Slashdot Mirror
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."
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;
Nope, it's just a better made CD. Regular CDs aren't exactly problematic though, so it'll probably be one of those things where it gets used on expensive music collections to make people think they're buying premium stuff.
I read the internet for the articles.
Read the summary again. This isn't blu-ray, it's just using a blue laser to regular burn CDs instead of a red one.
It's solving a problem nobody has.
It's been a long time.
10 ETCH MASTER WITH LASER
20 PRESS CD WITH MASTER
30 PROFIT AND COMPLAIN
40 GOTO 20
Yes, commercial CDs are pressed from masters... this is a supposedly more accurate way of creating the masters.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The final polycarbonate disc is pressed. The glass master, however, is etched with a laser. The summary's still incorrect, though, as the master's created using a UV or violet laser.
TFA could be referring to the fact that red lasers are used to check the master for consistency.
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
There are no foolproof methods; but there are a variety of techniques that have been tried, with more pain to the legitimate than to the pirates, as usual.
.
There are two basic schools of design for Audio CD DRM: The one is to include, in a location that won't interfere with the audio tracks, a data track, and put some sort of nastiness in it, set to autoplay on insertion. This is
The other main method is to exploit differences between the Red Book standard(audio CDs) and the Yellow Book standard(CDROM drives) and introduce deliberate errors into your CD that will be negligible under redbook but problematic under yellow book. Because this is a hack, there are no really good ways to do it(and, it causes real issues with some newer stereos that use CDROM drives); but that is how it is tried.
This isn't actually a new "physical media format". It's just a CD made with a blue laser instead of a red laser. They're still readable by any old CD player; the only difference is that they supposedly have a lower error rate.
My sig can beat up your sig.
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.)
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
CDs aren't created directly with lasers. The pit-land pattern is etched into a glass master, from which the stamps are produced which are used to press the polycarbonate discs that end up in our CD-players. The step which involves a laser is the activation of the photochemical surface of the glas master. Where the photochemical surface is washed away, the etching process creates the pits. I think it's a stretch to think that switching to a blue laser can provide a noticeable benefit in that process.
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.
You realize that the data side of the CD is really the top, right? That the actual data layer is right THERE at the top, with almost nothing to protect it, right?
And that the DVD spec put the optical data layer in the MIDDLE of the disc, with polycarbonate layers on either side to protect it, right?
And that you can polish scratches in the polycarbonate just fine with various compounds, so that even a pretty serious scratch can be eliminated? Even massive all-over scratching from sand can be fixed with sufficient elbow grease.
However, I do most heartily agree: it would be nice to have CD/DVDs with harder outer coatings. Polycarbonate is far, far too soft.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
That's the point of an audio CD.
No.
Why post shit like that when you have no idea?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(audio_CD_standard) Audio-CD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Book_(CD_standard) CD-ROM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-R#History Orange book (CD-R)
The whole bunch:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Books
Red:
"On the disc, the data is stored in sectors of 2352 bytes each, read at 75 sectors per second. Onto this the overhead of EFM, CIRC, L2 ECC, and so on, is added, but these are not typically exposed to the application reading the disc."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#CD-ROM_format
"In order to achieve improved error correction and detection, a CD-ROM has a third layer of Reed-Solomon error correction.[2] A Mode-1 CD-ROM, which has the full three layers of error correction data, contains a net 2048 bytes of the available 2352 per sector. In a Mode-2 CD-ROM, which is mostly used for video files, there are 2336 user-available bytes per sector."
So less bytes / sector for data = more for error correction.
There's a world of difference between "shatter" and "so unstable it doesn't work anymore."
Kid-proof tablet..
You make the mistake of equating something that's technically correct but completely irrelevant. 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.
Of course, you could say "screw it" to the whole coaxial cable thing and use TOSLINK. That has the added benefit of eliminating the chance of a ground loop.