Compact Disc Turns 26, Has a Bright Future 487
javipas writes "The Compact Disc was created 26 years ago, but apparently it is as healthy as 15 years ago, when computing versions of this format (CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW) made the market explode. Nowadays CD has been replaced in some segments, but not on the music industry, that continues to support it massively. The shy return of vinyl and the absence of real competitors make CD's future very bright, so it seems this birthday will not be by any means the last one we celebrate. Happy birthday!"
Absence of real competitors (Score:3, Insightful)
...except mp3s...
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But by all means, keep walking on your good ol' tapes
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Insightful)
Run a cassette over with a truck, tape any broken sections back together and re-spool it, that thing's fine.
Maybe the problem is that it sounds no worse?
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Funny)
I head about VCR's but I believe that's only a legend.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Funny)
A small Laser Disc or something. It'll never catch on.
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Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Interesting)
Forget not the humble 8-track tape!
The eight track is a format best forgotten, as I said in Good Riddance to Bad Tech a few years ago. [kuro5hin.org]
Oh, btw I am old!
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Funny)
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The four selectable tracks were a slight advantage for cassette tapes, since you could skip ahead or back much more quickly to get to the song you wanted.
But it was just way too big. You'd think something designed for a car would be smaller (our 8-track was in the home stereo and not the car). It makes sense for cars in that it is easier to insert into a player while driving than a cassette would have been. Sound I don't know about, I was too young to properly discern but it didn't seem any worse than LP
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You are sadly misinformed, as was nearly everyone else at the time. I had this very same discussion with a guy I was stationed with in the Air Force in 1971, and when he heard my cassette deck he agreed that there was no discernable difference between my cassette and his eight track. In fact he bought a cassette deck that very same day after hearing mine!
I have a copy of Deep Purple's Machine Head [wikipedia.org] that I bought when it first came out (1971), and it still sounds very good. There is more tape hiss on my vinyl
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Funny)
Forget not the humble 8-track tape!
I've tried. That, along with mullets and a few other things. ;-)
I have a few hundred of them (before you call me old, examine my UID...I'm 17).
Congrats! Since you're old enough to drive, it's time to start saving up for that used Firebird to go with the 8-track tapes. Alternatively, a fully decked-out van would work, though if you live down south, an old pickup truck might be more appropriate.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent funny. 8-track tapes were a mountain of shit. No rewind. Terribly narrow tracks combined with slow tape speeds resulted in asstacular sound quality. The bits of foam glued to the plastic cartridges that pressed the tape against the heads would lose their springiness over time or simply come unglued. Head alignment in players was a major problem. Four "programs" per tape resulted in long songs getting split into pieces. The metallic splice in the loop that triggers the program switch would come unglued, resulting in a loop that was no longer a loop, merely a bunch of tape being pulled out of a cartridge, into a tape deck, and not being returned to the cartridge - an eaten tape, in other words. No rewinding, it's worth mentioning it twice because it was so damn irritating. They get credit for being cool looking. Nothing more, and nothing related to its performance as an audio format.
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Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... they're still being sold new today.
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In 1987 a Phillips CD player cost me about US $ 325.
Its sound is much better than newer DVD an CD players.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Insightful)
You are forgetting...
When DAT first appeared, there were no cheap CD burners.
You either mastered to 1/4 inch tape or to cassette.
DAT was incredibly useful to studios and production houses as:
It was high quality.
Literally identical backup copies became possible.
The media was cheap.
Some players supported timecode so you could sync to picture or vice versa.
Up to 180 minutes of recording time, about three times longer than a CD. Or 6 hours in LP mode.
It was a revolution at the time. The only alternative was some horrible lash up with video recorders and A/D converters that I don't really want to remember. Or early computer digital, which mostly sounded awful, was unreliable, and you'd still have to archive to magnetic tape or optical WORM drives as hard drives were tiny and expensive.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly greed killed off DVD-Audio and SA-CD.
They could be the standard today, offering a real benefit over MP3s being shared online, but they're nowhere. Presumably that's because the licensing fees were too high, and then the media was too expensive on top.
So CDs it is.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, for starters, most studios don't even use the full dynamic range of CD, so DVD-Audio or SA-CD are kind of a waste... they'd just compress the audio to make it sound loud and we'd be in the same boat that we are with CDs.
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Yes, you end up with an average dynamic range of 4db (maybe 3db by now?) with most popular music. The medium is capable of 90db(usable) at 16 bit. The dynamic range is there when it leaves the studio for the mastering desk; that's where people who care nothing about sound quality, but have all the money, pencil whip the mastering engineers into ruining it with extreme overcompression in the name of being "competitively loud". The mastering engineers have to make a living so the grudgingly comply, despite kn
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Funny)
So YOU'RE that guy in the next apartment! Honestly, I thought you were slaughtering sheep!
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Go buy a book on basic information theory. The Nyquist theorem states that if your sampling rate is at least twice the highest frequency, the reconstructed waveform is indistinguisable from the original.
Now, in edge cases CD can fall flat, because 22KHz may not be enough to capture the full sound. While 22KHz is beyond the limit of most humans' hearing, it is considered good enough, but sometimes high harmonics do have an influence on lower harmonics, and the standard low-pass filter that cuts off a CD at 2
Re:It's not entirely about dynamic range... (Score:5, Insightful)
DVDs allow for a higher sampling rates, so less sound is lost. The sound, as a result, is more true to the original source. Currently, DVD movies use 96,000 samples per second or higher.
In theory a 96khz sampling rate ADC should be superior to 44.1 because it allows the anti-aliasing filter rolloff to be shifted above the range of human hearing, creating a flatter passband. In practice all modern sigma-delta DACs use oversampling, 128x, 256x, whatever the case may be. Not only does this reduce the complexity of the input analog anti-aliasing filter, but it pretty much ensures that even at a 44.1khz sampling rate the passband is essentially flat out past 20khz.
I think the issue you have with "slow output" may have less to do with the sampling rate and more to do with the slew rate of the analog amplifiers and overall design of the DAC - on consumer equipment cost cutting measures have to be made somewhere, and the analog output circuitry is often where it happens. Op-amps with very fast slew rates and ultra-low noise, like the Burr Brown OPA series are far too expensive to use in consumer grade equipment.
DVDs allow for a higher sampling rates, so less sound is lost. The sound, as a result, is more true to the original source. Currently, DVD movies use 96,000 samples per second or higher.
What is "true to the original source"? If a difference can be heard at a 96khz sampling rate, then the recording has to be made on absolutely top quality recording equipment in a pristine acoustic environment. For recording jazz and classical this may make sense - but for most other genres including pop and rock the "original source" material (guitars, synths, drums etc.) have very little sonic information aside from noise above 12khz or so anyhow, and before being mastered at 96khz have probably been run through dozens or hundreds of bog-standard ICs in mixing consoles, dynamics processors, and effects. In that case it's hard to justify the sonic advantage of the last step in the chain being "true to the original source" when the sound of the original source has already been processed beyond recognition.
Re:It's not entirely about dynamic range... (Score:5, Informative)
Vinyl audio has less information content than CD audio. The frequency content is approximately the same between the two, but the dynamic range in vinyl recordings is less (about 75 dB v. 96 dB).
Er, no. It's all about frequency content. Whether events in a musical piece occur at 10 Hz or 3 Hz, a sample rate in the multi-kilohertz range will have no problem picking them up. The signal in between the samples is perfectly reconstructable up to frequencies of half the sample rate.
When audiophiles prefer vinyl it's because the sound is different, not because the fidelity is higher. There certainly are elements in the processing chain that could hurt CD audio -- such as the steep anti-aliasing filters needed to kill aliasing while preserving as much of the frequency range as possible -- but vinyl audio processing also has its drawbacks. Just say, "I like vinyl better," and leave it that. CD audio is not inherently inferior.
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Er, no. It's all about frequency content. Whether events in a musical piece occur at 10 Hz or 3 Hz, a sample rate in the multi-kilohertz range will have no problem picking them up. The signal in between the samples is perfectly reconstructable up to frequencies of half the sample rate.
An interesting detail is that Shannon's sampling theorem has a bit of fine print: that a signal sampled at twice its highest frequency is perfectly reconstructable provided that the bit depth is infinite. This makes intuitive sense; the minimum AC voltage level change that is detectable by an n bit ADC is V/2^(n-1), where V is the maximum RMS voltage swing. So for a 16 bit ADC with a 2 volt RMS input that's 60 microvolts. In an ideal ADC signal level changes that are less than 1/2 that amount are going to
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect you would still have the same apathetic response that HD disc media did (where "BluRay and HD-DVD fought it out, and SD-DVD won"), where the increase in quality isn't dramatic or important enough to warrant the move to a new media, new players, and (often) new DRM. The future is not in another 12cm disc media-- 12cm disc players for current formats are widely owned, a wide base of tools exists to work with the formats-- even CSSed DVD, and the quality is more than adequate for all but those who spend more time analyzing sound than listening to it.
I suppose multi-channel audio could be one exception, although that still would struggle to make it out of a niche. It's a matter of relatively few multichannel PCs and stereo systems versus an overwhelming base of stereo receivers, players, boom-boxes, and portables.
If anything, the evolution of media is going to focus on physical form factor, deliverability, and perhaps durability. Sound quality is a finished game-- the challenge is now convenience and usability.
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Sadly greed killed off DVD-Audio and SA-CD.
Yep, but you're wrong about which kind of greed [wikipedia.org]:
SACD has several copy prevention features at the physical level which, for the moment, appear to make SACD discs impossible to copy without resorting to the analog hole. These include physical pit modulation and 80 bit encryption of the audio data, with a key encoded on a special area of the disk that is only readable by a licensed SACD device. The HD layer of an SACD disc cannot be played back on computer CD/DVD drives, nor can SACDs be created except by the licensed disc replication facilities in Shizuoka and Salzburg.
Overpriced media that I can't copy or digitally rip, and that is locked in a deadly stranglehold by a tiny cabal of manufacturers? Sign me up!
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Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Interesting)
Bogus.
If the interference beats are in the audible range than they can be captured. When you capture the product of the high-frequency interference in the field you don't need to deliver said high-frequencies to the home.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Informative)
I hate to break this to you, but you need to spit out the audiophile kool-aid.
Binaural beats do happen only in the human mind - but those are not what you were talking about. Interference beats, which are what you were talking about, happen when pressure waves in the air (get this) interfere.
Perfectly capable of being picked up by a microphone.
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You can put mp3 files on a CD, and play them in a CD player that has a mp3 codec in its embedded firmware.
Of course, .WAV or FLAC is better quality, but no one cares about quality for it to affect the market, apparently.
CDs compete with Flash memory and hard drives.
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Neither was tape or vinyl, yet those media sold quite well for decades.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Informative)
Sure they are. You run them through very lossy analog compression where you remove frequencies that aren't recordable on the medium. With vinyl it is important to remove low frequencies that can cause the grooves to overlap. Cassette recordings use a bandpass filter to remove high and low frequencies. This doesn't go in to compression schemes such as Dolby noise reduction, which was an analog compression scheme to store more of a dynamic/frequency range than the tape would allow.
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Those files will still have to be stored somewhere. Either on a hard drive, in RAM, flash drive, someplace. You can download the mp3, but you still have to save it to something.
Also when the music was originally recorded, do they record right to mp3 and send it out on the intenet? They usually save it on a master recording which is .. wait for it... physical media.
Perhaps cds are not as popular for some sections of the consumer market. I would not say all sections. I (and a hell of a lot of other people I
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Yes, I understood that point, it's still not insightful. MP3s made CDs more popular as a storage medium by allowing people to download a collection of songs from their favorite source, then burn it to a cheap CD to share with their friends, listen to in the car, sell in Chinatown, etc. The CD isn't going away any time soon, it's still a very convenient method for getting data, whether it's music,
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Interesting)
iTunes is the single biggest retailer of music on the planet, surpassing Wal*Mart. That happened a year ago.
Keep up with the times.
And there was a DVD audio format, but it will never catch on.
The audio CD will not go away for a while.... (Score:5, Insightful)
More and More car stereos, even factory stereos will play from an ipod or better yet a usb memory device filled with mp3 music. In fact Clarion recently released 2 new car stereos that cant play a CD, only digital memory formats.
I see the CD going away slowly as digital downloads become more and more popular, but that is completely dependent on DRM going away. I have enough friends and customers that are pissed at itunes DRM right now that they will not buy another song.
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Not only does DRM need to go away, but with ever-increasing bandwidth there's no reason to NOT sell lossless audio.
If labels would sell music the way NIN has for their last two albums (Ghosts / The Slip) and include the artwork and all those goodies, I'd probably never actually buy another CD again.
Until then, it's rip to FLAC.
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Bandwidth isn't the issue so much as the migration to flash-based portable players. The iPod Touch for example is 32GB max with an 8GB option still available. When storage is that constrained many people will be space-limited and would be able to carry many fewer songs with FLAC.
As flash sizes increase and prices go down I wouldn't be surprised to see lossless formats crop up. At the present, though, the decision wouldn't make much sense for a large group of users.
Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if anybody has made this task droolproof at the consumer level; but I've seen menu options pertaining to it in Amarok, and anybody with the slightest script-fu can obviously do it with a few minutes effort.
h h h pppp p p yyy b b b b bir th d d d day (Score:2, Insightful)
IMHO the iPod et al spells doom for the CD. As soon as 'the kids' can transfer music phone 2 phone there goes the music biz.
However, as burning and archive mechanism, why not, but no room there for the 'labels'
I have been doing phone2phone for a while (Score:2)
but I don't have kids to teach. It's easy, I just swap Microsd cards, and mail them any "non" mp3 stuff they had on it back.
Re:h h h pppp p p yyy b b b b bir th d d d day (Score:5, Informative)
The iPod spells doom for the pop music CD. All the other music genres are doing fine on CD.
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Re:h h h pppp p p yyy b b b b bir th d d d day (Score:4, Interesting)
As soon as 'the kids' can transfer music phone 2 phone there goes the music biz.
That can be done now in countries where phones don't routinely have their Bluetooth crippled.
Cost of production and ease of "lockdown" (Score:4, Insightful)
Why shouldn't we switch over to flashdrives? They're even better than CDs(smaller,more space, very cheap and getting cheaper,can't scratch)But they're easier to modify. It's hard for the average user to jailbreak/mod a CD. Not so much for new forms of media.
Although the hyper vigilance of Blu-Ray firmware updates may seem to contradict me...
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Are you perhaps conflating CDs with optical media? Otherwise your post doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Flashdrives have fairly slow read/write speeds, they only last a certain number of read-write cycles, they're more expensive per unit, they are easier to lose (if you've seen mine, let me know!), and let me know how many average users can modify a flash drive.
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Their slow speeds compared to a CD, I am not sure about that, CDs aren't that fast.
The numbers of reads-writes before they die, is actually quite high, I havn't seen one go on me yet. Besides you can only write to a CD once (for the cheap types) the more expensive only a few times.
Easier to loose, I would say about the same. It is just that the CDs scratch so easially we take better care of them. But you will be supprise when I reorganize or clean up how many Linux CDs that I burned I find. They just slip
26th? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the hell celebrates a "26th" anniversary?
It's like dog years. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:26th? (Score:4, Funny)
Someone who has already celebrated a 25th, but hasn't reached a 27th.
Seriously, I don't know about you, but my birthdays and anniversaries happen every year. The coolest parties happen on the ones divisible by 5, but people do acknowledge them as they happen.
Cheers
Re:26th? (Score:5, Funny)
You do if you've been married to your wife for 26 years. Or you won't be celebrating a 27th anniversary.
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1st=0, 2nd=1,
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.. and how is this news?
Re:26th? (Score:4, Funny)
Who wouldn't celebrate the Polycarbonate Anniversary? There's lots of good ones around there. You know. 24 is Neodymium, and 27 is Jungle Camouflage!
CDs are cheap storage (Score:3, Informative)
I am shocked that the summary lists the music industry as the reason that CDs have endured as long as they have. The music industry enjoyed record CD sales during the 1990s. Those days are long gone. Online distribution is the medium of choice for that.
CDs have been relegated to the ranks of $0.50 disposal media storage for 650 MBs at a time. When this disc space is used so ~200 Mp3s can be "backed up" in case of Mp3 device or harddrive failure... then you can argue that the "music industry" is being supported by the continued usage of CDs. But don't be fooled... the only reason to keep CDs around is because of the need to cheap, disposal media distribution. Neither e-mail, online storage, or UBS memory sticks quite fit the same niche as the standard CD.
Re:CDs are cheap storage (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you listen to the RIAA, then the sole reason for that is online piracy. They always point to that peak in the 1990's as being the point that CD sales should be at (or higher) if piracy was stopped. However, it is more truthful to say that it was a temporary high point in sales and that sales dropped afterwords due to normal market forces. (Normal Market Forces including piracy, but not as the main component... probably not even as a major component.)
Greed killed CD sales (Score:5, Insightful)
Here' an example:
The Beatles, Hard Day's Night, the movie on DVD is twelve bucks at Best Buy. [bestbuy.com] It pretty much has every song on the album in the movie. Twelve bucks.
The Beatles, Hard Day's Night, the CD. Has all the music, none of the movie. Price? Fourteen bucks. [bestbuy.com] Same thing, but on media with less scratch resistance, less storage space, and oh yeah - no movie.
The reason why people aren't buying music is because it's not worth it. The price is artificially inflated, which makes consumers grumpy and unwilling to buy.
Re:Greed killed CD sales (Score:5, Insightful)
True. But still, if you follow the math the overall industry is saying that the movie has a negative value.
In other words, the RIAA is saying the music for Hard Day's Night is worth $14. And Hollywood is saying the music plus the movie is worth $12. That would mean the movie alone is worth -2 bucks. We all know that can't be true so something else must be wrong.
And what's wrong is the RIAA's greed. The price on the CD is artificially inflated to the point where it competes with movies. And as we all know, movies cost FAR more to make than a CD of music. Hell, with the quality of home equipment these days a decent musician working solo can bang out a seriously impressive CD worth of music in their basement. A $50k basement studio would put you in the ballpark sound-wise with most major labels anymore.
And hell, look at the Lord of the Rings movies. [bestbuy.com] Right now you can buy the entire trilogy for $25. And the movies cost $430 million to make.
And the CD for A Hard Day's Night is selling for right around half that. I'm sure it's difficult to make an album, and The Beatles are pretty good - but I have a hard time imagining that the expense to make the CD and the money to market it compares fairly with The Lord of the Rings. If they did, that would imply that Hard Day's Night cost 430M * (14/25)=240.8M in today's dollars. To make A Hard Day's Night - if the costs matched up.
This disparity in pricing is what puts people off and makes them not want to buy CDs.
IMHO, a fair CD price would be about three bucks. A buck fifty goes to the artist (which by today's standards would be so generous as to seem like a fairy tale), and the other buck fifty goes to production and promotion.
And yeah, I really mean that. That's what it's worth. Fifteen bucks for a CD is simply unbelievable. That's about twelve dollars worth of useless outdated bloat that the world simply doesn't need anymore.
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The movie does have negative value if what you're interested in is listening to the music. Even if someone has a DVD player in their car, they won't typically listen to a movie's soundtrack by putting in a DVD; the songs are edited, people talk over them not to mention explosions or other noises, the track locations don't correspond with the beginning of the song, the fidelity is pristine, etc. For music listening purposes, an actual CD (or soundtrack equivalent) is a much better value. Most people reall
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Well, that at the fact that everybody is set up to handle this particular kind of media.
Seriously, my car, my computer, my CD changer, the stereo in my living room ... they all support the physical medium. Coming out with the "new hotness" of form factor and expecting everybody to re-tool everything is stupid. Even if we can do better, CDs have the advantage that everyone has the gear to
Re:CDs are cheap storage (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't buy online music from a band at 1:30 am inside a bar as you drunkenly stagger and give them the ultimate praise: "You dudes rock!" But you can reach into your pocket and pull out a $10 bill (you've been doing that all night anyway as you buy beers) in exchange for a plastic box.
CDs aren't going away yet. They, combined with T-shirts, are an important part of offsetting some bands' travel (and drinking) expenses. How can you replace that? Bring a laptop along on a night of drinking, and hope the bar has free wifi, so you can say "you dudes rock" as you peer at a little screen and give them the satisfaction of seeing you click on something, so that the band can then collect the money after they've already spent it on beer and gasoline? I don't think so.
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The new fan receives something tangible and the benefit of full album artwork. The band gets cash in their hands on the spot with a decreased cost of physical overhead.
Everybody
Explain this to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
You used to have to buy writable 650Mg CDs for $1. Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7 [newegg.com]. Impervious to scratches, can survive several trips through the washer, and have fast read/write speeds. I cannot understand how TFA is so optimistic. When CDs came out, it would take weeks to download a full CD, now I can download a 720p torrent in an few hours. My HDDVD player has a Ethernet jack... so how long until we stop spinning discs and start slinging bits?
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When the auto industry gets their heads out of their asses and home media servers are as easy as an external hard drive to set up and as cheap.
We're finally getting to the point of optional iPod factory head units for autos now. Up until a year or two ago you had to go third party for that kind of thing. Once a universal standard comes around for portable media players they're will be a surge in head units supporting this. Until then there
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Too bad AOL stopped giving away media before flash cards replaced CDs.
Re:Explain this to me. (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. I used to love getting AOL floppy disks in the mail. Back when a megabyte of storage space was actually useful ;-)
Re:Explain this to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
You used to have to buy writable 650Mg CDs for $1. Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7. Impervious to scratches, can survive several trips through the washer, and have fast read/write speeds. I cannot understand how TFA is so optimistic.
Personally, I'm not going to lend someone my flash drive.
They're small, easy to lose (though I keep mine on a lanyard) and I have other stuff on it.
You burn someone a CD or DVD, it doesn't take all that long, it's cheap, but most importantly, you don't expect it back. IMO, CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are disposable in a way that even a cheap flash drive is not.
Re:Explain this to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you can get a gig of flash, near infinitely rewritable for $7 [newegg.com]. Impervious to scratches, can survive several trips through the washer, and have fast read/write speeds. I cannot understand how TFA is so optimistic.
Why is there a market for paper plates when you can use ceramic ones over and over? Because you can throw it away.
The shy return of vinyl? (Score:5, Informative)
A few years ago someone at worked asked me what the last Rush album was that came out on vinyl and after some poking around I found out that they all had up to the latest (Vapor Trails, IIRC). The thing is that many people lost touch with vinyl but the die-hards* kept with it. I don't know if it's the nostalgia factor or even if it's true that vinyl is making a comeback but the bottom line is that it wasn't a matter of the vinyl not being there but rather listeners who didn't know where to look.
* Yeah, if you're one of the small percentage of all people over the age of 17 who can really hear the difference. Otherwise you're probably only fooling yourself.
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I'm a vinyl nut, but there are many albums I don't want on vinyl including many of the later Rush albums. The reason is simple: You can't get more than about 40-45 minutes on a single LP without serious quality loss (quick explanation: the louder the music is on the LP, the better the S/N ratio but the more space the groove modulations take up). These full-length 55+ minute CD's on LP sound awful unless they make it a double LP set.
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NOT as healthy as 15 years ago (Score:4, Funny)
I bet there is some occasional unexplained knee pain. And for some reason, compact disks can no longer eat bananas without violent diarrhea.
Unfortunately (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately we can't sing Happy Birthday to the CD without paying royalties. Such a cruel world. =/
CD question I'd like to know the answer to... (Score:4, Interesting)
Were the designers intentionally working with from the size of the floppy disk, which happened to be right for car CD players?
Or were they working to fit the same size as car stereos, which happened to be the same size as 5.25" floppy drives?
Or did they ignore both and just happen to end up that size?
Or did someone happen to have a 5.25" floppy drive in their car, and thought it would be great to read more than 1.2mb worth of data on a disc?
Re:CD question I'd like to know the answer to... (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone know how the CD came to be 5.25" in diameter?
Um, mine are all 12cm?
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Wikipedia is your friend [wikipedia.org]
I'm hearing a lot of MP3... (Score:3, Informative)
but how the heck do I return an MP3? When on the road, I've always turned to renting audio books from cracker barrel.
It's great because, depending on my time, I stop and get a new book if I want one. I couldn't do that with an MP3 or USB stick without my computer. I know ATT would pitch a fit if I tried downloading 12-16 Cd's worth of book Over-the-air.
I know of nothing online that rivals something like what Cracker Barrel has going on for $4 a week.
Makes me sad, really. (Score:2)
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The public at large cannot and will not pay for the immersive audio music experience and even less of them have hearing capable of enjoying it.
Let's be honest, for most people the 10 USD ear buds is more than enough in their opinion. Tell them you own a 600 USD set of Sennheisers and you'd swear that you just told them you just paid 600 USD for a candy bar.
Quality playback equipment is expensive. Most p
Bright future (Score:3, Interesting)
CD is still good format for storing normal data in offices. I dont now mean any games what needs DVD's or HD movies, but normal office data. For sending photos it is great because you need to store photos in JPEG (or other) format so you get them to small size. CD is good unless you need to send all RAW photos what you toke in weddings or other similar situation.
What I really like about CD, is it's lifetime. It has be used to store music what can be still played. Only thing what makes it worse, is these new ideas to push DRM's to them what makes CD's more like use-and-throw-away medias. That is the about on music business. That feeling I have got from music corporations.
So I can still listen those 15-20 years old CD's on my computer or car stereos, but I am not sure can I listen CD what I can buy today from store.
Same thing is happening on technology, television gets digitalized and all standards starts to be changed every 3-5 years. Reminds me just from the Microsoft Office format.
I hope that Blu-ray disk is now such media, that can be keeped next 20 years. Altought personally I am scared that there is coming next media around a 2015.
Is it really so that old medias actually stored the data better way because it could be used longer? Like VHS, CD, Vinyl, paper etc? The problem is not the technology itself, it is on companies who wants money and more money by "inventing" better versions after a next one and pushing them out faster rate.
Has a bright future? not in my house. (Score:2)
Someone recently asked if I'd send them a CD of some pictures. I looked at them funny, and then realized that not everyone realizes CDs are dead yet. It's like when Grandpa's on Life Support in the ICU, and the Brainwaves aren't registering, but you still go in and say goodbye. The best uses of CDs now is Skeet targets, and decorations. I just want a car stereo that can do DL DVDs for Mp3's and gives me options to play through a directory structure, and make / edit playlists on the fly QUICKLY. Then, I
Ripped Off (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course that turned out to be a lie with the media itself, and prices have risen steadily while the costs of production have plummeted. And the artists will tell you that they're not getting any more money out of them in mechanical royalties than before either.
Evidence of how badly ripped off you are in CD's is evident by the healthy profits made by DVD's which contain far more content, and cost far more to master and press, yet sell for nearly comparable prices. Until we Just Say No to overpriced music CD's we might was well just open our wallets to the recording industry and say, "Just take what you want."
Look to Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Fanboy logic (Score:4, Funny)
As long as you don't consider computers not made by Apple.
Praise for the CD (Score:3, Insightful)
The CD is still arguably the best premium format for buying and collecting music. They can be made inexpensively, they're pretty durable, you get some artwork and liner notes (though not as good as with vinyl), they're reasonably compact, and the audio quality can be very high indeed when it's mastered right.
The mastering process has become the weak link, with the ongoing "loudness war" where dynamic range of music is routinely compressed all to Hell.
The attempt to introduce Super Audio CD and DVD Audio turned into a farce. First strike against them was the ridiculous format war. Second strike was the ridiculous DRM they were saddled with. Third strike was their dependence on superior audio quality to sell the product -- something most people couldn't even hear, and the rest of the industry didn't care about. (If they cared, we would never have got into the aforementioned loudness war.)
Why no metadata with CDs? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure it's a technical answer but why can't, with 700mb of space available, one lousy kilobyte be reserved for metadata? If older players wouldn't like it, I should think it could be "hidden" after the last track.
It just seems silly that my CD player can't scroll the title of the track being played. Or that my computer can't pull titles and even album art without an Internet connection.
It's called CD-Text (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cd_text [wikipedia.org]
"CD-Text is an extension of the Red Book Compact Disc specifications standard for audio CDs. It allows for storage of additional information (e.g. album name, song name, and artist) on a standards-compliant audio CD. The information is stored either in the lead-in area of the CD, where there is roughly five kilobytes of space available, or in the Subchannels R to W on the disc, which can store about 31 me
older CD players were better. (Score:5, Informative)
The old mechanisms were lovely metal framed affairs will bushed bearings, metal worm drives or fast moving arms for the optics. The optics were proper optics on well balanced, nicely made actuators and the whole thing just stank of quality components and care and attention. Because they were well made, the characteristics of the system was consistent from one unit to the next, and the analogue servos were all tuned to match the system. They could play CDs with horrible scratches on them much better then modern ones and the sound quality was generally better because they had a proper DAC.
When I left that field we were using "low cost" mechanisms. This mean moulded plastic gears, one single senser fits all (if you know how long it takes to reach the end of the disc, why bother with a sensor? just ram it against the end stop) The lens is bubble of resin, the actuators were often horrible. On top of this the tolerance in manufactruing was bloody awful. The resonances, the bandwidth changed considerably between units so the SW was expected to compensate and that was almost impossible with any degree of succcess. They'd hobble through a CD painfully, but put on a scratched disc or one with defects and all bets were off. Thats what a $15 CD player gets you. And do not even get me started on "1-bit bitstream DAC" rubbish.
Then there is the cost reduction on CDs themselves. Old CDs were nice thick well pressed affairs made of quality layers. They has a nice satisfying gap between songs (incidently this allowed the original analogue CD systems to jump from track to track looking for a certain signal from the subcode in the pretrack gap as it skipped across the disc surface - on the datapath/audio was digital in those days).
Last but not lesat is CD cop yprotection that erodes the CIRC scratch protection systems, if I start on that I'll begin ranting - thank god thats dying a death.
When I get a CD these days, when it is shiny and new I rip it, MP3 it, and then put it on the shelf where I look at it wistfully. I'm afraid, I'll scratch it and rended it paperweight.
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While I think there are probably certainly some advantages to higher-quality materials used in manufacturing CDs, generally speaking, "enhanced audio quality" would not be one of them. We are talking about digital data here. It's true that if there are flaws in the material, the CD reader/player might have difficulty correctly reading the digital data, so it, I suppose, could cause 'pops' or 'skips' in the audio if there is a section that cannot be read - but that improves the *durability* of the disc. Any