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...
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:Absence of real competitors (Score:5, Insightful)
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'
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...
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.
26th? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the hell celebrates a "26th" anniversary?
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:Absence of real competitors (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately we can't sing Happy Birthday to the CD without paying royalties. Such a cruel world. =/
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.
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.)
Re:Cost of production and ease of "lockdown" (Score:1, Insightful)
What the heck are you saying with "Simple to lock down?!" The Redbook specification for CDs is quite clear on DRM: there cannot be any. Standalone players are designed to this spec, so anything on the disc MUST be readable. By definition, audio CDs cannot be locked down at all.
This is why all 'copy protection' schemes A) break the Redbook spec, so the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo cannot be included on the disc or packaging, and B) are ridiculously easy to bypass by disabling Autoplay and ripping with something like EAC.
The real list is that they are cheap, small enough to be convenient, have sufficient redundancy to last a long time, and by definition have no copy-protection systems. THAT is why they have remained popular over other formats.
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.
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."
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.
Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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: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.
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.
Re:The shy return of vinyl? (Score:2, Insightful)
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).
Buying new vinyl is a waste. The masters are digital, so you get the worst of both worlds, the disadvantages of both analog and digital and the advantages of neither.
If you're buying anything recorded after ~ 1980, the CD will have the best fidelity. Before that an LP will, provided your turntable is good enough. With analog, the quality input device is paramount.
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.
If you don't have a really good turntable you're right. But with a good turntable and a well engineered recording, provided the signal was analog from the original to the LP's cutter, vinyl beats digital hands down, and anyone should be able to hear the difference.
Look to Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The audio CD will not go away for a while.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wearing headphones in a car is illegal in most states, therefore you will never see a headphone jack.
Line in 1/8th inch jack? those are on lots of car stereos. Most cheap stereos have them. High end stereos have a line in on the back.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:3, Insightful)
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 know) still back up to CD and DVD 9depending on what is being backed up) in case the hard drive dies. Better to have your music/movies/files on a medium that you can readily use to restore in case something bad happens.
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.
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.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:3, Insightful)
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, movies or even games.
This is especially true in less populated areas where broadband is still limited to a few places, or the speeds are too low to do anything useful. You can just go to the local Walmart and buy a CD in areas where you can't get anything faster than dial up. Plus CDs are perfect for people who aren't very tech savvy, sure there are some people who are hopeless (I had to explain to someone their DVDs weren't playing because they were putting them in upside down) but there are also plenty of people who can't figure out computers but can understand something as simple as playing a CD.
I know this is slashdot and we're all for getting rid of the record companies, but CDs aren't evil by nature, they're perfect for what they do. The death of the old distribution methods (record companies charging $20 for a cheap round plastic disc with audio information on it) doesn't mean the death of the CD.
Re:26th? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:1, Insightful)
The Philips Compact Cassette was originally a 2-track device, designed as an improvement upon the 3" rim-drive reel-to-reel recorders popular in the low end of the market. The sound quality sucked, and continued to suck (especially on commercially released tapes) until the advent of CRO2 tape and Dolby noise reduction in the late 70s. Only then did the cassette become competitive with the 8-track in sound quality of home-recorded tapes, and the sound quality of pre-recorded tapes still sucked for several years after that. You may claim that the 8-track was unnecessary due to the existence of the cassette, but the cassette was a dictating machine or a toy until the late 70s and the need for a reasonable-quality in-car sound source was real, and was met by the 8-track.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:3, Insightful)
But by all means, keep walking on your good ol' tapes
Re:SHM-CD (Score:3, Insightful)
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 disc, if it's readable, would have the same audio quality if they have the same data on it, and the data is fed to the same DAC.
I'm all for making discs more scratch resistant, but this SHM-CD sounds suspiciously similar to 'audiophile grade digital cables' from the likes of Monster Cable, et. al, where the manufacturers are dramatically increasing profit margins on something which, for most users, is only marginally, or possibly not even noticeably, better.
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: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:3, Insightful)
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 knowing it's pure stupidity. They have to pay their mortgage right?
Hopefully with the downfall of the recording "industry" and the rise of independent studio work this trend gets reversed.
>they'd just compress the audio to make it sound loud and we'd be in the same boat that we are with CDs.
yup...
Sad. We have the capability to sound *better* than a 1 inch tape deck and we toss that 20db advantage out with the garbage.
The worst part is a properly mastered recording sounds just as loud as an overcompressed one on the radio, only it has dynamics and sounds better. The radio stations apply their own compression to even things out. This works with the overcompression on the CD to completely ruin it.
It boggles the mind... The result: music radio stations are switching to talk radio format in droves, because nobody will listen to music on the radio. I wonder why...
-Viz
Re:It's not entirely about dynamic range... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 22KHz will kill those high harmonics and their side-effects. But that's admittedly an edge case. I'd wager that CD is good enough for at least 99% of all music.
Mart
Re:Greed killed CD sales (Score:3, Insightful)
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 really only want to see a movie once or twice, whereas they'll listen to a soundtrack they like dozens of times.
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: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.
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Absence of real competitors (Score:2, Insightful)
Um, several million DJs are pretty sure you're wrong. Virtually all new music that can be danced to is released on vinyl - not reissues or new stock vintage, but actual new pressings of new music.
Yes, there was about a 5-10 year period after 1988 where records were difficult to get, but that's long past. Get with the times, man!