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Father of the CD, Norio Ohga, Dead At 81

Posted by samzenpus on from the rest-in-peace dept.

lightbox32 writes "Norio Ohga, who was Sony's president and chairman from 1982 to 1995, died Saturday at the age of 81. He has been credited with developing CDs, which he insisted be designed at 12 centimeters (4.8 inches) in diameter to hold 75 minutes worth of music — in order to store Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in its entirety."

5 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. [insert subject here] by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    to store Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in its entirety

    It is also the case that they chose that size because it's slightly too large to fit in most pockets, thus discouraging casual sharing.

    1. Re:[insert subject here] by Le+Marteau · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Back in the day, the problem with Beethoven's ninth, and cassettes in particular, was the times of the movements. From one version:

      1st Movement: 13'32"
      2nd Movement: 13'09"
      3rd Movement: 14'21"
      4th Movement: 23'22"

      There is no way to put these movements on a two sided cassette without having about 17 minutes of unused space, unless the 3rd movement was split between sides.

      So what many (if not most) versions on cassette would do to conserve tape is put the 1st, 2nd, and PART of the 3rd movement on side A of the cassette, and the remaining part of the 3rd movement and the 4th movement on side B. It was kind of jarring to have the tape fade out in the middle of the 3rd movement to switch to the other side.

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  2. Re:I don't see what's "compact" about those discs by larry+bagina · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Don't forget LaserDiscs. Unlike DVDs, they didn't compress the audio or video. If you want to watch the Star Wars trilogy (before George Lucas butchered it), LD (or an LD rip) is the only option.

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  3. Terrible packaging from unresponsive oligopolists by wombatmobile · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yes, the packaging sucked! The tabbed hinges on the case cover are fragile and break when dropped from any height. The only thing holding the product together was the shrink wrap, which was impenetrable. But the music industry cartel was so powerful, the packaging experience persisted unchanged for a quarter of a century! And then the industry died.

  4. Re:nope, he wasn't part of Philips by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I disagree. Laserdiscs were analog, whereas CDs and DVDs are all digital. CDs and DVDs are just bit buckets where you can put whatever digital data you'd like. They had video CDs for a time. There are standards as to how to encode stuff to be playable, but they are still much more similar than an analog format.

    From your post I can tell that you live in softwareland.

    The difference between decoding a laserdisc and a CD is pretty much a firmware issue. The difference is that for CD's you will have to check the sampled value against a treshold to decide if it should be encoded as a 0 or a 1 whereas for laserdic you will input the analog value to the video decoding code.
    DVDs require different electronics.

    The development work to turn a CD-player into a laserdic player vs the work to turn a CD-player into a DVD-player would roughly be about 1:10