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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. --
Good thing he wasn't a Wagner fan!
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.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
CDs were far smaller than the vinyl phonograph records of the day.
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.
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.
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.
This is total rubbish - not just your comment but the entire idea that he made the CD to fit Beethoven's 9th. In what world does Beethoven's 9th have a set length?
Facts: The prototype was 60 minutes. The final product was 74 minutes. Surely they argued what would fit in 74 minutes but not in 60 minutes. Like you say, there's no set length but pretty much all agree Beethoven's ninth takes more than 60 minutes. Most recordings do in fact fit within 74 minutes, including the one most consider the "reference recording".
That's really where the facts end and the speculation begins. Most likely Beethoven's 9th was mentioned as an example of what wouldn't fit a 60 minute disc. There's no credible source to say it HAD to fit. The whole mythos seem to assume everyone else agreed on 11.5 cm, but one man insisted on 12 cm. There's really no proof of that, there was a prototype and they agreed to tweak it a little making it half a cm bigger. When people asked why, Beethoven's 9th was probably a convenient example to use. So after turning a feather into five hens this became this huge mysterious legend.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
It seems Symphonies and all were created in those halcyon days of "live performances"
Don't be silly. I'm sure Beethoven had an ipod.
That would explain why he went deaf.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
You seem to forget that the equipment required to decode and handle even uncompressed CD audio would have been very complicated by early-1980s standards. And for any very primitive compression techniques that they could have come up with, you could have used the "wait a bit longer" argument because something better would have come along soon, all the way up to the early-1990s when the compressed MiniDisc media came out.
Oh, except the compression on that is crude by modern standards, so you could argue that they should have waited a bit longer... and a bit longer....
Yes, it would have been an *excellent* idea for them to have postponed the CD by 20 years! *cough*
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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.
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
Yes, it was terrible that they were so inept as to replace a fragile crackly hissy medium with one that the vast, vast majority of people are literally physically incapable of distinguishing from a live performance.