The History of the CD-ROM 299
Gammu writes "The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records; Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts."
Original CD Players (Score:5, Interesting)
Built like a tank, too. It was still in regular use until just recently, and still worked flawlessly without so much as a cleaning over 20 years later. They don't make them like that, anymore. Maybe it was better components, or simply nostalgia, but I thought it had a better sound quality that most CD players these days.
Inventor (Score:3, Interesting)
An interesting guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
At that, my fiancee turned to me and my other friends, sitting behind them, and introduced us.
We chatted for the remainder of the bus ride and he told us a little of what the invention process was like and how he hadn't even made a dime from something that we noted had changed the world. (He wasn't bitter, BTW.)
I got his autograph (as did several others) and a short line formed. I still have the CD I had him sign.
It's nice to see him getting some recognition.
Re:CD isn't obsolete (Score:3, Interesting)
Pearl Jam's album likely isn't going to be mixed for 5.1, sadly, though I'd buy that in a heartbeat as well.
But the Star Wars score was recorded and mixed in 5.1 so it isn't a stretch if the format really existed to release some movie scores in DVDA.
By the way, DVDA also has another meaning that I can't link to because it isn't safe for work.
Bill Gates advocated CD-ROM very early (Score:5, Interesting)
CD-ROM was arguably his last time Bill was close enough to the leading edge that others who made a living at that edge sought his opinion.
*M$ had listed overnight Australian time.
Re:CD isn't obsolete (Score:1, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Missing items (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, the famous Why has the compact disc 74 minutes of playtime is explained there:
Thanks for making me feel old (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:mini-discs (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't just mean for music either, at the time I was carrying a zip drive to uni and back to move my research around. $35AUD for a 100Mb disk. Meanwhile Minidiscs cost $5-10 and held 120Mb. Bring out a player that acts as a portable 120Mb disk drive which cheap disks, that could also play all the mp3s that people were starting to get off Napster and it would have exploded at any point up until 2002 or so when Ipods started to get affordable.
But Sony were too scared of piracy, so everyone used someone else's technology to pirate Sony music anyway, and Sony didn't own the hardware market, which they could have.
the CD-ROM standard and the surfing competition!! (Score:2, Interesting)
hold 72 minutes of audio, because Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was that long. Philips proposed the 36-kHz standard, because it made a smaller, more compact disc and matched a telecom standard that would make downloading and transferring music easier\x{2014}which I find rather ironic. Sony preferred the 44.1-kHz sampling rate, because it matched the upper reaches of audible sound at 20,000 cycles.
The final decision was made in a meeting in Hawaii, according to Richard Bruno, who was a Philips executive and one of the company's CD project managers. With final arguments running into recreational time, Bjorn Blutgen of Philips and Toshi Doi of Sony took to surfboards still bickering. One of them had the bright idea of challenging the other to a surfing match: Whoever fell off the board first would lose. The Dutchman lost. Hence we have a 44.1-kHz sampling rate on today's CDs. Now you know.
(Resources: from my own memory when ages ago i read this while taking a shit on the john: From John C. Dvorak's Inside Track, PC Magazine http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1573633,00.as p [pcmag.com])
Re:Now if we could only go back in time... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yep, I'll agree with that, but that doesn't stop some people. Len Lye [wikipedia.org] is a classic example. Much of his body of work was unproduced at the time of his death, the materials being either not readily available or (most often)technologically possible. Lye never expected to live to see most of his work completed and only now are some of his smaller works being produced at full scale, many of the pieces in galleries [art-newzealand.com] at the moment are only scale models.
The Len Lye Foundation, set up shortly after his death, aims to produce each one of his works, in full scale where possible, as a tribute to the energy, vitality and pure joy with which he approached his life, his art, and everything he did.
Re:An open question...why 44.1? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:HD-DVD is dead (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CD isn't obsolete (Score:3, Interesting)
If you can't tell the difference between 128kb and lossless formats, its quite likely that your source either sucked originally, or your speakers aren't good enough.
If you try "audiophile grade" earphones, headphones or speakers (Grado, Shure, Klipsch, Etymotic Research etc) you will likely hear a big difference between the two. The side effect of buying higher end audio equipment is it makes your mp3s harder to enjoy, I've since switched to ripping my CDs in FLAC.
http://www.intellexual.net/bose.html [intellexual.net]
Re:HD-DVD is dead (Score:3, Interesting)
Then I looked and saw it was playing a BluRay movie. I'll never understand why people attempt to sell these really expensive TVs and in the stores generally just hook up a a standard cable signal. If you want to show off what the TV is capable, pump some HD content into it at the store.
Maybe 'round Christmas time there will be a decent price break on the PS3, and if the $500 version comes down to $400 I'll bite.
Re:Inventor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CD isn't obsolete (Score:3, Interesting)
I get tons of compliments on how good my sound-setup sounds.
Given that lossless formats have a good chunk of their size coming from areas beyond the capability for the human ear to perceive, I'm not sure why everyone is so down on lossy formats.
Re:Missing items (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp [snopes.com]