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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. --
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!
What?
Beats using the "Minute Waltz" as an empirical measurement.
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Compare it to a full record and you will see ..
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Double entendre?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
his invention of the cd has given me endless joy. thank you Mr Ohga.
CDs were far smaller than the vinyl phonograph records of the day.
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.
You are missing an important variable, here.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The "significance" of the initial M. is that he writes mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and scifi as Iain M. Banks.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Someone's off his rocker.
Or, to use another media contemporary with the CD, around 6666 Double Sided, Double Density 8" floppy disks.
You covered a lot in that brief rant. Snopes provides a little more information.
I get worried when Slashdotters start ranking microwaved geeks by taste. Masterchef this isn't.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Phonograph?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
+ 1 stupid
The plastic boxes weren't nearly as much of a problem as the cardboard insets they used to use - the sulphur content would literally dissolve sections of the CD.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've found it to be incredibly difficult to locate LSD in the last few years. I'm glad to see someone is having better luck than I.
This Wired article is a bit more detailed.
Ironically, the mastering techniques of the day limited CD recordings to 72 minutes. The unusually long Furtwängler "Ninth" was not released until 1997.
Try adding soy sauce.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
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.
Actually, this is no longer the case. You can get combo DVDs that have both the theatrical and the "special" versions. Here. Unfortunately, the theatrical is only in Dolby 2.0 and the video hasn't been remastered like the re-release, but it's certainly better than VHS.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
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.
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.
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.
You weren't around to remember how CDs were originally packaged? The jewel case was put in a 12" long cardboard box up until 1993, quite wasteful since you would immediately throw out that big box. It was probably designed so that record shops could use their old record bins for holding the box (and to visually justify the 50% more expensive product that cost less to produce.)
What is unfortunate is that is that for an equal amount of plastic as the jewel box, the design could have included putting the disc into a caddy, floppy disk style; the end product could have had real art printed right on it, and would have been less susceptible to scratches and dust.
I remember not being able to figure out how to get my first cd out of the jewel box.
FYI, the inner diameter was chosen by Philips to match the Dutch 10 cent coin at the time.
What are you talking about ? LPs are terrible, and they were even worse when the CD was invented. All that compression and EQ necessary to get music to fit on an LP - all that scratching, dust, static ?
I'd say most people, including people who call themselves audiophiles, would have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between the CD and the musician's final master tape in a double-blind test (the only kind of test which really makes sense).
You weren't around to remember how CDs were originally packaged? The jewel case was put in a 12" long cardboard box [yormeister.be] up until 1993 [latimes.com]
Eh? Is that true?! I live in the UK and bought CDs from the late-1980s onwards, and I don't recall *ever* having seen one inside one of those stupid longbox designs.
The article implies that this was a US-only thing ("[switch to jewel boxes] as is already done in virtually every other country?"), but I'd expect to have at least heard of it anyway. I thought they'd only use packaging like that for stupid, contrived, multi-disc box sets.
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but worse: now we have kids for whom low-bitrate MP3 files and even Youtube videos are acceptable!
320kbps = low-bitrate?
Besides, you could try judging music by how good it is, instead of what medium it was published on.
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Not all MP3 files are 320kbps. 128 and even 64kbps are common among my 12 year old brother's friends. Of course, they listen to it on a cellphone speaker, so higher bitrates wouldn't necessarily improve the sound quality.
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We also had CD "longboxes" in Canada from the mid-'80s to the early '90s. Most of them displayed the expanded version of the jewel case cover art and some had slightly larger booklets and extras (such as posters). Nowadays, I hear that these things are collectible because of the expanded artwork and bonus inserts.
As for why the longboxes were developed in the first place, qubezz already mentioned one reason (i.e. re-using the old LP bins to hold two longboxes side by side). The other reason was that unpackaged CDs were easy to shoplift. The 12" longboxes made it just that much harder to stuff in a jacket pocket or down one's pants.
320 kbps is not bad, but I once downloaded music in 96kbps. It sounded like absolute shit, of course, but the person who encoded it didn't realize he was doing it seriously wrong. And I bet that, if you pointed it to him, he would call you a nitpicker. After I saw my sister listening to music on her cell phone -- and I mean without earbuds, really using the phone's tiny, crappy built-in speaker -- I realized that people are used to absolute crap sound.
Circumcision is child abuse.
burning done
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
Try adding soy sauce.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-sabi!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
When you realize that the 320kbit MP3 you've downloaded is actually ripped from a 192kbit CD, however...
MP3 is a lossy codec, though. A trained ear can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 quite easily, and once somebody's pointed it out to you, you'll notice a big difference between an analog source and a digital source. You do need high end hi fi equipment to hear the difference, but when you're in that range, you won't ever want to go back to digital.
The problem is, it's precious difficult to find actual analog sources these days. There's no point in getting an analog pressing of something that was recorded in a digital studio, because the loss is happening at the source. Remember in the early days when CD's used to have a mark on the jewel case indicating AAD, ADD, or DDD, to indicate how it was recorded, how it was mastered, and how it was distributed? They stopped doing that when everybody went digital, and since then there's really no point in seeking out an analog media. But when I compare the CD version of my Deutsche Grammophon recording of Beethoven's 9th against the Vinyl version (which I also have), the Vinyl version comes out way ahead, even though they're based off the same master tapes, and the records are 30 years older than the CD. Ironically, of course, short of inviting you into my home to hear it in person, there is no way for me to prove it to you, because the moment I record it to a digital medium, or put it on Youtube, you'll lose the very information I'm complaining about losing in the CD. :)
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 ]
'Eh? Is that true?! I live in the UK and bought CDs from the late-1980s onwards, and I don't recall *ever* having seen one inside one of those stupid longbox designs.'
I saw a few in a classical CD sale in London just a few years ago. Must have been languishing in a warehouse somewhere for well over a decade.
MP3 is a lossy codec, though. A trained ear can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 quite easily, and once somebody's pointed it out to you, you'll notice a big difference between an analog source and a digital source. You do need high end hi fi equipment to hear the difference, but when you're in that range, you won't ever want to go back to digital.
So I need a trained ear, someone to point it out, and high end equipment just to hear how much my CD collection sucks? When you put it that way... I'd rather remain ignorant.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
digitize him and compress him to an ISO file
mix and burn..... (sorry)
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Try adding soy sauce.
You made my day. :D
What is unfortunate is that is that for an equal amount of plastic as the jewel box, the design could have included putting the disc into a caddy
Some of us had caddy-loading CD-ROM drives. For that matter, some car CD changers still use caddies... Nonetheless, caddies came, and for the most part they went away. It ended up being just another thing to break, lose, etc. And the caddies themselves were annoyingly expensive without adding much value.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The "significance" of the initial M. is that he writes mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and scifi as Iain M. Banks.
AIUI, this came about by accident. He always intended to use the "M" for both, but his mainstream publisher decided that the name sounded better without it, so left it out. When he eventually found a publisher for his SF work (he wrote the earliest SF stuff first, but didn't get it published until after his first non-SF[1] novel) that publisher agreed with him that the initial sounded good, so included it.
[1] - I hesitate to call The Wasp Factory mainstream -- it is significantly farther detached from the real world than most SF, IMO.
Unfortunately, the theatrical is only in Dolby 2.0 and the video hasn't been remastered like the re-release, but it's certainly better than VHS.
AIUI, the theatrical version on these DVDs is a direct copy of the content of the laserdisc.
Yes because a 8GB microSDHC existed in 1982, you tit.
I believe I still have a few of those laying around somewhere.
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 ^_^
320 kbps is not bad, but I once downloaded music in 96kbps. It sounded like absolute shit, of course, but the person who encoded it didn't realize he was doing it seriously wrong.
I'm not really defending 96kbps- at least, not for MP3- because I doubt that you could *ever* get great sound at that bitrate. But using files you downloaded (possibly years ago) as an example is flawed.
I downloaded quite a few tracks during the early-2000s. They were 128kbps- the de facto standard bitrate at that time. Many of them *were* obviously poor quality and demonstrated why 128kbps MP3s were maligned by those who cared about sound quality. But the thing is, I encoded many of my own MP3s at 128kbps, and they were *miles* better. Not hifi, but significantly better.
Why? One major cause was likely the encoder. Apparently a lot of the early MP3 encoders that came with the popular software of the time were very crude and poor-quality. On the other hand, I was using a "lame"-derived encoder (lame was considered one of the best encoders back then). Plus, it's possible that some of them were transcoded and/or re-converted. In short, you can't blame poor sound quality solely on the bitrate, particularly where Napster-era MP3s are concerned.
That said, the guy should probably have realised that they sounded awful. But then, my Dad appeared happy with the (very low) default encoding bitrate of Windows Media Player a few years back, even though *I* could hear artifacts so obvious they showed up clearly even on the sub-£10 speakers that came with the computer.
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"If you can put music on a compact disk, why can't you put a persons consciousness?"
-Cave Johnson
[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.
Hey, I (for one) like tits.
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.
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!