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Sony Blu-spec CD Format Detailed, Hits Stores
CNETNate writes "More details about Sony's new Blu-spec CD format — standard CDs authored using Blu-ray's blue diode technology — are beginning to emerge, with commercial releases beginning to hit Amazon. Blu-spec CDs are compatible with existing CD players but have been mastered with higher levels of accuracy by using the same technology used to author Blu-ray discs, with the intention of eliminating reading errors that occur as a result of being authored with traditional red laser technology. Sony has also launched an official (Japanese) site for Blu-spec CDs."
This reminds me of the gold plated cables "to ensure the digital signal has the highest fidelity".
This looks like snake oil marketed to the "I'm a pretend audiophile who loves buying more expensive things with questionable benefits" crowd.
It's been a long time.
Just wondering if anyone knows?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So instead of Redbook audio, this would be Bluebook? When can we expect the government cover-up?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
h the intention of eliminating reading errors that occur as a result of being authored with traditional red laser technology.
I thought commercial CDs were pressed, not burnt.
does this also mean increased storage on the CD?
My sig has been answered.
If you RTFA, you'll notice the bottom half of it is titled:
Why this is all marketing nonsense
Funny how the summary left out that part.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I would have been more impressed if they'd somehow managed to keep it compatible while 'hiding' a second layer such that while you'd get the traditional old two channel audio with a traditional player, a blue laser player would be able to access the second layer, enabling high fidelity, high bitrate 6 or even 8 channel sound.
As is, it sounds like they're eliminating 'errors' by doing the equivalent of printing old 200 dpi images with a modern 1200 dpi printer. Sure, it's a bit cleaner, but there's no additional information.
I don't read AC A human right
I much prefer my half speed master cd's.
(its easy, really. burn at 24x or even 8x 'for great justice').
sheesh.....
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I think the more important thing that every is missing here is that Steve Guttenberg seems to have found employment again!
This guy's the limit!
my bits will be much higher fidelity than other peoples! my zeros will be round and full and my ones will be straight and clean!
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
Not to mention why should people care to replace the standard CD players that have functioned for years?
TFS: "Blu-spec CDs are compatible with existing CD players but have been mastered with higher levels of accuracy by using the same technology used to author Blu-ray discs, with the intention of eliminating reading errors that occur as a result of being authored with traditional red laser technology"
This is a way to make sure your data writes work better. I've had more than one drive that writes CDs at only 85% success rate.
More to the point, I think this technology helps with drives which have trouble reading CD-Rs. The Blu-Spec discs will work better, exercise the drive less, and prevent unexpected drop-outs in audio.
Of course, most drives manufactured these days are designed to handle the oddities of CD-Rs, so the point is probably moot for 98% of hardware on the market.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
CDs with much improved rootkits^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H error correction!
I'd attribute that to defective cd burners and/or defective media. I've used dozens of cd drives and maybe several thousand cds and haven't had any issues with writes before.
With modern production techniques, does it really matter? Virtually every song that comes out today is so highly engineered and compressed for that "wall of sound" that extra fidelity just doesn't seem to make a difference. I feel like an old man, but I actually miss some of the "old" AAD CDs that were taken simply from the old master tapes. I was never a big fan of vinyl, hating all the hisses and pops etc. that would eventually accumulate, so I appreciate a good CD.
Is there something I have missed from this new release? Will sound engineers be able to give us albums and songs without all the compression? Better said, will they want to?
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Of course, most drives manufactured these days are designed to handle the oddities of CD-Rs ...
Oddly enough, I found that my old CD-Rs (from 2001) can't be read on a modern tri-format DVD writer, but can be read accurately on a Sony-branded CDROM drive. I've verified it by copying out a 300MB ZIP file and testing it.
Of course, I found I can read my old pressed CDROMs (from 1993).
Anyway, to keep on topic ... link to Blue-spec CD. Oh my goodness, the article's changing right before my very eyes (21:12, 26 February 2009)!
So, since a CD is digital, with error correction codes, the ONLY thing this solves is that it might make it easier for a cheap, portable CD player to read the disk. When you rip that CD to a lossless audio file, current technology will do that just fine.
Uh...hello? What exactly is the point, then? Last I heard, portable CD players have been made completely and utterly obsolete due to the advent of portable MP3 players, which are now cheaper, smaller, and can hold a whole CD binder worth of music in a device smaller than a cellphone.
So how does this new technology impact me?
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
C'mon George - you know you want to!
The only problem I've ever had with audible "errors" on CD are when the publishers have introduced them as part of some sort of brain dead DRM attempt!
Will sound engineers be able to give us albums and songs without all the compression?
If portable music players have stronger amplification, then I don't need any of the volume (dynamic) compression. I find myself requiring "active noise-cancellation" (so called) earphones when outside, just to hear the music... because the portable music player doesn't amplify it enough!
I do audio recordings for performing ensembles occasionally, and I edit the audio afterwords. I use a certain amount of dynamic compression, but not too much. My audio now ranges from -25dB to -1dB, giving the listener about 24dB of dynamic headroom.
It's definitely too soft on normal MP3 players... and even softer if the listener switches on extra bass (because some players reduces the mid- and high-ranges to simulate a stronger bass).
My sound card is the only device capable of driving a strong sound to my earphones. I welcome the day when portable music players amplify a lot more strongly (especially the bass), then I think engineers may just go easy on the dynamic compression.
Stick a better anti-scratch coating on the data side of CDs
(and DVDs), and they'll be much better than just cutting the pits and lands more accurately.
Someone fixed the typo between the firehose and here!
(see, we do notice)
Does the 1's go into the 0's?
(You'll need an understanding of male-female activities to comprehend this question.)
I'd wager it's to make it harder to get a quality rip of the cd.
Think of it as trying to use a floppy that was formatted in a very new drive in a very old drive. The new drive has smaller, more precise and sensitive heads. It can read the disks it formats without problems. The older drive has larger, less precise heads and has trouble reading the disk made by the newer drive. The disk may be within spec but not what was the practical standard of the time of the old drive.
J_Random cd player probably won't have problems as the read problems will be within (intentionally) its error correction. A computer drive trying to rip it is probably going to have a helluva time.
Actually, if these can burn discs more accurately and more to redbook spec, I'd be all for it. I remember there was so much crap about which burners and which blank media combinations were best.
I'd think that, at this late date, we could sell CD-size USB sticks for less than 50 cents. Perhaps we can't beat the price of mass CD manufacture, but we can sure beat the price of writable ones, and come close enough to the mass CD price that it becomes a small fraction of the product cost.
Bruce Perens.
Um, no, this doesn't seem to have to do anything with consumer CD writers.
Here's my guess at the real story: Sony figured out a way to use Blu-Ray pressing infrastructure to press CDs too, making it unnecessary to have CD-specific machinery at their plants. This lowers their manufacturing costs for CDs, and as a mostly unimportant side benefit, the resulting CDs are easier to read accurately by existing CD players. Some PR hack at Sony got hold of this info, and decided to turn it into a silly marketing campaign.
Are you adequate?
Aren't these the same people that intentionally put errors on disks to make them unreadable on computers? So is the point of this to write the errors more accurately?
There's no difference between the audio CD and the one with data.
Yes there is. At some conceptual point in the Compact Disc system, Compact Disc Digital Audio can be thought of as having 44100 stereo samples per second, each 4 bytes long, for 176,400 bytes per second. Once this becomes momentarily unreadable, CD-DA players have to use signal-processing methods to hide the dropouts. Compact Disc Read Only Memory, on the other hand, has 75 blocks of 2,048 bytes per second, and some of the missing 22,800 bytes are filled with an extra block of error correction codes. The drive starts to use this extra ECC once parts of the lower layer become uncorrectable, making a CD-ROM disc remain perfectly readable longer than a CD-DA disc.
(CIRC and subcodes are beyond the scope of the point I'm making here.)
Geez only $200 cables? You are a cheap ass. Nothing beats the fidelity of my multi-thousand dollar wood speaker knobs!
with the intention of eliminating reading errors that occur as a result of being authored with traditional red laser technology
That would be ironic considering that abuse of published CD and DVD standards to create reading errors (i.e. "bad" sectors) on purpose is common practice in the content industry as a misguided form of copy protection; Disney being amongst the worst offenders.
Except bits are not 1's and zeros. there are a pit with a length that gets interpreted as 1 and zero's.
So now that make a more accurate CD.
Lass master copy failure do to too much distortion.
Not that I would expect anyone here to understand that the world is bigger then what they do or know.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
never had a problem with CDs being unreadable
never had a problem != not always occurring to you. Since you have also only used 3.5% of the capacity of the CD disk, because everything is wrote 6* with crc on everything to test... basically if they prove this tech out, you can get 6-20* the amount of data on a CD.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc#Data_structure music payload of 2048 bytes per sector for the Mode-1 CD-ROM format. (2336 for mode 2)
(bits in a frame totals 588) * (98 frames per sector) = 57624 bits / sector basically density is 2336/57624 = 4% (for mode 2), 3.5% (for mode 1).
Audio CD players do not usually perform bit-perfect reads of the discs. They have plenty of latitude to ignore small read errors, since the listeners are very unlikely to notice small errors. What this new technology allegedly does is press CDs that are easier for the players to read; i.e., reduce the rate of read errors with improved discs.
Are you adequate?
I keep my CDs carefully
Not everybody has that luxury. Some people would benefit from a scratch coating like that of Blu-ray Disc or the sharper pits that the blue laser creates in the pressing master, as they'd make the disc last for more years in perfectly readable condition before the player has to use signal processing to fill in an unreadable frame.
Instead of that bullcr**, they could just stop reducing the dynamic range of our music and give us back the sound our CDs were supposed to produce...
See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Bad joke, 200 dollars is nothing for cables.
I want DVD-Audio standard in all contemporary "CD players" hitting the markets, but this isn't happening. It should have been happening years ago. MP3-containing CDs happened, but DVD-audio never caught on... would have been out of bounds for MP3 to encode anyway (5 channels), and we'd all be using Ogg Vorbis.
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oops bytes vs bits, so its 32%, not 3.2%
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
This pointless technology serves no more audio-fidelity improving purpose than the hundreds of ridiculous inert gimmicks gullible "audiophiles" have been buying for years, such as Stop Light Pen or the fabulous $485 wooden knob. Disappointing to see cash-hemorrhaging Sony in desperation stoop to the level of these other scamsters.
SACD and DVD-audio both offer actual audio fidelity improvement, but were always commercial non-starters given the expensive and mostly obscure hardware needed for playback. Imagine if the DVD consortium back in the day had included the DVD-audio specification in the basic DVD player profile so that all the millions of DVD players out there today could play them. We would have had ubiquitous high-quality audio playback hardware today, and a greater market would have accordingly existed for high quality disc-based audio formats. It might have kept the recording industry scam going for longer.
So, since a CD is digital
Random philosophizing: Nothing that exists is digital. The height of each pit is analog, as is the density of the smudge in front of the pit. But error correction, part of the physical layer of a device, medium, or link, makes it act digital. Blu-spec is about making it act digital longer by tightening the physical tolerances.
the ONLY thing this solves is that it might make it easier for a cheap, portable CD player to read the disk. When you rip that CD to a lossless audio file, current technology will do that just fine.
There's a finite amount of wear that a CD can take before a given player stops error-correcting it. This amount might be more for your computer's CD drive than for a portable CD drive, but it's still finite. If Blu-spec makes a CD last longer in your portable CD player, it'll last even longer in your computer's CD drive.
This sounds wonderfully useful for the Blu-Ray manufacturers. They can either have their Blu-ray disk labs pull double duty and burn audio CDs if they have no need to burn DVDs for a time, and they can upgrade their red laser CD burning facilities to use blue lasers to increase the utility of those facilities without more facilities.
The whole "sharper edges on the CD" thing is interesting, but ... has been beaten to death by the last 110 comments.
This technology works by increasing the resolution of the bits coded onto the CD, so that the zeros are rounder, and the ones have the little tip at the top, and a flat line along the bottom.
But seriously... How about we improve CDs by setting a standard that eliminates harsh audio compression, and sets limits on the audio leveling..?
Get a player that uses two transistors in the output stage, like the first generation iPod Shuffle, instead of a transistor and a capacitor.
http://home.comcast.net/~machrone/playertest/playertest.htm
Of course blue lasers are better to author CD's. Want proof of the superiority of blue?
GI Joe v. Cobra: Good guys have blue lasers
Jedi v. Sith: Good guys have blue light sabers and blue lasers, the bad guys have red
Smurfs v. Gargmel: Good guys are blue, bad guy has a reddish cat.
I rest my case.
Find a DDD Telarc disc from the early 90s that was intended to show off the capabilities of CD players back then -- wide dynamic range, basically 0% cross-channel interference, the works. Now rip it, and try to make the best-quality mp3/ogg encoding possible. Now do a blind comparison of the two. I guarantee you'll be able to tell the difference.
Say I'm willing to run a set of 16 ABX trials on a given clip. Starting with a libvorbis 1.2.0 based encoder at roughly 192 kbps, do you think I'd be able to pick out the compressed clip 13 times out of 16?
We'd probably even start seeing "mp3" players that can play raw PCM
There are already digital audio players that can play Apple Lossless or FLAC audio.
Even a 2 gigabyte microSD card can hold ~3 CDs worth of uncompressed data.
You might be able to double that with FLAC. But if you want to fill up on lossless, I'd recommend a hard drive player such as the iPod Classic.
specifications, which provide substantially less reliability for data retrieval than Data CD.
The point here is that Red Book specifications do not provide sufficient error detection/correction mechanism, but you can cram more bits into Audio CD than into Data CD. *That's* precisely the cause of bit error while reading CDs, not the scratches as cnet.uk article says.
So for reliable read you either need very high quality CD transport (and that costs money) or non-real time process (like EAC does).
The difference between writing with Red Laser vs Blue Laser. Imagine that you making the marks with a small brush vs a ballpoint pen. Now you read in real time, you have to determine precisely where each mark starts and ends. That's the point.
Your DAC either registers a 1 or it registers a 0.
True, the PHY on even the cheapest DAC is enough to ensure that. But how long in fractions of a microsecond does it register a 1, and how long does it register a 0? Clock recovery can be non-trivial and just as important as data recovery. If the signal pulses are distorted, the DAC might hold the sample with the 1 longer than it's supposed to, resulting in timing jitter. Unless your DAC is expensive enough to buffer and re-clock the signal, the jitter will likely show up as phase noise measurable on the DAC's output, and in some cases even ABXable to the naked ear.
But it does go to 1011.
-
What's the point with improving accuracy, when they screw with the music way before it gets to the glass mastering stage?
You just know you have to have it. With proper marketing you can get people to buy any new Sony product, whether they need it or not!
Warning: must have salty ears to listen.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
sony can not be trusted to not root kit your machine
and wreak your hardware
My guess is that this is a process that was created so that replication outfits can use their blu-ray mastering hardware to make CDs as well. Right now it requires a different machine for each process.
It probably does not follow the specifications set forth for Redbook CD, and as such can't be branded a CD, even if it is compatable.
So most likely, Sony had to come up with a new name for it, and the marketing department has grabbed hold of it.
But who the hell buys CD's anyway?
This should have been done 20 years ago.
My USB stick, works in any USB plug,.. so
why bother with disc's now?
Do I get a free pony in every jewel case?
Do I need to make sure I use Blu spec cables to my speakers too, with copper rolled in the correct direction?
Audiophiles realy are the some of the most religious suckers on the planet. If I could only think of this crap first and profit from it!
What will they come up with next. Oh please Sony, my CD's suck so bad I need blueray accuracy!!! Please, take away all other technologies, like HD-DVD. I didn't want cheap High definition video anyway...
People, please know your human eye and ear level limits.
The human ear can only hear with in a limited audio wave length.
The human eye can only process colors, images and motion with in a limited visual cortex.
The human eye and ear like when things look and sound the most NATURAL.
Would this new technology still involve sticking a disc shaped object in an ancient audio playing device and then provide only a measly 75 minutes of music?
Fortunately, there are alternatives to modern CDs. Super audio CDs and DVD Audio are mastered, and the specifications required to be SACD or DVDA compliant help to fight some of the more egregious mastering practices seen on todays CDs.
The bad news is that most of the people with SACD players and sound equipment good enough to hear the difference don't tend to enjoy the same kind of music I do. Sure, it's good to listen to last generation's rock greats... But I'm hoping that in another 10 or 20 years, I'll finally be able to listen to Tool on SACD.
I'd consider it a big deal if they used the same anti-scratch coating on CDs that is used on Blu-ray discs.
You are ignoring lossless compression. And with lossy compression you can't tell the difference except using a high end set-up. For playing on crappy ear buds while you walk down the street, lossless copies are not going to provide any benefit (incidentally this is why they master the music to clip in the first place).
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
CDs are burned with Infrared, not Red.
DVDs are burned with Red.
I'm going out and immediately start buying CD's again--like I did 15 years ago, in the studios' heydey. Or, at least, that's what Sony is thinking I'll do now, apparently.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I don't. I download them from Amazon.
Are they going to develop a new method for etching records next?
Blue laser? Red laser? There are no lasers involved here!
"Blu-spec" is a marketing term and stunt! Wow, some of the posters here today brought my expectations of /. to a new low.
Blu-spec CD is NOT a new CD format. It is just an improved method of manufacturing CD.
CDs manufactured using this method are just like other CDs, playable on all CD players, except perhaps in higher manufacturing quality.
The phrase "Blu-spec CD Format" is misleading.
God, I'm going to hate myself for this...
You have GiJoe wrong. The Joes actually had red lasers and Cobra had the blue.
This in fact messed with my head as a child trying to reconcile good vs evil based on a colour scheme (original concept pioneered by cowboy movies). Star Wars really set the bar in terms of what colour lasers the bad guys used, so... For quite some time I was half-convinced that Cobra was actually an organization of freedom fighters battling the evil empire of the USA. It didn't help that Cobra never actually hurt anyone. For years after I wondered if Marvel had written GiJoe as some sort of anti-Reagan era metaphor for American imperialism.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The fact is that ANY well made coaxial cable has sufficiently low capacitance and good enough shielding to send SPDIF 6 feet from your CD player to your receiver's DAC.
True, the data will arrive intact, but will the clock arrive intact or jittered?
For this to come to CD/DVD/Blu-Ray writers!
Here are the specifications in English, directly from Sony's site.