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Father of the CD, Norio Ohga, Dead At 81
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."
"After a private ceremony, Mr. Ohga will be microwaved."
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
-1, tasteless
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
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.
Good thing he wasn't a Wagner fan!
So he created a technology that was based on empirical measurements of his tastes..."in order to store Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in its entirety."
Oh God I can only dream of the worse replacements. What was with the German and Japanese infatuations with one-another's culture? I only read "master race" meaning "original from ancestor" so maybe I'm not seeing the importance of comparing my Incestors as not being original/mastered enough, but that must be the IDE-ego of my Slave mentality. Maybe is why Beta never caught on, because the buyers were too beta like me.
Lets say I have a 8 GB microSDHC card full of mp3s. That nail-size is too large, so let me burn the music to a digital audio COMPACT disc. Uh oh, I would need about 100 of these 12-cm discs.
his invention of the cd has given me endless joy. thank you Mr Ohga.
Yet another Sony format that never caught on. When will they learn?
Too bad the record industry spoiled it with lousy packaging. Flimsy plastic jewel boxes covered with shrink wrap and security tape that is really a pain (occasionally, literally) to remove.
just an unproven note from all of the unproven deities indicating that if they wanted us to have them (hymens), then monkeys would almost certainly have them too, so, it may remain an indefinable historically unlocatable possibly divinerable 'mystery', although almost inextricably attached to the current never ending chosen ones' .5 billion population 'finish line' crusadiacal holycost? stay tuned for melodious monday.
He's now a coaster?
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.
Too bad they couldn't have used even a $0.10 (back then) codec to get the bit density up, though. Even four more bits per sample (each for left and right), or, better, eight, and, 56,000 samples/second, would have made the CDs actually sound pretty good, and would not have changed the cost of production of the CDs, themselves.
Sure, they were more difficult to scratch than vinyl, and repeated plays on low-cost equipment didn't do damage, but the dynamic range is way down (12-18 dB, depending on the vinyl preamp quality) and the lower sample rate led to audible filter artifacts that particularly affect imaging, most noticeably on orchestral pieces.
All-in-all, I'd really rather he had waited to do it better, or not bothered.
Fact: the CD sucks.
Isn't it contradictory how a supposed fanatic for sound quality settled for a poorer format? But the CD was "good enough" for most people, as well as convenient, not too expensive, and consistent. You need a good, well-maintained turntable to surpass even the cheapest CD player. But when you surpass, boy, you do surpass. Like monitors: an LCD is always so-so, which is much better than a low-end CRT, but when you get a good CRT, the limitations of LCDs become obvious.
So, technically superior music formats like SACD or DVD-A had no chance of going mainstream. I wonder if anything ever will: not only we had a generation raised on the CD, but worse: now we have kids for whom low-bitrate MP3 files and even Youtube videos are acceptable!
Also, Ohga was the one who pushed Sony into becoming a media company, rather than a pure technology company. That makes me dislike the guy even more.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Gregg invented in the laserdisc in 1958 (!), selling patent to MCA who developed commercially with Philips. Sony contributed some work on error correction to the Red Book standard, but the hard work of hardware design and modulation technique came from Philips, building on their laserdisc work.
What Sony did, and has ever done since, was see a market to exploit.
FYI, the inner diameter was chosen by Philips to match the Dutch 10 cent coin at the time.
burning done
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
Lots of people grumbling about how they think CDs are inferior etc. I don't get why.
Sony plucked this guy from an operatic career, and his passion for sound quality made a big difference. The CD standard is pretty darn nice, especially compared to cassettes, and this guy was responsible for a lot of the push to make it a market reality. He also provided a lot of good leadership for Sony in other ways (getting them into gaming, for instance) and was an important supporter of the arts.
After his retirement Sony has had a lot more trouble both avoiding being evil (rootkit saga!) and finding vision. Furthermore, while Philips and Sony designed the CD standard around engineering constraints and human perception, media formats since that time have instead been designed around marketing (OMG this says 192 kHz! it must be 4 1/3 times as good as CDs!) and content protection/DRM. I certainly wish more companies would find executives like Mr. Ohga.
So who ripped us off with all those 74 minute discs?
...and that's good enough.
The kids just want some background noise. 64kbps MP3 on Smartphone speaker is more than enough.
No need for them at all to be forced to use some theoretically superior format, which anyway requires a living room with 5000$-worth audio equipment to be enjoyed at it fullest.
Stop bitching about the fact people only take the cheapest solution that fills their needs, and that 99.999% people out there have needs at only a fraction of what you personally need.
If you're really, really such a big music fan, stop complain, log of audiophile forums, shut down your computer, get out of your living room, buy a nice ticket in the opera of your city and have a nice evening listening to live music.
You're going to enjoy the experience much better than thinking about people without your tastes listening music on sub-5000$ equipment.
Or is the actual complaining about audio quality what you really enjoy in music ?!?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
digitize him and compress him to an ISO file
mix and burn..... (sorry)
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
He worked for Sony -- that means he's in hell now.
subject says it all
Anyone else find this to be an eerie coincidence?
It's like he was actually killed by the hack...
http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp — apparently it is unknown whether the audio CD was designed specifically to fit Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
"If you can put music on a compact disk, why can't you put a persons consciousness?"
-Cave Johnson
I had a professor in a grad level instrumentation class use the CD as an illustrative example of sampling, filtering, etc. In the course of this he said that the "advertised" reason was fitting the symphony on the disk. The real reason was that Phillips was way ahead of Sony and could bring to market sooner, so Sony brought this up to slow things down until Sony could be ready. Not sure if true, but makes sense from what I have seen of corporate tactics.
[1] - I hesitate to call The Wasp Factory mainstream -- it is significantly farther detached from the real world than most SF, IMO.
Agreed. Many ascribe the term "literary fiction" to this genre of his work, and if one must pigeonhole it, the term probably serves better than most. Banks' work is never mainstream, which is pretty much what makes it worth reading.
I happen to be an unashamedly huge fan of his non-SF work (my personal favourites: The Crow Road and Complicity), but his writing is stupendous no matter where he turns his attention.
They're not comparing to your dad's turntable. They're using fancy turntables with cartridges that cost more than your computer. Under ideal conditions, vinyl can sound really good.
I absolutely hate the wank that gets peddled about "trained" ears and whatnot.
I have three diplomas from the Royal College of Music, so I have at least a general idea of what my music is supposed to sound like.
However, age has not been entirely kind to me, and I have a formally diagnosed hearing loss in higher frequencies in both ears (enough for me to wear hearing aids to help with sibilant sounds in conversation less evident in the music I listen to). I get grumpy with the sound reproduction from my Rega Planar turntable, since the so-called "warm" characteristics favoured by many so-called "audiophiles" tend to round off the frequencies in which my hearing is deficient.
However, I need no training to recognise the difference between a recording of (my choice of) music at CD quality and an MP3 rendering of the same at 320 Kb/s VBR.
That doesn't mean I refuse to use compression: for my iPod, which is almost exclusively used where there is more than enough ambient noise for detail to become irrelevant, 192 Kb/s VBR is just fine. What saddens me, though, is the number of kids^Wpeople who have never actually heard proper recordings of their music, who go through life with a limited palette of audio experience.
First of all, it's actually 74 minutes.
Secondly, Snopes says that the whole Beethoven's Symphony thing is "Undetermined."
http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp
They're not comparing to your dad's turntable. They're using fancy turntables with cartridges that cost more than your computer. Under ideal conditions, vinyl can sound really good.
Plus, vinyl's got the electrolytes that your ears crave!
(from https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Compact_disc ):
The partners aimed at a playing time of 60 minutes with a disc diameter of 100 mm (Sony) or 115 mm (Philips).[9] Sony vice-president Norio Ohga suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler's recording of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony Number Nine from the 1951 Bayreuth Festival.[23][24]
The additional 14-minute playing time subsequently required changing to a 120 mm disc. Kees Immink, Philips' chief engineer, however, denies this, claiming that the increase was motivated by technical considerations, and that even after the increase in size, the Furtwängler recording would not have fit on one of the earliest CDs.[8][9] According to a Sunday Tribune interview,[25] the story is slightly more involved. In 1979, Philips owned PolyGram, one of the world's largest distributors of music. PolyGram had set up a large experimental CD plant in Hannover, Germany, which could produce huge numbers of CDs having, of course, a diameter of 115 mm. Sony did not yet have such a facility. If Sony had agreed on the 115-mm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the market. Sony decided that something had to be done. The long playing time of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony imposed by Ohga was used to push Philips to accept 120 mm, so that Philips' PolyGram lost its edge on disc fabrication.[25]