunkenly stagger and give them the ultimate praise:

Sure you can, most cellular providers have an online music store you can buy from.

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[dswensen]

Bar? As in leave the house? Look where you're posting, man.

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[MojoStan]

You can almost fit Led Zeppelin's entire catalog, from Led Zeppelin 1 to CODA on a single CD if the tunes are in MP3 format.

That's cool, but I prefer the idea of Led Zeppelin's entire catalog, including How the West Was Won, on a single DVD (dual-layer is probably needed) if the tunes are in FLAC format (or other good lossless format). CD/DVD jukeboxes and changers would be less necessary. It would be great if FLAC playback became a standard feature of DVD players the same way that MP3 playback is now standard on CD players, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[geekoid]

You could get a flash disk.
OR hook your music device to there system and get a copy transferred.

Re:CDs are cheap storage

[xaxa]

Digital download cards. My band is planning to release our next EP entirely digitally. Because of this need to sell a physical product at shows, we will be selling digital download cards (like gift cards) to buy the music from our site.

Excellent idea! Hopefully your customers will understand, presumably they're mostly young and won't have any problem.

PS you don't have any seeds for you torrent.

Explain this to me.

[scorp1us]

You used to have to buy writable 650Mg CDs for $1. Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7. Impervious to scratches, can survive several trips through the washer, and have fast read/write speeds. I cannot understand how TFA is so optimistic. When CDs came out, it would take weeks to download a full CD, now I can download a 720p torrent in an few hours. My HDDVD player has a Ethernet jack... so how long until we stop spinning discs and start slinging bits?

Re:Explain this to me.

[east coast]

so how long until we stop spinning discs and start slinging bits?

When the auto industry gets their heads out of their asses and home media servers are as easy as an external hard drive to set up and as cheap.

We're finally getting to the point of optional iPod factory head units for autos now. Up until a year or two ago you had to go third party for that kind of thing. Once a universal standard comes around for portable media players they're will be a surge in head units supporting this. Until then there is going to be iPods and a few USB players/drives. The portable media player needs to mature a bit more before the auto industry will play catch up.

And for the 2-3 PC home both NAS and home media servers are still a bit on the high end of the price range. Geeks and technophiles have already jumped for it, everyone else sees it as an expensive toy like they did with LaserDisc.

Re:Explain this to me.

[MPAB]

Too bad AOL stopped giving away media before flash cards replaced CDs.

Re:Explain this to me.

[TubeSteak]

You used to have to buy writable 650Mg CDs for $1. Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7. Impervious to scratches, can survive several trips through the washer, and have fast read/write speeds. I cannot understand how TFA is so optimistic.

Personally, I'm not going to lend someone my flash drive.
They're small, easy to lose (though I keep mine on a lanyard) and I have other stuff on it.

You burn someone a CD or DVD, it doesn't take all that long, it's cheap, but most importantly, you don't expect it back. IMO, CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are disposable in a way that even a cheap flash drive is not.

Re:Explain this to me.

[MPAB]

Exactly. Built-in car stereos have odd shapes that make them difficult to replace; most play only CDs and the "extra" of playing MP3 CDs (a pain in the ... to make) or an AUX input costs as much as a Pimp My Ride stereo system.

Re:Explain this to me.

[Thelasko]

Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7 [newegg.com]. Impervious to scratches, can survive several trips through the washer, and have fast read/write speeds. I cannot understand how TFA is so optimistic.

Why is there a market for paper plates when you can use ceramic ones over and over? Because you can throw it away.

Re:Explain this to me.

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Is there a small cheap device for doing this - connect two flash drives, and sync them (differential or total sync, forward, retrieve)? I could see that making it ridiculously easy for people to send eachother stuff and make the CD obsolete.

Re:Explain this to me.

[Hatta]

You used to have to buy writable 650Mg CDs for $1. Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7.

At $1 each, the CD gets you 4.4 gigs of space for the same price as that one gig of flash. So the CD still wins out, and the DVD is even better. Plus, rewritability is not necessarily something you want when you're looking for a storage medium.

Re:Explain this to me.

[tepples]

Once a universal standard comes around for portable media players

3.5 mm stereo TRS connectors. What's so not-standard about that?

Re:Explain this to me.

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

Indeed. I used to love getting AOL floppy disks in the mail. Back when a megabyte of storage space was actually useful ;-)

Re:Explain this to me.

[brunes69]

So what happens next year when a 1 GB flash stick is now $0.50 or something ? How low does the price go before it is disposable?

Don't think it can happen? An SD reader, which is infinitely more complex to produce than a flash chip since it involves multiple circuits and a big hunk of metal fo rthe USB port, is only $1.50 nowadays..

Re:Explain this to me.

[geobeck]

You used to have to buy writable 650Mg CDs for $1.

A buck is pretty cheap for anything that weighs 650 tonnes!

Re:Explain this to me.

[jawtheshark]

One writable CD for $1? Heck, man I remember when CD-R burners (and only CD-R) were SCSI only and a single 650Meg CD costed 6€ (Well, back in my own currency then...)

Now get off my lawn!

Re:Explain this to me.

[sootman]

You used to have to buy writable 650Mg CDs for $1. Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7.
 
Yeah, and now those same 650 MB CDs (actually, 700MB now) cost about a quarter apiece in quantity. We've got spindles of them around here, you just grab one when you need one.
 
Speaking of spindles, a hundred 700 MB CDs = 70 GB. So for the cost of 3 or 4 GBs worth of Flash, you can have about 20x the capacity in a write-once format. (Or buy RWs, if you want to bother keeping track of them.)
 
BTW, I worked with a digital photographer in 1996 and we were happy when blank CDs dropped from $9 to $7 APIECE. We used to load one up in his 1x burner, start a backup, and go to lunch.

Re:Explain this to me.

[HungWeiLo]

1 PC, 2 flash drives, Microsoft SyncToy (free). Works pretty well for me.

Re:Explain this to me.

[scorp1us]

Any PC with rsync?

Re:Explain this to me.

[Hawke666]

Hmm, I know I can find a car stereo which plays MP3 CDs, USB flash, and SD cards, plus AUX input for that price: http://www.target.com/Player-USB-Port-Audio-Input/dp/B000FFEXEY but I was unaware that Pimp My Ride stereo systems were that inexpensive -- where can I find one!?

Re:Explain this to me.

[tknd]

Yeah but I'd say the market for CDs is shrinking really fast. It's just like printing paper. Before you used to print something and expect to either have it archived or kept in some file cabinet because that was how you stored data back then. Today, print outs are disposable or even worthless as newer technologies start replacing their functions: screen projectors for meetings, emails and IM for messaging, small electronics for picture viewing. Everything these days is stored digitally in some format and the paper is just seen as the last way to get it onto a cheap display device. Publications like newspapers and magazines are getting burned really hard by this change and are adapting/diversifying to online publications instead of paper delivered ones. The only publications that are staying paper are marketing material like post cards and paper advertisements or brochures and dead tree books. But even those markets are shrinking. I know all of this because I know someone that works at the HP printing division.

So for CDs I'd say the same trend is occurring. It used to be you (everyone) used CDs to archive data. Today people think of them as disposable. Tomorrow they'll probably start thinking of them as useless. Why? Because networking technology like wireless and the internet are taking over the function of data distribution. Even thumb drives might have a run for their money once networking technologies improve. If you can start shoving 10mb down a network within a few seconds in digital form, there's almost no need for the data storage medium. We're already seeing that with smaller media like documents. For example, you don't think "i'll save this document to a disk and hand you a disk" today you say, "I'll email you a copy." There's no disk involved in that transfer of data, just the network connection and some devices at various points to make the transfer occur. Or how about that time when you had to move your document somewhere else and rather than whipping out a thumb drive you figured it would be faster to just email it to yourself and download it at work/school or wherever you need it.

So CDs are eventually going to go extinct as the CD readers get used less and less. For example look at the netbook boom (small computers without CD/DVD drives). Why it is occurring today rather than 5 or 10 years ago? Because there are plenty of alternatives to CDs: wireless networking, thumb drives and most of the applications people use today are based on the internet. So now the CD drive rarely gets used and some people actually think they don't need it. Even desktop PCs will eventually stop shipping with CD/DVD drives just as they stopped with the floppy drives. Probably the biggest thing keeping the CD alive today is the piggy backing of DVD in the same device. A CD ROM by itself is today almost useless, but a DVD ROM still will have merit for a while. But even that is changing with things like video on demand, movie downloads, and of course that bittorrent thing.

In fact I don't see why there is any reason for us not to be there today. You can already watch the olympics on the internet in much better quality than youtube on a 1mbps dsl connection. If our connections were in the 10mbps to 100mbps we'd already be reaching the "good enough" territory for most media and data distribution. At that point you make each device basically a specialized computer with an internet connection and there's little reason to have these things called disks or drives if the internet can store and distribute everything.

Re:Explain this to me.

[Jorophose]

Nail meet head.

DVDs and CDs are disposable, especially since they're effectively worthless to the distributor after they're made.

What am I going to do with a disc full of songs that I already have? As opposed to a flash drive that I can reuse...

Re:Explain this to me.

[Jorophose]

Can't boot my computers with USB (I admit they're fairly old, ~1999-2001).

So for me CDs win. Plus I can burn games on them and distribute them across the LAN like that.

Re:Explain this to me.

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

A PC is not small/cheap. The point is to be extremely portable... much like a flash drive.

Re:Explain this to me.

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

A PC is not small/cheap. The point is to be extremely portable... much like a flash drive, so it feels like you're just casually giving your friend a CD when you meet them somewhere, then they can listen to it immediately on their drive home.

The shy return of vinyl?

[east coast]

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.

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a vinyl nut, but there are many albums I don't want on vinyl including many of the later Rush albums. The reason is simple: You can't get more than about 40-45 minutes on a single LP without serious quality loss (quick explanation: the louder the music is on the LP, the better the S/N ratio but the more space the groove modulations take up). These full-length 55+ minute CD's on LP sound awful unless they make it a double LP set.

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[MPAB]

Most vinyls I've seen bear the DDA symbol, tough. They're not "the real stuff".

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[sm62704]

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).

Buying new vinyl is a waste. The masters are digital, so you get the worst of both worlds, the disadvantages of both analog and digital and the advantages of neither.

If you're buying anything recorded after ~ 1980, the CD will have the best fidelity. Before that an LP will, provided your turntable is good enough. With analog, the quality input device is paramount.

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.

If you don't have a really good turntable you're right. But with a good turntable and a well engineered recording, provided the signal was analog from the original to the LP's cutter, vinyl beats digital hands down, and anyone should be able to hear the difference.

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[scorp1us]

I have vinyl of the 2008 release of Ghosts (Nine Inch Nails) Someone still thinks it is important...

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[TheOldSchooler]

But can I get the latest Hannah Montana in vinyl? That's what I really want.

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[east coast]

Well, the first all digital recording for the mass market was Dire Strait's Brothers In Arms album and it was considered really advanced in it's own time. So, it's more likely that you'd be pretty safe with most recordings up to the early 90s. Some of this would also be determined by genre since I know that a lot of classical was a big early adopter of digital but your punk and garage band types may still be using older technology today.

And I know that some artists went back to analog recording because of the sound dynamics.

It use to be the most CDs came with the SPARS code on them (AAD, ADD, DDD, DAD) but this seems to have fallen by the wayside. It would be really interesting to see who still uses what technology today. Also consider that many may be using sample rates far over those of conventional CDs so the vinyl may still offer better dynamics in that fashion.

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[psykl0n3]

Buying new vinyl is a waste. The masters are digital, so you get the worst of both worlds, the disadvantages of both analog and digital and the advantages of neither.

Yes, the masters are digital, but most mastering houses will do their job in at least 24bit/96'000 so that means the quality of the files getting cut to vinyl is going to be better than that which ends up on the CD. On top of this when the 24/96 get converted to 16/44,1 there is noise introduced even if dithering algorithms are used.

Arguably, on good (read as studio level) equipment you will be able to hear the difference between 16/44.1 and 24/96. As agreed by a lot of same mastering engineers the difference between 24/96 to 24/192 is hardly noticeable and the extra file heft is not worth it, but the 16/44.1 is clearly inferior.

Now, of course not everything which gets pressed to vinyl is recorded in ideal circumstances and not always the mastering is excellent, but in a club with an above average loud sound system I can pretty much every time tell between someone playing off of vinyl and CDs/mp3s. Thus the popularity of vinyl in DJ circles. Plus it helps to separate those that are really ready to invest into the music they play from those who don't which brings about a few more kudos :)

Some people are still cutting dubplates of their new tracks, instead of putting them on CD-Rs for a good reason too...

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[sm62704]

Thus the popularity of vinyl in DJ circles

That, and you can't make a CD go "VOOP!"

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[geekoid]

You need to have very high end equipment to notice the difference between vinyl and a CD played on a 10 dollar player.
And even then that's only going to be true for about a dozen plays.

And that only if it is a quality production with that level of sound in mind during the whole process.

And only if you are in a reasonably quite room.

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[djfake]

Vinyl went away.

Records sell in the hundreds, maybe thousands at very best. When was the last time an LP was certified Gold or Platinum? The sales that have continued are minuscule in relation to the over all music sales. It's a cult thing, much like the sales of blank cassettes. Yeah, these are RIAA figures, but the point is still valid:

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/04/riaa-admits-vin.html

As for hearing the difference, that's already been debunked here.

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[east coast]

Records sell in the hundreds, maybe thousands at very best.

Far from true.

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[djfake]

Per title my friend, the numbers in your article are aggregate. And what did it say, 511 million CDs to 1.3 million records?

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[sm62704]

You need to have very high end equipment to notice the difference between vinyl and a CD played on a 10 dollar player.

Yes, that's true.

And even then that's only going to be true for about a dozen plays.

With a high end turntable you have very little pressure on the stylus, and you can get a whole lot of plays out of a record. Cheap turntables will ruin a record quickly; it's the difference betwween 1/4 gram of pressure with a good turntable, and 20 grams of pressure with a cheap one.

Re:The shy return of vinyl?

[east coast]

The way you stated your numbers could have (and was) very easy to misconstrue. And I don't really think there is anyone out there who is representing the upswing in vinyl sales as a threat to CDs dominance in the market. So if it makes you happy, yes, vinyl numbers will remain small in the future. I don't think anyone here has questioned that. But from what you're saying it would be like saying that Linux on the desktop is dead. Or that Bentley cars are dead.

And in any case, your point about the gold/platinum album is just as moot considering that certification is based on the work and not the format. So even if these numbers are small they do contribute to the overall sales of a work.

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...

Re:AOL Coaster CDs

[east coast]

Damn right it's not the same way but they sure are a lot of fun if you own a shotgun, someone to pitch them like a Frisbee and some #7 bird-shot shells.

Re:AOL Coaster CDs

[TheRaven64]

Heh, I remember calling up Compuserve, AOL, and anyone else with a freephone number who sent out disks. Pretty much every ISP used to do it back in the early '90s, and so I never had to buy floppies.

Re:AOL Coaster CDs

[FLEB]

AOL was nothin'. CompuServe would give you a five- or six-disk set (Mac was 6, PC was 5), and there was online ordering. Unfortunately, my parents cut me off of it once UPS started delivering shipping boxes full of free floppies.

Re:AOL Coaster CDs

[Hatta]

For a while AOL was sending out discs in metal tins that made excellent rolling trays. Wish I still had a few of those.

My first music CD

[dedazo]

Was a New Order album I bought because of the "True Faith" track (from the Bright Lights, Big City movie), which I just had to have. Of course out also went $1,200 on a Technics CD deck as well, because I only had tape and turntable at the time.

I don't have the disc anymore (I do have the box somewhere) but I have this distinct memory of CDs being a lot thicker and heavier back then. Anyone remember that?

Re:My first music CD

[Colourspace]

Same here - it was New Order, Substance in 1987. Apparently compiled so Tony Wilson (Factory records boss) could have all his New Order singles on 2 cd's.. Ostensibly, this was for him to play in the car, but I'm not sure car CD players were about then..? If they were they wouldn't have been cheap.. CD's were much thicker back then, but I do remember a case of a time where I was commenting on how indestructible CD's were to my GF of the time while flexing it ever so slightly in my palm... The tiniest amount... It shattered in front of our eyes... So much for that theory...

Re:My first music CD

[chiph]

'Substance' was one of my first buys, too. But my collection got started a few years before then, back in late 1983 with the 'Star Wars' soundtrack on 2 CDs.

My first player was $650 for a Sony CDP-101, bought through AAFES military sales. I still have it - it sounds like crap. But one day it'll be collectible... :)

Chip H.

Re:My first music CD

[welshsocialist]

One of the earliest CD's I remember buying was Natalie Imbruglia's Left of the Middle . I still have it to this day; its pretty good.

NOT as healthy as 15 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet there is some occasional unexplained knee pain. And for some reason, compact disks can no longer eat bananas without violent diarrhea.

Unfortunately

[k31bang]

Unfortunately we can't sing Happy Birthday to the CD without paying royalties. Such a cruel world. =/

Re:Unfortunately

[Beat The Odds]

Unfortunately we can't sing Happy Birthday to the CD without paying royalties. Such a cruel world. =/

If you sing just a little bit, it's fair use...... ;)

Re:Unfortunately

[zolaar]

...and you smell like one, too!

please go away

[ChienAndalu]

I don't like them and I nearly don't use them anymore. They have taken the place of the floppy disk for me - three out of four CDs I burn have some OS that I can boot from.
When I want to share some files, I put them on a USB-stick or a portable hard drive.
There was a time when I stored backups on CDs, but the hassle of organizing and searching them is just too big.
Don't get me even started on buying software or music ;-)
I hope 1TB USB-sticks will come about soon.

I have been doing phone2phone for a while

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

but I don't have kids to teach. It's easy, I just swap Microsd cards, and mail them any "non" mp3 stuff they had on it back.

It's like dog years.

[Wandering Wombat]

Well, it's 2600 in computer years...

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

[MightyYar]

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

Um, mine are all 12cm?

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

[damn_registrars]

I rather suspect it has something to do with the width a drive can be in a typical computer case.

We used to have 8" floppy drives - why not use that size then? Or who said it had to fit inside a computer case? A lot of early CD-ROM drives were external, and early home CD audio drives were huge ... there was a time when it didn't seem like we would ever see portable CD audio players.

Re: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?

Um, mine are all 12cm?

The question remains, though, regardless of how one measures the diameter. Is it by design or coincidence that the CD size matches the size of the floppy drive (and the car audio deck as well)?

I have an 8-track in my old car that is the same external width as a CD player that I have for a newer car.

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

[cdrguru]

I believe they were based on floppy discs. Remember, these came from 1980, not 1993 as the summary seems to suggest.

Check out the book at http://www.infinadyne.com/cddvdforensicsbook.html

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

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I seem to recall hearing it was something to do with Sony insisting a CD could store 70 minutes (or something) of music. I think Philips had intended slightly smaller CDs... like 60 minutes or something. Which is a shame because one thing I disliked about CD's over compact-cassettes was that CD's never really fit in pockets very well!

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

[Hal_Porter]

And 5.25 inches is 12cm when you're travelling at 43% of light speed.

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

[sm62704]

Wikipedia is your friend

The partners aimed at a playing time of 60 minutes with a disc diameter of 100 mm (Sony) or 115 mm (Philips).[8] Sony vice-president Norio Ohga suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler's 1951 performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony at the Bayreuth Festival.[9] [10]

The extra 14 minute playing time subsequently required changing to a 120 mm disc. Kees Immink, Philips' chief engineer, however, denies this, claiming that the increase was motivated by technical considerations, and that even after the increase in size, the Furtwängler recording was not able to fit onto the earliest CDs.[3][8] According to a Sunday Tribune interview,[11] the story is slightly more involved. At that time (1979) Philips owned Polygram, one of the world's largest distributors of music. Polygram had set up a large experimental CD plant in Hanover, Germany, which could produce huge numbers of CDs having, of course, a diameter of 115 mm. Sony did not yet have such a facility. If Sony had agreed on the 115 mm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the market. Sony decided that something had to be done. The long playing time of Beethoven's Ninth imposed by Ohga was used to push Philips to accept 120 mm, so that Philips' Polygram lost its edge on disc fabrication.[11]

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

[MightyYar]

They aren't the "same size"... they are just both narrower than the width of a typical car deck. A car deck is wide enough to accept something wider than a CD. And even that is not standard, since I had to use an adapter to put a 3rd party deck in my old Chevy.

But I'm sure the designers considered the car use case when they created the medium. I don't think that they considered computer use since multimedia computers were not available in 1982 when the CD came out, and the data version (CD-ROM) didn't appear until a few years later.

For the record, the 5.25 inch floppy is that size because An Wang gave a vendor a cocktail napkin that he felt was about the right size for home media.

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

[Ironchew]

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?

CDs evolved from 5.25-inch floppies. Seriously, you creationists don't have a good grasp of natural selection, do you? Spinning disks are a very successful phylum.

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

[MightyYar]

Of course, that explanation is not the real one :)

Typical of corporate politics, that was the official story but the real reason is that Sony needed to force Phillips to build a new production plant, since they already were capable of making a 115mm disc. Otherwise, Phillips would have had a leg up on Sony.

The Beethoven recording didn't fit on a CD, even after the expansion :)

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

[MightyYar]

Same article that you cited :) Just read on.

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

[jawtheshark]

Don't think so: the original CD was Audio only and the computer format only came out as an afterthought. Original Audio CDs have a spiral form track which is not very useful for data.

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

[AnalogDiehard]

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

Before the audio CD format was defined, there were data CDs for computers. They used to be stored in a rugged carrier which you inserted in a computer CD drive that fitted in the same slot where the 5-1/4 floppy drive was installed. You inserted the carrier and the drive handled the CD inside the carrier. The carrier protected the surface of the CD from scratches as there was no error correction back then.

I clearly remember seeing these at work and at the school library before audio CDs were around.

I tried googling for an image, no luck here.

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

[damn_registrars]

They used to be stored in a rugged carrier which you inserted in a computer CD drive that fitted in the same slot where the 5-1/4 floppy drive was installed. You inserted the carrier and the drive handled the CD inside the carrier. The carrier protected the surface of the CD from scratches as there was no error correction back then.

Are you thinking of CD caddies? I had a CD drive that used those. Though that doesn't answer the question of why it was that size. Why was it advantageous to use the same size as the floppy drive? Why not use something larger or smaller? A lot of the drives that used the caddies were external anyways... I remember using them with Mac LC III's.

Before the audio CD format was defined, there were data CDs for computers.

That statement, however, is counter to the consensus in this thread so far. It seems that the Audio standard was indeed first. And I recall that the jewel cases my earliest data CD's came in were stamped in the corner "Compact Disc - Digital Audio".

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

[bill_mcgonigle]

Is it by design or coincidence that the CD size matches the size of the floppy drive (and the car audio deck as well)?

I suspect the engineers wanted to re-use their floppy disk filing systems.

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

[damn_registrars]

For the record, the 5.25 inch floppy is that size because An Wang gave a vendor a cocktail napkin that he felt was about the right size for home media.

I'm not familiar with An Wang, but the name reminds me of a line from one of my first bosses (he was the owner of a small computer shop [back when such things existed]):

Q: Who was the first female computer programmer?
A: Eve. She had an Apple in one hand, and a Wang in the other.

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

[MightyYar]

An Wang is the Wang in your joke...

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

[damn_registrars]

An Wang is the Wang in your joke...

Hate to break it to you, but ...
whoosh
That joke flew over you. In this context, Wang is actually primarily used as a slang word for male genitalia, and secondarily for Wang computer (which as we see in wikipedia was founded by An Wang).

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

[Rolman]

You are confusing the form factor of a PC's Drive Bay with the diameter of a Compact Disc.

Floppy disks were not 5.25" wide, their drives were. Ditto for the 3.5" floppies.

The Compact Disc's diameter is 12cm. Originally it was designed to be 10cm with a capacity of 60 minutes of PCM audio, but it was changed to 12cm to be able to hold a 74-minute long performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

Actually, a 12cm disc is able to hold more than 74 minutes of audio. That's why there are 80-minute discs.

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

[jones_supa]

But are you sure that the Beethoven's 5th didn't rather dictate the density of the data than the disc diameter?

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

[welshsocialist]

Is the previous post by chance referring to Mini CDs? A Win98 driver for some USB pen drive I brought a few years ago had the driver on this type of disc. I brought a pack of them from a CompUSA a few years ago. I never did much with them due to the skimpy space and the size of the discs themselves.

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

[MightyYar]

No, I get the joke! :) Once worked with a guy named "Harry Wang", and interviewed a guy named "Dong Hung Lo".

What I meant is, the "Wang" computer in the joke was made by An Wang's company, Wang Laboratories.

I'm hearing a lot of MP3...

[Seakip18]

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.

Re:I'm hearing a lot of MP3...

[SargentDU]

My local public library has that deal beat! Borrow the book on CD or cassette tape for free for a week or two! I believe that trumps your deal with Cracker Barrel.

Re:I'm hearing a lot of MP3...

[citylivin]

wtf are you talking about? what does cheese have to do with anything?

Just download the books before you leave or on the hotels wifi. Get a cheap laptop or something if you dont have one.

Re:I'm hearing a lot of MP3...

[apoc.famine]

You don't "return" electronic media. You make a micropayment for each one, or pay a subscription fee to access as many as you want in a given time period. The age of "returnable" and "disposable" media is over.

Of course, by that I mean it *should* be over. However, the old way of doing things is being held onto like rats holding onto a sinking brick.

Ideally, you should be able to take your ipod, phone, or portable memory stick into Cracker Barrel and download one of the two books a week you get with your $5 a month subscription package. Or pay $1 each time you go in, no subscription needed. This saves them the cost of buying, handling, tracking, shipping, repairing, storing, discarding, and replacing the physical medium.

Once you have that data, you either plug your ipod into your car stereo, run it through a crappy radio transmitter, or directly plug your portable storage into the data port of the stereo.

The fact that this isn't the way it works blows my mind. We have the technology, but lack the vision, from top to bottom.

Re:I'm hearing a lot of MP3...

[Hatta]

Just download all the audiobooks you want from the tracker of your choice. You can throw so many audio books on a CD that you won't even think of stopping for a new one.

Re:I'm hearing a lot of MP3...

[Seakip18]

Indeed! I only wish I could rent/return those tapes to anywhere.

You do have a good point though. There's nothing preventing me from getting 3 audio books, in the event of dead time.

Makes me sad, really.

[AbsoluteXyro]

As a huge fan of DVD-Audio, it saddens me to see plain old CD still cleaning house. I guess the public at large just does not care about audio fidelity, or an immersive music experience.

Re:Makes me sad, really.

[east coast]

I guess the public at large just does not care about audio fidelity, or an immersive music experience.

The public at large cannot and will not pay for the immersive audio music experience and even less of them have hearing capable of enjoying it.

Let's be honest, for most people the 10 USD ear buds is more than enough in their opinion. Tell them you own a 600 USD set of Sennheisers and you'd swear that you just told them you just paid 600 USD for a candy bar.

Quality playback equipment is expensive. Most people can't justify 99 cents for a song, how do you think they can justify a few hundred to a few thousand for playback equipment?

Re:Makes me sad, really.

[NiceGeek]

The public listens to music on the go. Not many people bother sitting down and listen to music without other things going on, so audio fidelity isn't high on the priority list.

Re:Makes me sad, really.

[AbsoluteXyro]

Seems most people don't have a problem shelling out ridiculous amounts of cash for an iPod.

Re:Makes me sad, really.

[AbsoluteXyro]

I'm guessing I'm in the minority of people who like to just kick back, relax, turn off all the lights and listen to some tunes.

Re:Makes me sad, really.

[east coast]

The thing is that you can't have "the same thing" as an iPod 160gb for 5 dollars. That's roughly what it works out to in the minds of the people who see the 600 dollar headphones compared to the 10 dollar ear buds.

Re:Makes me sad, really.

[AbsoluteXyro]

I wasn't talking about headphones, rather audio systems in general.

Re:Makes me sad, really.

[Detritus]

Some of us do not have the space for a zillion speakers and a proper listening room. Plus, there seemed to be some confusion on what exactly you received on a DVD-Audio disc.

The problem with all of the new formats is that their inventor's greed stopped them from cheaply licensing the technology to the companies that make CD and DVD drives. If the DVD+RW drives in my computers could read the discs, I might buy a few and see how they sound. I'm not going to spend $500 on some box that is nothing more than a disc player for an esoteric format.

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:Bright future

[sm62704]

Same thing is happening on technology, television gets digitalized and all standards starts to be changed every 3-5 years.

This is the first change in TV's format in its entire history (not counting the switch to color, which was backwards compatible and phased in very slowly). My 77 year old dad bitches about the format change constantly.

Is it really so that old medias actually stored the data better way because it could be used longer?

Pretty much yes. Vinyl could concievably last forever if kept flat and covered in a cool place. Tape lasts, but the oxide will flake off and magnetic fields can weaken the signal. Acid-free paper can last and has lasted for thousands of years barring, like vinyl, unfortunate accidents (like hordes of visigoths torching your library, or a flood washing it all away). CDs and DVDs have pretty limited lives because of the way they're manufactured; they must be done in layers, and the pits that store the bits are incredibly small.

Has a bright future? not in my house.

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Someone recently asked if I'd send them a CD of some pictures. I looked at them funny, and then realized that not everyone realizes CDs are dead yet. It's like when Grandpa's on Life Support in the ICU, and the Brainwaves aren't registering, but you still go in and say goodbye. The best uses of CDs now is Skeet targets, and decorations. I just want a car stereo that can do DL DVDs for Mp3's and gives me options to play through a directory structure, and make / edit playlists on the fly QUICKLY. Then, I'll replace the monsoon system in my car, assuming I still own a standard 4 wheeled vehicle by then.

(for instance play Outkast /stankonia & /Speakerbox disc 1 & /Speakerbox disc 2 etc..)

Ohh, I just had an idea.

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

What about coating a roof w/ used CD's!

I want to be the first to coat my roof (shiny side up) w/ nothing but metallica albums!

Really though, CDs are an O.K. medium to get music to your computer quickly if you have dialup. Remember that in the US broadband penetration kinda blows, and in many areas if you don't like the company that offers it your SOL. for $50 broadband fee / mo. you could buy like 10 new CD's (if that was the only reason you needed broadband it'd make sense)

And to those who say 1 gig flash drives, phooey They'll just stack up because no one will use 25 1g flash drives. I say a flash drive KIOSK that loads what you want to buy onto the drive you own right there instantly.

It's what 2 min to fill a 2 gig flash memory? Plug drive in, format /q, copy leave store, plug it in your stereo/comp/ cellphone, PDA, etc.

Re:Ohh, I just had an idea.

[graphicsguy]

What about coating a roof w/ used CD's! I want to be the first to coat my roof (shiny side up) w/ nothing but metallica albums!

VERY interesting idea. Green reuse of CDs as shingles. Plus, aliens can play them from space!

Ripped Off

[Nom du Keyboard]

It may have a healthy future, but now it's severely overpriced. Initially they were expensive because it was new technology and expensive to build plants to manfacture the raw blanks, master, and press them. Over time we were promised that the price would come down drastically as the process matured. That was proven true with CD players.

Of course that turned out to be a lie with the media itself, and prices have risen steadily while the costs of production have plummeted. And the artists will tell you that they're not getting any more money out of them in mechanical royalties than before either.

Evidence of how badly ripped off you are in CD's is evident by the healthy profits made by DVD's which contain far more content, and cost far more to master and press, yet sell for nearly comparable prices. Until we Just Say No to overpriced music CD's we might was well just open our wallets to the recording industry and say, "Just take what you want."

Re:Ripped Off

[cdrguru]

Evidence of how badly ripped off you are in CD's is evident by the healthy profits made by DVD's which contain far more content, and cost far more to master and press, yet sell for nearly comparable prices.

Sorry, but today DVDs cost no more to manufacture than CDs. Virtually the same equipment is used and it is pretty much a closed process. You might be able to convince me that you are going to pay 2x for a dual-layer disc but not much more than that.

Trying to say a DVD contains "more" content than a CD fails in any terms other than bytes. You don't buy books by the pound nor do you buy concert tickets by the song. Quantative measurements do not reflect anything except a misguided attempt to justify pricing by marginal cost. You aren't paying because of what it cost to make CDs and DVDs any more than you are paying for any other creative work by what it cost to make.

You can argue about where the money goes that you are paying, but trying to say you should pay what it costs to make is saying there are no other costs. Surely "creativity" is worth something, isn't it? If you are employed to write code how would you feel about being paid by the line, as if the only effort was simply typing and nothing else was a part of what you were doing?

Re:Ripped Off

[ph0rk]

Don't be obtuse. Your standard blockbuster movie still costs an order of magnitude (or two) more to produce than your standard pop hit record does - and the parents comment about mastering and pressing a gold master still stand. Sure the end product is stamped out for roughly the same price, but the original artistic work was far cheaper to produce.

Creativity is worth something, and individual examples may differ, but movies tend to have a lot more creative effort and hours of labor poured into them than music albums.

The point the original poster was making was that DVDs are profitable, cost roughly the same (~$20) and yet are made from a generally much more expensive (in terms of labor, capital, and creative labor) source object.

Re:Ripped Off

[Nom du Keyboard]

Trying to say a DVD contains "more" content than a CD fails in any terms other than bytes.

In addition to Ph0rk's comments to your post, a DVD contains a LOT more bytes. About 7X more bytes, and that is only single layer ones. And every one of those bytes has to be created with content. You could just as fairly say that a dual-layer DVD has 14X as many bytes, and therefore gives you 14X as much for your money.

Consider, in addition to an entire movie and not just a soundtrack, you get director commentary tracks, making of featurettes, deleted scenes, trailers, alternate endings, and other additional content. Even music videos! All this costs far more to produce and master than laying down ten or a dozen tracks in the studio - and the motion picture studios still make half their income off of DVD's.

Re:Ripped Off

[Kittenman]

"Overpriced"? I have to disagree. Classical music CDs rarely make money - 'cept for the 'crossover' genre - and yet they continually make them. More than that, the recording companies usually do the best job they possibly can in terms of hiring orchestras, choirs, music halls, solists, etc... Such recordings can only be subsidized by the sales of B-Z Top and his Furious Five - or whatever the latest Rap sensation is. Of course, some record companies do just trouser the profits ...

Re:Ripped Off

[swordgeek]

A happy exception to this: Buying from the artist.

Most of the small musicians I know of sell their music for $10-$12, and make a few dollars (!!!!!) profit on them. At a local festival I go to every year, CDs are mostly priced at $20 (some higher), and the artists are guaranteed 80% of that price. That's the sort of 'high price' I like to pay.

Greed killed CD sales

[Weaselmancer]

Here' an example:

The Beatles, Hard Day's Night, the movie on DVD is twelve bucks at Best Buy. It pretty much has every song on the album in the movie. Twelve bucks.

The Beatles, Hard Day's Night, the CD. Has all the music, none of the movie. Price? Fourteen bucks. Same thing, but on media with less scratch resistance, less storage space, and oh yeah - no movie.

The reason why people aren't buying music is because it's not worth it. The price is artificially inflated, which makes consumers grumpy and unwilling to buy.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[Pope]

Taking inflation into account, the music is a hell of lot cheaper than it was 20 years ago in the heydays of vinyl.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[Weaselmancer]

True. But still, if you follow the math the overall industry is saying that the movie has a negative value.

In other words, the RIAA is saying the music for Hard Day's Night is worth $14. And Hollywood is saying the music plus the movie is worth $12. That would mean the movie alone is worth -2 bucks. We all know that can't be true so something else must be wrong.

And what's wrong is the RIAA's greed. The price on the CD is artificially inflated to the point where it competes with movies. And as we all know, movies cost FAR more to make than a CD of music. Hell, with the quality of home equipment these days a decent musician working solo can bang out a seriously impressive CD worth of music in their basement. A $50k basement studio would put you in the ballpark sound-wise with most major labels anymore.

And hell, look at the Lord of the Rings movies. Right now you can buy the entire trilogy for $25. And the movies cost $430 million to make.

And the CD for A Hard Day's Night is selling for right around half that. I'm sure it's difficult to make an album, and The Beatles are pretty good - but I have a hard time imagining that the expense to make the CD and the money to market it compares fairly with The Lord of the Rings. If they did, that would imply that Hard Day's Night cost 430M * (14/25)=240.8M in today's dollars. To make A Hard Day's Night - if the costs matched up.

This disparity in pricing is what puts people off and makes them not want to buy CDs.

IMHO, a fair CD price would be about three bucks. A buck fifty goes to the artist (which by today's standards would be so generous as to seem like a fairy tale), and the other buck fifty goes to production and promotion.

And yeah, I really mean that. That's what it's worth. Fifteen bucks for a CD is simply unbelievable. That's about twelve dollars worth of useless outdated bloat that the world simply doesn't need anymore.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[Jason Levine]

I would consider overpricing the CD and alternatives (such as a lower priced DVD) to fall under the category of "Market Forces." The recording industry is trying to act as though they are the main provider of paid recreational entertainment for consumers when they are just one of many, many, MANY options nowadays. Their actions (e.g. pricing CDs too high), the actions of those who compete for the consumers' entertainment dollar (e.g. producers of DVDs), and other situations (e.g. a drop in the amount of money the average consumer has to spend on entertainment) are causing a drop in CD sales. Instead of examining themselves, their market, and adjusting to the new situation, the recording industry seems to want to just shout "PIRACY!" and get the government to legislate profits for them.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[geobeck]

That would mean the movie alone is worth -2 bucks. We all know that can't be true so something else must be wrong.

I dunno. With the kind of pulp Hollywood is putting out these days...

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[Ex-Linux-Fanboy]

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.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[Weaselmancer]

No, there is no theatrical release. Just concerts. And licensing for commercials and movies and other usage. And broadcast royalties.

But yeah, other than all of that that there is no money to be had.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[xigxag]

The movie does have negative value if what you're interested in is listening to the music. Even if someone has a DVD player in their car, they won't typically listen to a movie's soundtrack by putting in a DVD; the songs are edited, people talk over them not to mention explosions or other noises, the track locations don't correspond with the beginning of the song, the fidelity is pristine, etc. For music listening purposes, an actual CD (or soundtrack equivalent) is a much better value. Most people really only want to see a movie once or twice, whereas they'll listen to a soundtrack they like dozens of times.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[Weaselmancer]

A negative value possibly, but certainly not a negative cost. The people creating the content wish to be paid. And it takes more people to make a movie, and more time to do it.

I'm talking about what it would take for the content creators to recoup and then make a profit - not consumer perception.

Also that's why I picked Hard Day's Night. It's a musical. When they break into the songs, they're basically music videos. The band is dubbed. It's the exact same music you get on the CD. Just with added video of the band faux-playing along, with some silly stuff added in. Exact same music, though.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[Televiper2000]

Movies also have a secondary and very successful rental, and rebroadcast market. Most DVD releases are already paid for because every Blockbuster in America will buy buying 10, 20, 30, 50 and they're all going to be permanent sales. If you look at smaller run DVD releases such as Criterion they're significantly more expensive than your average CD. If you go to any music store you'll find a significant number of classic releases well below $10. The reality is that studios are pushing DVDs harder, and one of their tactics is the low price impulse buyers market. They can do this because movies generally have a much more universal appeal.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[mgblst]

It is not "artificially inflated", that would imply that price should be set by the cost of an item. It is not, prices main controlling factor is demand. This is they way economics works, this is the way capitalism works, and this is the way the world works.

If you don't think it is worth that much, don't buy it, nothing changes. If everybody doesn't think it is worth that much, then the price will come down.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[BForrester]

If you follow the math the overall industry is saying that the movie [Hard Day's Night] has a negative value [of -2 bucks]. We all know that can't be true so something else must be wrong.

You obviously haven't seen the film. -$2.00 is too generous.

Re:Greed killed CD sales

[Weaselmancer]

I think you forgot to pay the composer of the music and the author of the lyrics.

Nope, that's in the first buck fifty. "Pay the people who make it."

Also the person who drew the original cover art and design.

See above.

And the advertising costs, which includes not only the web placement, radio and TV

That would be the second buck fifty. "Pay the people who promote it."

...the people who convince the DJs to play the song on the air/satellite/cable/Internet radio stations, write the press releases, and so on.

I'll bet if you stopped with the payola, these people would start to seek out music on their own. Seeing as how it's their job to play and promote music in the first place. If suddenly they had to find it on their own rather than be bribed into it - if their job was at stake - they'd go out and find it.

Payola is an inherently broken and wrong thing with the music industry. It's how lousy music gets on the airwaves. I don't even turn a radio on anymore these days.

But even if you don't agree with the idea of promotion costs, or even the idea of a system for artists to make money

Gigantic straw man. The people who make it should be paid. The people who promote it should be paid. The superfluous assholes in the middle jacking up the price twelve dollars a pop should be unemployed.

Re:AOL Coaster CDs-Yeah But...

[Nom du Keyboard]

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...

Yeah but those metal cans the CD's came in were great for sending out my own to friends.

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[Lumpy]

Why? Both my motorcycle and my cars have the ability to play music off my 16 gig USB thumb drives. (The car will use a 40gig Hard drive connected tot he usb in the back.

are you not looking very hard for stereos that do this? Also who the hell makes playlists in their car while driving? make your m3u playlists at home and selected them in the car.

Re:mmmmm.... media

[corsec67]

You mean Laserdisc?

They were usually used for movies, and the video on them was actually analog, so your comparison to a record is very apt.

The Legend of Beethoven's 9th

[sxltrex]

Here is a rehash of the classic Beethoven's 9th story. According to legend, the president of Sony was presented with a prototype 11.5cm CD with a 60 minute limit. He demanded that the CD be capable of storing his favorite symphony, Beethoven's 9th, and it required a capacity of 74 minutes with a corresponding size of 12cm.

Re:The Legend of Beethoven's 9th

[damn_registrars]

is a rehash of the classic Beethoven's 9th story. According to legend, the president of Sony was presented with a prototype 11.5cm CD with a 60 minute limit. He demanded that the CD be capable of storing his favorite symphony, Beethoven's 9th, and it required a capacity of 74 minutes with a corresponding size of 12cm.

So then had they already agreed on a digital music storage method? Because of course they could have played with sampling rates and other such things to have fit 74 minutes onto a disc of whatever size they like.

Therefore Beethoven's Ninth is only of great importance if the manufacturers had already agreed to how to store the music on the disc, before deciding how large (physically) the disc would be.

Re:The Legend of Beethoven's 9th

[MightyYar]

if the manufacturers had already agreed to how to store the music on the disc, before deciding how large (physically) the disc would be.

Well, that part is true. Sony and Phillips compromised and shared technology to get to a spec for a 10cm disk that could store 60 minutes. For whatever reason, Phillips set up a prototype line to press 11.5 cm disks instead. Sony didn't want to fall behind at launch (by not yet having a production line), so they pushed to have the disks expanded to 12 cm.

I think the upper limit on size from the spec phase was "coat pocket".

Like all engineering projects, I'm sure that more than one element shaped the final product.

Huh?

[varmint jerky]

Damn, this post is total gibberish. But I guess the OP's point is that the CD is 26 years old and we still use it? In other news...the CD is the new floppy and people will keep using it until they stop.

Re:Huh?

[TwoScoopsOfPig]

people will keep using it until they stop

That tends to happen with damn near everything. Kinda like how you find stuff in the last place you look - if you're not a moron, you stop looking.

Look to Apple

[CrazyTalk]

Apple seems to be a good job of predicting (if not causing) future trends - first mainstream computer with a 3 and a half inch floppy, first PC to ELIMINATE the floppy (original iMac), and now first computer to get rid of the CD altogether (Macbok Air)

Re:Look to Apple

[Velorium]

As much as Apple's business model tends to piss me off, I think I'm with you on this one. Sadly I lack mod-points today.

Re:Look to Apple

[pandafoo]

and now first computer to get rid of the CD altogether (Macbok Air)

dell did that a long time ago. the latitude d400 did not have a cd drive like 3 years ago....

Re:Look to Apple

[ratnerstar]

That's nothing! I had a 286 machine 15 years ago that didn't have a CD drive.

Re:Look to Apple

[CrazyTalk]

As others have pointed out, Apple wasn't always the absolute first. But they did help popularize each move, contrary to MOST existing personal computers at the time.

Re:Look to Apple

[CrazyTalk]

hence my use of the term "mainstream" - most computer manufacturers were contrary to Apple for each of those. And yes, Apple took their idea for the OS from Xerox PARC, etc.

Re:Look to Apple

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Close; but not quite. Apple is virtually never first(and they used to be first more often than they are now). They are, however, very good at taking a trend that is gradually oozing into the PC market at large and implementing it Right Now. without caving in to pressure from those who would prefer to have backwards compatibility, or just pay less for older stuff.

In the cases of floppyless machines, USB peripherals, wifi, DVI, flat panels on the desktop, and possibly some others I'm forgetting, they were not first; but they were the first to decisively write off the old stuff, and more or less force the new across the board.

Re:Look to Apple

[toddestan]

Forget the Toshiba. I'm pretty sure the first PC ever built lacked an optical drive.

Re:Look to Apple

[mgblst]

There are plenty of PCs before Macbook Air that didn't have CD drives, IBM 560, X21, X41, Toshiba Portege 3110ct...these are just the ones that I have owned. How ignorant are you?

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[bigstrat2003]

Your acquaintance is not the one out of touch, it's you. As has been noted, CDs make excellent one-off, disposable storage. Their capacity isn't great, but it's enough that if you need to send a few files over someone's way, you can do so without worrying about them losing your flash drive.

copy control killed it

[mkcmkc]

DVD-Audio has no killer features to balance its killer flaw: copy protection.

Re:copy control killed it

[AbsoluteXyro]

Sad but true. I also think the fact that CD players already had a mind-bogglingly huge install base didn't help. You couldn't take DVD-A discs with you and be relatively certain you'd find a player to play them on (say at a friend's house, whatever) and you certainly couldn't stick them in your car stereo. The format really pigeonholed itself to the "audiophile" market (as much as I hate that term). I really don't see a physical format usurping CDs, I get the feeling the CD will be digital distribution's first victim.

I am fair, and will take a new perspective

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

of what you said. I failed to mention he wanted me to mail them (he is curently 3 states away). That requires more than a plain envelope and a few stamps, for best results, and no cracks, they really should be sent in a padded envelope.

Again, I agree w/ one-off disposable storage situation for sneakernet, it's fast enough, and easy.

But for flashdrives...

For a 1g flash drives they fricking come for free in a cerael box. They are like 2600 whistles. O.K. I am exagerating, but who doesn't have 3 of these lying around their house w/ nothing to do? I have two 512s, a 1 and a 2. + 3 1g sd cards he can get Far easier than a thumbdrive OR a CD. Also the value of a flash drive is small enough to not worry about losing it. 7$ after you adjust for inflation is like .50 from 5 years ago.

Sorry, I like to exagerate.

Re:I am fair, and will take a new perspective

[bigstrat2003]

Where are you getting flash drives? I paid $20 for my 2GB drive (not on sale). On sale, I see a 4 GB for $20. That's really cheap if you want to use one for yourself, but for disposable storage it's still kinda pricey.

Re:I am fair, and will take a new perspective

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unfortunately, flash drives, like USB cables, are popular markup targets on the brick and mortar scene. The prices are more reasonable by far online or on sale(somebody had a link to newegg, 1gig for just under 7 bucks, shipping cost more than the drive, though, which killed it).

Longer than the floppy disk

[DaveInAustin]

When the CD came out, it was cutting-edge. At that time, a 10 megabyte hard drive was considered huge and set you back more than $1000. Today, you can get drives 10,000 times larger for 10% of the price. There's no way you put any other 10 year old part on you computer today (unless there was some data on it you needed to extract). As cutting edge as it was, you still had to sacrifice sound quality with 16/44.1 sampling. That's why vinyl is making a little bit of a comeback. Why do we have to accept having such outdated technology? Actually we don't which is one of the reasons why the music industry isn't selling music like they used to.

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

I didn't realize the 16 gigers are under $50 now! WOOT! Scrap the DVD thing.

As for making playlists, sometimes a passenger will DJ. Sometimes you'll be sitting in a starbucks drive through, or stuck on I-5 for an hour moving about 1 mile. It's not a huge requirement but it shouldn't be impossible to que up 15 or twenty songs.

I was looking hard for steroes about a year ago, and didn't see anything I liked. I resolved to just re-allocate my money for that time, and stick w/ what I had until things get a touch better. I could have gotten what I wanted if I spent over $600 but for that, I'd put a computer in my car and be done. (thinking of going that route anyway, though time spent for that project isn't practical either)

What kind of units do you have? What kind of car/ bike?

Praise for the CD

[Zobeid]

The CD is still arguably the best premium format for buying and collecting music. They can be made inexpensively, they're pretty durable, you get some artwork and liner notes (though not as good as with vinyl), they're reasonably compact, and the audio quality can be very high indeed when it's mastered right.

The mastering process has become the weak link, with the ongoing "loudness war" where dynamic range of music is routinely compressed all to Hell.

The attempt to introduce Super Audio CD and DVD Audio turned into a farce. First strike against them was the ridiculous format war. Second strike was the ridiculous DRM they were saddled with. Third strike was their dependence on superior audio quality to sell the product -- something most people couldn't even hear, and the rest of the industry didn't care about. (If they cared, we would never have got into the aforementioned loudness war.)

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[tygt]

Sorry, I have to disagree. They have a very bright future in the microwave.

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[Cillian]

No matter what you might like to think, the fact that they asked for a CD proves that it's not dead. Going back to your grandpa example, you seem to be like the person trying to wrestle your inheritance out of his fingers while he's still perfectly healthy.

VInyl's just having a long slow death...

[fantomas]

Vinyl never went away but it's been nearly dead for a long time surely?

When I was a teenager in the 80s every small town had an independent record shop for niche tastes, major department stores stocked mainstream pop and classical records, and larger towns had a whole host of larger music stores with floors of records. These days you only find the niche record stores and the really big music shops have a "DJ corner" with vinyl. To be brutal, measure the floor space given over to vinyl in shops compared to other products. The retailers are only going to stock what sells. I think it's sweet and lovely you can still buy vinyl and some bands still release on it but I think it is nostalgia or for specialists. Speaking as somebody who can't give up his punk 7" singles! But could I be bothered to buy a new record? hmmm...

I mean you can buy new wax cylinder recordings but I am sure they aren't coming back...

why must everyone

[flahwho]

Insist on calling any mp3 player a friggin ipod!? AAARRRRGH that urks me something fierce!

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[kestasjk]

assuming I still own a standard 4 wheeled vehicle by then.

We'll probably have flying cars by then; don't upgrade your stereo system yet

Why no metadata with CDs?

[lawaetf1]

I'm sure it's a technical answer but why can't, with 700mb of space available, one lousy kilobyte be reserved for metadata? If older players wouldn't like it, I should think it could be "hidden" after the last track.

It just seems silly that my CD player can't scroll the title of the track being played. Or that my computer can't pull titles and even album art without an Internet connection.

Re:Why no metadata with CDs?

[lukpac]

I'm sure it's a technical answer but why can't, with 700mb of space available, one lousy kilobyte be reserved for metadata? If older players wouldn't like it, I should think it could be "hidden" after the last track.

It just seems silly that my CD player can't scroll the title of the track being played. Or that my computer can't pull titles and even album art without an Internet connection.

It already exists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-Text

Re:Why no metadata with CDs?

[Smenj]

[...] why can't, with 700mb of space available, one lousy kilobyte be reserved for metadata?

CD-Text allows you store up to 5KB of metadata in the "lead-in" area. Older CD players don't recognize it.

I rarely see CD-Text actually used, though. Most stereos don't display this info, although it would be trivial to do so. Since I'm not used to seeing it just pop up, I have to wonder how many CDs actually include this feature.

Re:Why no metadata with CDs?

[geekoid]

My car CD player knows the names and other information on the CD. It doesn't connect to anything.
Cover art would be rather large.

Oh yeah!?

[flahwho]

We'll I've added one new CD every year to my collection ever since. Now I have a whopping 26 discs! It'll only take me 1674 more years to replace all my vinyl, cassettes and 8 tracks.

Re:mmmmm.... media

[Dogtanian]

I remeber the big CDs, they looked like vinyls, but digital.

Huh? To the best of my knowledge there have *never* been any commercially marketed CDs larger than the standard 12cm ones! (The obvious disadvantage being that they wouldn't fit in an ordinary CD player). The only other CD size I know of is the "mini" 3-inch/8cm one.

Perhaps you're thinking of the LaserDisc video format which actually predates the CD? They came in a variety of sizes, the largest of which was the same size as a vinyl LP, but looked not unlike a giant CD. Some later ones included digital sound, but the video itself was always analogue, albeit at better quality then video cassettes.

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[RoboRay]

MP3 DVDs are almost as obsolute as picture CDs. Just get an in-dash receiver with a USB input and use whatever sized flash drive you need. I ran my USB header from behind the receiver down into my center console stowage bin, so there's not even anything visible.

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[sm62704]

The best uses of CDs now is Skeet targets

Tie them to a string and hang them in your garden and they'll chase the birds away. CDs terrifty birds.

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[RoboRay]

That should be "obsolete" of course. I fail at speeling.

Re:CDs are still around...

[Dogtanian]

a poorly recorded mp3 can actually damage hearing at high volume due to the "missing" audio data. you can actually see the missing sound on a good EQ, which forms an incomplete 'compressed' waveform, which your hearing is unable to deal with at high pressure (70+DB).

[citation needed]

Do you have a point?

[p3d0]

I seem to have derailed this discussion by claiming that "physical media" will become obsolete. Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had said "physical media for use as a distribution mechanism for music and data to consumers" but I thought people would be capable of keeping the topic of this discussion in mind while reading my remarks. If you need a reminder, take another look at the title of this Slashdot article.

One question...

I ... still back up to CD and DVD (depending on what is being backed up) in case the hard drive dies.

Why? I just back up my HD onto another HD. Are you doing off-site backup?

SHM-CD

[FornaxChemica]

That reminds me... has anyone mentioned the SHM-CDs? Has it ever been discussed on Slashdot? There's not even an entry in the English Wikipedia. It seems almost unknown outside Japan. I was tempted to submit a news item about it once, but being lazy as I am I've never done it.

Opinions vary a lot, some claim the quality is similiar or even inferior to CDs, while others, possibly the majority -- the format seems rather popular in Japan given the increasing number of releases -- say the quality is noticeably higher.

Anyway, here's the Japanese Wikipedia page about the SHM-CD,and the summary from CD Japan:

The high quality SHM-CD (Super High Material CD) format features enhanced audio quality through the use of a special polycarbonate plastic. Using a process developed by JVC and Universal Music Japan discovered through the joint companies' research into LCD display manufacturing, SHM-CDs feature improved transparency on the data side of the disc, allowing for more accurate reading of CD data by the CD player laser head. SHM-CD format CDs are fully compatible with standard CD players

Re:SHM-CD

[philicorda]

There is nothing inherently better about the sound, as the data they contain is identical to a normal CD.

There could be an improvement if the CD and the CD player are in such bad condition that you are getting E32 errors (unrecoverable by the usual reed-solomon error correction). It's debatable whether even these are audible as the missing sample would be interpolated.

Another way might be to reduce servo jitter from tracking. This might be audible if the power supply is rubbish and the player is badly designed.

The problem is that both these scenarios would only happen with very low end players and dirty or scratched CDs, so the playback equipment would be so awful as to make any comparison of fidelity pointless.

Re:SHM-CD

[JSBiff]

While I think there are probably certainly some advantages to higher-quality materials used in manufacturing CDs, generally speaking, "enhanced audio quality" would not be one of them. We are talking about digital data here. It's true that if there are flaws in the material, the CD reader/player might have difficulty correctly reading the digital data, so it, I suppose, could cause 'pops' or 'skips' in the audio if there is a section that cannot be read - but that improves the *durability* of the disc. Any disc, if it's readable, would have the same audio quality if they have the same data on it, and the data is fed to the same DAC.

I'm all for making discs more scratch resistant, but this SHM-CD sounds suspiciously similar to 'audiophile grade digital cables' from the likes of Monster Cable, et. al, where the manufacturers are dramatically increasing profit margins on something which, for most users, is only marginally, or possibly not even noticeably, better.

older CD players were better.

[apodyopsis]

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.

Re:older CD players were better.

[brentrad]

I'll second this. I bought a Sony Discman in 1987 or 88 (for $300), and it was a freaking almost-all-metal TANK. I carried it with me every day at high school, and lost track of the number of times I dropped it on the concrete ground. It sounded awesome, had a replaceable rechargeable battery pack that charged when you plugged the CD player into AC, FM/AM tuner, line-out as well as headphone port, etc. The circuit board cracked around the headphone port several times (not a manufacturing defect, it was from daily abuse), and a local stereo store was able to repair it.

That Discman withstood over 5 years of heavy daily use until finally mysteriously dying. Bought another Sony CD Walkman years later, and it was a plastic piece of crap...died within a year or two of light use, but was never all that good to begin with. Bought a Sony car CD player around that same time: also a piece of crap. Shame, because Sony really made quality CD players once upon a time. Now I only buy Panasonic CD players...haven't got a bad one yet. Although since I bought my iPod and Panasonic head unit with iPod dock cable, I suspect my CD-player-buying days are over.

Re:older CD players were better.

[swordgeek]

Hmm. Some may have been--maybe even most of them. However, it didn't last very long. In winter of 1984/1985 (right around Christmas or New Year), my dad bought a cheap piece of crap CD player. Thing was plasticy, floppy, and had a 14-bit DAC. Yes, that's right--it actually dropped the two least-significant bits!

There are some nice CD players still to be had--but they're pricy units. Denon is probably the cheapest decent player out there, and beyond that you get into Rotel, and then into the truly silly range.

Re:LOL

[AbsoluteXyro]

And you're a self-righteous dickhead. See, I can name-call too! I never said I didn't enjoy the portability and convenience of MP3 players and the like. I simply appreciate what DVD-Audio technology can deliver (that being, high audio fidelity and immersion). I never claimed to be better than anyone else because of it. The equipment I use doesn't even approach the $500 mark in total, and consumers at large seem to have no problem doling out that kind of cash for a fancy iPod. My statement seems pretty valid that the majority of consumers don't care about audio fidelity. I guess you just can't be bothered to use your brain, you'd rather swing your internet cock around in an attempt to feel good about yourself.

Ever Wonder

[S7urm]

If the expansion of the HD disc markets ever reach into the music industry, will Musicians be expected to write 100+ songs to consider it viable to produce an Album on, say, Blu-Ray?

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

[MightyYar]

This is the reason why vinyl is still around

Vinyl is still around because of nostalgia and pseudo-science.

I can buy the fact that people claim that they can hear problems with CD audio... but SA-CD? Sorry - it's so over-sampled and the range is so overkill... I just don't buy it. A record has such a limited dynamic range.

Sorry for the delay.

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

For a "CD replacement FD" @ 1gig they are like 5.99 @ newegg. Yeah it's more expensive than a CD. It's also easier to tote around, and in the same format, and size package, you can get 16 gigers! (I just found out today, that those things have come down to reasonable to me levels)

Updating might be in order

[Duncan Blackthorne]

For what they are, CDs are still pretty good, but only having 80 minute capacity is something I've felt has always been a limiting factor. CD players that supported data CDs loaded with MP3s always seemed like kind of a hack to me. In the meantime, I've discovered compression formats like AAC+; perhaps it would be a good idea to update the current uncompressed format of audio CDs to include optional AAC+ (or other high-quality, low- or no-loss) compression? Seems to me like a good trade-off between sound quality and the ability to stuff a standard 700MiB CD with 12+ hours of music. Otherwise? I haven't regularly used audio CDs on a regular basis for much of anything. I'm either using an MP3 player or some digital format stored on a hard disk -- or listening to Shoutcast, as I am right this moment. That being said though when I want to purchase music, I'm more likely to go purchase a physical CD instead of purchasing a download, mainly because most downloadable formats are in MP3, not AAC/AAC+ or better (I don't like or use iTunes).

External drives?

[JSBiff]

I'm gonna guess that at least some portion of Macbook Air users probably plugin a USB or Firewire DVD drive. DVD drives (which of course, still read and if the drive is a burner, record, CDs) certainly still have a place in modern computing - watching movies, backups, OS reload.

Thanks, I just found this out.

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

I stopped my research a year or so ago when all the USB stereos were craptastic, and expensive. It seems that now, there are far better options out. Looking at A crutchfield, I think they have over 60 ones w/ usb input now!

when I found out how cheap 16 gigers are

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

I retract that need. I haven't checked flashdrive prices in over a year ( haven't needed a new one)

Seems you can get a 16G for about $50 US. Not bad!

Oh snap!

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Costco,

3x 4gb @ 44.99 11.25ish a piece for a 4 gb drive! Almost 1/2 of what your price for a 4gb drive is! (though I agree a 4g is still a little much for disposable storage)

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

[kipman725]

the problems with sacd are more a case that to achive the maximal quality you must capture and edit the audio data as a bitstream. Audio editing software is designed to work on PCM data and most A/D converters output PCM.

What about backups?

[Nerdposeur]

Step on a CD with your boots on, it's probably garbage. Run a cassette over with a truck, tape any broken sections back together and re-spool it, that thing's fine. When it comes to longevity, CDs are the worst idea yet.

Yeah, because I'm always running over my music collection with a truck.

Want longevity? How about the ability to quickly rip a perfect digital copy and make as many backups as you like? I think that's a pretty good idea.

I don't know about you, but my CDs ARE backups. And they're safely stored in my closet. Unlike my tapes, which I threw away, after they wore out from use.

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

[mvdwege]

Go buy a book on basic information theory. The Nyquist theorem states that if your sampling rate is at least twice the highest frequency, the reconstructed waveform is indistinguisable from the original.

Now, in edge cases CD can fall flat, because 22KHz may not be enough to capture the full sound. While 22KHz is beyond the limit of most humans' hearing, it is considered good enough, but sometimes high harmonics do have an influence on lower harmonics, and the standard low-pass filter that cuts off a CD at 22KHz will kill those high harmonics and their side-effects. But that's admittedly an edge case. I'd wager that CD is good enough for at least 99% of all music.

Mart

Re:Has a bright future? not in my house.

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

It's interesting to not that everyone thought I was Dead serious w/ my analogies. I am never serious. but I do think that CDs are about done.

There will be a breakthrough new way for digital distribution of music. Many schemes are going on right now. CD's won't be around forever. But just to note, I saw VHS tapes for sale the other day. Who here has watched a movie on VHS in the last 3 years? Not too many I'd guess. CD quality MP3's will only grow in popularity. Most slashdotters use EAC http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ (or a comprable program) to rip their music from CD's they own anyway right?

It's allready happening. Cell phones. Yeah Verizon is trying too hard to make money on what could have been an easy way for them to STEAL cash from the public, but they priced songs too high, and chopped the bitrate (WAY) too low. If they pulled their heads out of their butts, and fix TWO small problems, BAM! a real i-tunes competitor w/ a decent install base of allready capable phones, and a solid network to distribute w/.

I think it's kind of amusing that I have been able to watch full length movies on LG phones for 3 years, but we still rely on CD's as a distribution method for Music.

In another post, I wrote about how CD's are not a bad method for the US, our penetration of Broadband is not the best by comparison to other countries, HOWEVER, they are still going the way of the cassette, it's only natural. Maybe not as fast as Cassette gave way to CD, but going none the less here is why:

1. They are bulky compared to new storage media
2. They are not as durable as new storage media
3. They can't be rewritten as much as new storage media
4. Their are limited to 650mb.
5. The general population wants the portability & compatability of a file, and the ability to buy by the song.

It's odd, the general crowd agrees w/ these things but thinks that CDs will stick around forever?

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

[bitrex]

DVDs allow for a higher sampling rates, so less sound is lost. The sound, as a result, is more true to the original source. Currently, DVD movies use 96,000 samples per second or higher.

In theory a 96khz sampling rate ADC should be superior to 44.1 because it allows the anti-aliasing filter rolloff to be shifted above the range of human hearing, creating a flatter passband. In practice all modern sigma-delta DACs use oversampling, 128x, 256x, whatever the case may be. Not only does this reduce the complexity of the input analog anti-aliasing filter, but it pretty much ensures that even at a 44.1khz sampling rate the passband is essentially flat out past 20khz.

I think the issue you have with "slow output" may have less to do with the sampling rate and more to do with the slew rate of the analog amplifiers and overall design of the DAC - on consumer equipment cost cutting measures have to be made somewhere, and the analog output circuitry is often where it happens. Op-amps with very fast slew rates and ultra-low noise, like the Burr Brown OPA series are far too expensive to use in consumer grade equipment.

DVDs allow for a higher sampling rates, so less sound is lost. The sound, as a result, is more true to the original source. Currently, DVD movies use 96,000 samples per second or higher.

What is "true to the original source"? If a difference can be heard at a 96khz sampling rate, then the recording has to be made on absolutely top quality recording equipment in a pristine acoustic environment. For recording jazz and classical this may make sense - but for most other genres including pop and rock the "original source" material (guitars, synths, drums etc.) have very little sonic information aside from noise above 12khz or so anyhow, and before being mastered at 96khz have probably been run through dozens or hundreds of bog-standard ICs in mixing consoles, dynamics processors, and effects. In that case it's hard to justify the sonic advantage of the last step in the chain being "true to the original source" when the sound of the original source has already been processed beyond recognition.

skipping

[yoha]

Why can't CD players play through a skip? Given the ability to put logic in the players, it's incredible that a player can't understand that it is skipping.

Re:skipping

[geekoid]

Ever hear a remix~

No, but you can...

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Dial up I-tunes on your I-phone.

You can dial up Vcast on a verizon phone.

Soon cellular networks will be for distributing music and texting as the population reverts to losing their vocal chords.

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

[Squiffy]

Digital sampling causes information to be lost, which results in poorer sound quality than the source

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).

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.

This is the reason why vinyl is still around and (oddly enough) preferred by some audiophiles.

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.

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.

Fanboy logic

[2short]

Apple does everything first.

As long as you don't consider computers not made by Apple.

Re:LOL

[AbsoluteXyro]

Can't resist another chance to further display the sad state of your mental faculties, huh? It's hardly my problem if you can't wrap your brain around the relevancy.

Don't forget the Sony D-50!

[vyruss000]

I still have the historic Sony D-50 (nice picture here) my father bought for me in 1984. It was called portable but it ran on AC power only. However it was astounding back then how you could make a CD player that small. I don't use it but it still works fine. A jewel of elegance and function in electronics.

Re:Don't forget the Sony D-50!

[IntlHarvester]

Had one too. It had a snap on battery pack which took C-cells IIRC and made it at least somewhat portable.

It's called CD-Text

[brentrad]

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.

did someone say DVD-A?

[Stubtify]

Natsuko, you go sit over here.
Right on the bed. Very good.

And Haruko, you sit right here, darling.

Now, when we roll cameras,... ... Natsuko, you say:
"There is no escaping us, Orgazmo."

There iz no escaping us, Orugazmo?

Good. And Haruko, you say:
"Prepare to meet your doom!"

Prepare da meet zou doom!

Good. Close enough.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0124819/

American Stupidity?

[DesScorp]

""This sorry piece of crap is proof positive of American stupidity"

Stupidity? Despite it's larger size, 8 track caught on for what were then good reasons. For one, you're understating the sound quality issues with early cassettes. They were crap for sound quality, and and early cassette players were notorious for unreliability.

By the time cassettes caught up in terms of reliability and quality, there was a huge market of existing 8 track tapes and players, and for its time, people were fine with them. You sound like Sony, berating "Stupid Americans" for not switching to the "obviously superior" Beta standard. And you're just as wrong as they are for the same reasons; why should we have gone out and spent millions of dollars to replace what was then a satisfactory standard? 8 track had everything we wanted at the time.

Look, I hated 8 tracks, because you couldn't fast forward or reverse very well (I liked LP's the best as a kid, because if you wanted to fast forward or reverse, you got up and moved the needle... voila). But it wasn't American Stupidity because consumers wanted the quality of reel-to-reel tape in a portable setting without the hassle and mess of reel to reel. 8 track gave them that. Cassettes initially did not.

Re:American Stupidity?

[BrokenHalo]

For one, you're understating the sound quality issues with early cassettes. They were crap for sound quality, and and early cassette players were notorious for unreliability.

Not just early ones. Even later high quality machines, in my case used primarily with top of the range tapes, needed quite a lot of babying to maintain any kind of consistently good sound reproduction. The basic problem was that too many parts were in physical contact with the tape, where all of them were too inaccessible to be assured of proper cleanliness.

Great Idea!

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

I forgot about my need for that! I have 3 blueberry bushes that need a little protection.

MOD PARENT +5 NOSTALGIC

[Jorophose]

It's too bad we can't get ourselves something like this but for movies.

For some reason "the industry" is fine giving away its music, but movies?!?!? NO WAY!!! (and yes I know nothing was really done after DVD was cracked in a month or so's span, but upscalers seem to only do 1080p with hdmi, and bluray only does 1080p with hdmi, I don't even know if it does component)

It's too bad Toshiba/DVD Forum couldn't "donate" the HD DVD specs. It would have made it useful for people wanting to make their own movies and archive them. Sure, not many people could play them, but can't all HDDVDs be played in normal DVD players? And of course a close-to DRM-free format would be a big hit.

Wrong for macbook air

[Jorophose]

No, you're wrong.

Asus eee 700 series didn't have optical drivers, neither did its sucessors. (I don't know about thinkpad X series) XO-1 didn't. Classmate PC didn't.

Oh, and Compaq Armada and such 90's cd-less laptops.

Asus is hardly a small player. They were the biggest name in motherboards just a few years ago, and they're still by far #2, behind Gigabyte.

Apple is hardly the first to drop the optical drive. And the macbook air is the most terrible notebook I've ever seen. It's thin. Wow. Now find me a laptop bag for it. Yeah, not exactly thin, and can't exactly fold it.

I'll take a 299$ Dell e, or a 499$ HP 2133, even if it's a half-inch thicker.

cd's vitality?

[haggus71]

Yeah, the CD is healthy. That must explain the drop-off rate of CD sales last year, 20% according to some estimates. The record is actually seeing a revival, as no digital format, due to its nature, can create a continuous sound wave like a record. It's only attraction was volume and portability, both of which were surpassed by mp3's. You can get the same or better sound quality on an mp3, as well; and with the storage space of these players rising, you can fit a high volume of 256k mp3's.

Between the resurgence of clarity in LP's for the audiophile, and the quality and portability of mp3's, you can write off cd's in about 5 years.

Re:cd's vitality?

[swordgeek]

"...no digital format, due to its nature, can create a continuous sound wave like a record."

Blah blah blah. Go tell it to Nyquist, Shannon, and half a century of physicists who apparently don't know as much as your golden ears.

"You can get the same or better sound quality on an mp3, as well"

Are you saying that MP3s can have better sound than the original source material? In other words, you can IMPROVE THE SOUND BY THROWING PARTS OF THE SIGNAL AWAY! Wow! Now that's a complete revolution in audio--something even the creators of MP3 and other lossy(!) formats wouldn't have imagined.

LPs are popular for three reasons:
1) Mistaken nostalgia by those too young to have grown up with them
2) DJs
3) Irrational audiophiles who hate not being able to tweak CDs and CD players.

Good records definitely sound better than bad CDs; but good CDs far surpass the finest vinyl ever made. Years ago, a number of experiments were done which showed you can take a good CD and make it sound like "glorious vinyl" by adding low-level out-of-phase noise to the signal. There's your fantastic clarity.

Understand here that I've got a $1500 turntable and a few hundred records that get played routinely. I also agree that the CD is a dying format--however, neither LPs or quality (or limitations thereof) have anything to do with it. Streaming and downloadable music is what's killing it, and the recording companies are hastening its demise by their idiotic attempts at copy regulation.

I beg to differ

[daBass]

Adjusted for inflation, that is over $600 now. You can certainly buy one now for that money that sounds better than yours, just don't expect a $25 K-Mart special or even a $100 Sony to do so.

If it works and sounds good, don't replace it. But if you must, rest assured that you can buy one that sounds as good or better.

And yes, most DVD players suck ass in the role of CD player.

Re:I beg to differ

[timeOday]

Adjusted for inflation, that is over $600 now. You can certainly buy one now for that money that sounds better than yours, just don't expect a $25 K-Mart special or even a $100 Sony to do so.

Untrue! I got a DVD (and incidentally, CD) player for about $40 that has a coaxial digital output. The sound it pumps out is identical to any fancy player you could buy.

Testing the claim...

[russotto]

OK, here's a CD. Think it has a bright future? Let's find out. Hmm... just pop it in, close the door... TIME-0-0-3-START... POW! Hey, it really did have a bright future. Short, but bright.

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

[russotto]

Digital sampling causes information to be lost, which results in poorer sound quality than the source. When audio is captured digitally, it cannot be captured in one continuous stream, instead it is sampled 44,100 times per second. That's just kind of how it works. 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).

You're trolling, right? Please tell me you're trolling. You do understand that the only information lost at 44,100 samples per second is well above 20kHz, the conventional limit of human hearing. And that most speakers aren't going to be reproducing those frequencies accurately in any case. And that the pace of the music has nothing to do with it.

I'm pretty sure you're trolling... but you could be one of those audiophiles who believes in the sound-enhancing power of pure silver power cables...

This article was a troll, right?

[scurvyj]

This whole article was a troll, right? CD's are deddy deddy dead dead dead. But we all knew that already.

Bright Future?

[greenlead]

I am pretty sure that we have (maybe) one generation of optical disc technology to go before solid-state technology overwhelms it. Data will be transferred over the network or with small solid-state storage devices (MicroSD?).

orly?

[Guppy06]

"Nowadays CD has been replaced in some segments, but not on the music industry, that continues to support it massively."

I haven't seen a disc with the compact disc digital audio logo for sale in a music store for years.

The music industry abandoned this particular standard years ago, as it doesn't support DRM. It's been supplanted by something that may or may not play on a legitimate player of compact discs (the publisher makes no guarantees), but will fuck up your Windows or OS/X installation regardless.

Re:orly?

[swordgeek]

Hmm. Exactly the opposite of what I find, in general.

Out of the last hundred albums I've bought or planned to buy, only one of them (Ben Harper, "Both Sides of the Gun") had DRM. EMI has given up on DRM on "CDs" (not really CDs, as you know). Maybe I'm listening to the wrong music, but I just don't see anything that isn't CDDA anymore at all.

ya rly

[Nick0000000]

I can buy CDs cheaper than buying via a legit download site. And there is no problem with buying and selling used CDs on eBay/Amazon. Until that changes, CDs are certainly not dead.