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Compact Disc Turns 26, Has a Bright Future
javipas writes "The Compact Disc was created 26 years ago, but apparently it is as healthy as 15 years ago, when computing versions of this format (CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW) made the market explode. Nowadays CD has been replaced in some segments, but not on the music industry, that continues to support it massively. The shy return of vinyl and the absence of real competitors make CD's future very bright, so it seems this birthday will not be by any means the last one we celebrate. Happy birthday!"
...except mp3s...
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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'
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
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...
Who the hell celebrates a "26th" anniversary?
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.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
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?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The truth is that vinyl never went away.
A few years ago someone at worked asked me what the last Rush album was that came out on vinyl and after some poking around I found out that they all had up to the latest (Vapor Trails, IIRC). The thing is that many people lost touch with vinyl but the die-hards* kept with it. I don't know if it's the nostalgia factor or even if it's true that vinyl is making a comeback but the bottom line is that it wasn't a matter of the vinyl not being there but rather listeners who didn't know where to look.
* Yeah, if you're one of the small percentage of all people over the age of 17 who can really hear the difference. Otherwise you're probably only fooling yourself.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I bet there is some occasional unexplained knee pain. And for some reason, compact disks can no longer eat bananas without violent diarrhea.
Unfortunately we can't sing Happy Birthday to the CD without paying royalties. Such a cruel world. =/
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
Well, it's 2600 in computer years...
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
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?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
but how the heck do I return an MP3? When on the road, I've always turned to renting audio books from cracker barrel.
It's great because, depending on my time, I stop and get a new book if I want one. I couldn't do that with an MP3 or USB stick without my computer. I know ATT would pitch a fit if I tried downloading 12-16 Cd's worth of book Over-the-air.
I know of nothing online that rivals something like what Cracker Barrel has going on for $4 a week.
import system.cool.Sig;
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.
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."
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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)
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.)
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.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
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.
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.
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
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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.
Vinyl audio has less information content than CD audio. The frequency content is approximately the same between the two, but the dynamic range in vinyl recordings is less (about 75 dB v. 96 dB).
Er, no. It's all about frequency content. Whether events in a musical piece occur at 10 Hz or 3 Hz, a sample rate in the multi-kilohertz range will have no problem picking them up. The signal in between the samples is perfectly reconstructable up to frequencies of half the sample rate.
When audiophiles prefer vinyl it's because the sound is different, not because the fidelity is higher. There certainly are elements in the processing chain that could hurt CD audio -- such as the steep anti-aliasing filters needed to kill aliasing while preserving as much of the frequency range as possible -- but vinyl audio processing also has its drawbacks. Just say, "I like vinyl better," and leave it that. CD audio is not inherently inferior.
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.
Apple does everything first.
As long as you don't consider computers not made by Apple.
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.