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!"
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:The shy return of vinyl? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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?
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.
Re:CD question I'd like to know the answer to... (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia is your friend [wikipedia.org]
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... they're still being sold new today.
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:CDs are cheap storage (Score:3, Informative)
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
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.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:3, Informative)
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 copy of Aerosmith's first album [wikipedia.org] than on my cassette of Machine Head.
Chrome and dolby made cassettes rival CDs, if you have a good enough cassette deck.
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:The audio CD will not go away for a while.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Greed killed CD sales (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Look to Apple (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:3, Informative)
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 megabytes. "
I remember seeing support for CD-Text on car CD changers almost 10 years ago, and most non-cheapo CD players these days support it if they have room for text on their display. But CD-Text never seemed to catch on for some reason. Maybe because the record companies never bothered to add the data to their pre-recorded CD's. Or that a lot of CD player displays only consist of Track Number and Play Time, so there's no way to display text.
Most burning programs like Nero, and even iTunes, support both burning CD-Text and reading it from discs that have it, so you can add it to your own CD's if you feel like it...or if you even bother burning music CD's these days.