Compact disc story (1998)
researchgate.net31 points by pipeline_peak 14 hours ago
31 points by pipeline_peak 14 hours ago
I remember seeing my friends dad’s first cd player. Huge jazz fan and it did sound great. Especially the quiet parts (No tape hiss or record pops) and easy to use. He bought a couple of cds of rock and man they sounded good.
Every other media at the time required some maintenance to sound good. Records would scratch, those tape pinch rollers would need to be cleaned. Nothing was easy, cds were (skip forward with a button push). Cassettes still were the only way to record, better for portability and sounded pretty good (we did some a:b testing cd vs cassette as kids).
Late 80s, cds were everywhere. I stopped buying records. At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.
My friends dad who liked jazz did lament that a lot of the jazz he had in record form would never be re-released as cds. Not digital so a lot of music lost to time and a format change.
Early CDs were labeled as to the processes used, a 3 letter code As and Ds, so:
AAD == Analog recording, Analog mastering, Digital media
ADD == Analog recording, Digitally re-mastered, Digital Media
DDD == Digital recording, Digitally re-mastered, Digital Media
This is known as a SPARS Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code
Your dad's friends should have imported from Japan --- they were big on Jazz, and a lot of my Jazz CDs have spines labeled in Japanese on one side and English on the other.
Late 80s or early 90s there was also a DAD type, which often sounded really good.
From that Wiki link-
In practice, DAD was very rare, as many companies (especially the well-known classical music labels) used digital tape recorders (which were not prohibitively more expensive than analog tape recorders) during the editing or mixing stage.
I don't know if I have such a CD --- do you have an example which is noted as sound markedly better than other editions? (I'd especially be interested in a DAD disc which sounds better than an updated DDD disc)
Why did you write "re-mastered" instead of simply "mastered" for ADD/DDD?
> At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.
History repeats itself: right now you can now buy loads of CDs for cheap on eBay.
Prices are rising though. CD sales are up a bit the past year but it's not clear if that's a blip or a trend.
I was one of the bozos believing that the dimensions of the CD had to do with Beethoven 9th symphony. :(
Yes I did went and paired up a CD with a cassette this morning OMG!!! Is true.
I could not afford the $300.00 USD Sony Portable CD but I friend of mine did.
First CD he let me listen to: Genesis "Genesis"
First DDD CD: Peter Gabriel "Security"
That last one probably the most influential music in my upbringing.
Funny though, I have hundred of CDs but I don't have those two.
I guess I have to go back to my friends house to listen to them.
I heard Bob Weir on a Desert Island Discs broadcast with the Dead. He said the song Shock the Monkey was the song that got him willing to start using MIDI and digital tech, which the rest of the group had already embraced. Hearing how one artist I loved pulled another artist into a new direction really clicked for me as a music lover. I can't figure how to search their archive or whether it was an American copy with a slightly different title like desert island albums or songs. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr/episodes/player
A Philips engineer visited our chair end of the 90s and told the same about the size "the cassette could be handled with one hand, let's keep that". He also told us they designed their delicate test equipment so that it would fit on a 1st class seat but not 2nd, so when they had to sit next to it during the flight (much too sensitive stuff to check in), management had to book them 1st class flights to Japan. ;)
For a thorough breakdown of everything CDs, here's Technology Connections playlist on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFWBEyCKt4tK...
If you can read German, somebody also wrote a whole dissertation on the subject of the CD's development history:
One of the cool/obscure things is that the center hole exactly matches a then available coin because it made the development and testing easier.