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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."
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)!
If i'm not wrong, Audio CD are error tolerant, they was designed to play without being interrupted by ignoring minor errors while reading. Because everyone will be more angry if their CD is skipping like crazy than having little distortion in the sound. That is why programs like EAC exist, they can check if the reader are bypassing errors or not so a (near) perfect copy of the audio data on the CD can be created.
I keep my CDs carefully and I don't have a great ear so I can't say that my CDs give different sound over years. But there are a lot of audiophiles around, and when they want to create a lossless copy of the CD, everything has to be 'lossless', from the source to the encoding.
But IMO, this technology is useless as some other ones from Sony.
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.
> 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.
Not... quite...
The main reason why more and more people think mp3 audio sounds as good as CD audio is because the audio fidelity of CDs has gone down the toilet over the past decade. It's as if the recording engineers of the world have completely forgotten EVERYTHING they learned during the previous 25 years. Modern CDs have CLIPPING, for god's sake. That's inexcusable. Combine sloppy mastering with media of diminishing quality and players whose quality basically ceased to exist 5 years ago, and you have the reason why most current CDs sound like crap. Modern CD players never skip, because they have big ram buffers so they can recover from skips before the listener realizes it happened at all, but pretty much every other spec meaningful to CD players has gone downhill since the mid-90s.
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. You might have a hard time telling which is which if you hear it in isolation, but side by side you'll have no problem figuring out which one is compressed.
Put another way, the quality of compressed audio hasn't increased... the quality of CD audio has fallen compared to the quality it had during its golden era. 15 years ago, record companies spent lots of money trying to master perfect CDs, because they knew every disc they released was going to be scrutinized for the tiniest audio imperfection. Now, they don't even bother trying... and wonder why their customers don't bother *buying*.
If every new Britney Spears & Madonna disc had the production standards and "reach out and touch the music" clarity that the best Telarc discs had 20 years ago, people would STILL be buying them at stores, even if they intended to rip them to mp3 for convenience. Why? The added value of a flawless, premium-quality master from which to rip at will. We'd probably even start seeing "mp3" players that can play raw PCM, and people taking advantage of SDHC media's capacity to "rip them raw". Even a 2 gigabyte microSD card can hold ~3 CDs worth of uncompressed data.
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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