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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.