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Compact Disc Turns 26, Has a Bright Future
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Aug 21, 2008 12:09 PM
from the mere-stripling dept.
from the mere-stripling dept.
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!"
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Absence of real competitors (Score:3, Insightful)
...except mp3s...
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Funny)
So YOU'RE that guy in the next apartment! Honestly, I thought you were slaughtering sheep!
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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.
Parent
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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Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Funny)
I head about VCR's but I believe that's only a legend.
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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)
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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!
Parent
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... they're still being sold new today.
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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?
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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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
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.
Parent
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...
26th? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the hell celebrates a "26th" anniversary?
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
Parent
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.
Parent
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!
Parent
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.)
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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?
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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 ;-)
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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.
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.
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?
Parent
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."
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Fanboy logic (Score:4, Funny)
As long as you don't consider computers not made by Apple.
Parent