[pedxing]

To put it into perspective:

If you took your favorite audio file format, how would you store it? What type of physcical storage device would you put it on? What type of data encoding would you use to store it in that storage device? How would you play it back? These are the same problems the red book addressed. As in a previous message, much of the red book design decisions were based on economic factors and the limitations of the technology back then.

Here is another way to look at the problem. A cd player is relatively a very simple embedded device compared to today's digital audio player (DAP). A digital audio player may have an operating system. It may have extra hardware to control the hard drive. It will have a display device for its GUI. The hard drive itself has its own way of storing data, just like how CDs have their own way of storing data. The OS will create its own file system on that hard drive and so on. All that technology is required today for a fancy DAP to playback music. I am not saying a DAP is bad because it has many other benefits such being able to play a variety of music formats without skipping. In terms from the consumer's point of view, a typical cd player is now equivalent to a toaster oven while a DAP is considered to be mini handheld computer. Now which one do you think is more efficient in playing back music in respect to technological complexity?

 

[majid]

As Philip Greenspun puts it, the fact Sony and Philips engineers did not consider putting album and track titles and other metadata speaks volumes about how far opposite of computer-centric they were. The convergence of consumer electronics and computers is a very recent phenomenon, both in terms of products and engineering cultures.

 

[trains are bad]

Quote:

I think the original question is just a younger persons perspective. Back when CD came out, computers could barely do word processing. Most could only emit a single beep tone and there were no personal computer sound formats, sound cards, or even enough space to store the simple waveform on them. CDs were an absolutely huge amount of data back then and a simple device to play them was a milestone in digital development.

This is what I was thinking. It was just a (huge) step up from vinyl, and made perfect sense at the time.

The question the topic title asks is really a silly one, I guess. I take for granted how fast technology is changing, and how old CDs are. I think my first computer had a 1.2GB HDD.

But it still seems true me that CDs, amazing as they are, are now approaching obsolescence, not through quality issues but infrastructural issues.

I have a large CD collection, but I don't even own a CD player. So maybe you can see where I was coming from.

 

[soundboy]

Back when CD came out, the Commodore 64 (with 64K RAM) was one of the more powerful home computer you can buy. There was no CD-R, CD burner, and the internet was still a dream to almost all home computer users. Heck, having a remote control without wire was considered advanced. I remember DVD was still a dream back in 1995....gawd, I am old.

 

[Jahn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by trains are bad This is what I was thinking. It was just a (huge) step up from vinyl, and made perfect sense at the time. The question the topic title asks is really a silly one, I guess. I take for granted how fast technology is changing, and how old CDs are. I think my first computer had a 1.2GB HDD. But it still seems true me that CDs, amazing as they are, are now approaching obsolescence, not through quality issues but infrastructural issues. I have a large CD collection, but I don't even own a CD player. So maybe you can see where I was coming from.

my first computer didn't even have a hard drive. i was SO jealous of folks with commodores and their awesome tape data storage! eventually i got a computer, but i was one of the last on the block to get one - ah, i loved my 5.25 floppies!

and no WAY did i even connect the idea that my computer would ever intersect with actual CDs. not even in college when i upgraded to a Mac LC. back then it was the 3.25 floppies - again, still no hard drive, and definitely no CD-Roms!

DRM, MP3, compression, tagging - none of that was a blip in the consumer's mind back when I got my first Discman, a Sony D-15 my folks got as a door prize at a party (and I didn't use for several years until 1987 when i finally bought our house's first CD - New Order's "Substance"!) Heck, the normal joe on the street didn't even know what a bit versus a byte was.

and honestly i never ever heard the term "redbook" until I came to head-fi. so yeah, consumers are a bit slow on the uptake, and the manufacturers and designers back then probably couldn't even imagine some of the stuff we have now. i totally don't blame them for not having the foresight - heck, in 2 years we won't believe how we can get music to our ears i bet!

 

[Garbz]

Quote:

Originally Posted by trains are bad This is what I was thinking. It was just a (huge) step up from vinyl, and made perfect sense at the time.

Not really. Back then the first CDplayers used 14bit DACs which for a lack of better description sounded horrible. Vinyl had all the advantages. The sucess of the CD was more like the the sucess of mp3s. It was convienience over quality. They could hold more, were durable as stated above, smaller, and didn't degrade with use.

Also if you still have any doubt that they were created for audio play and not for data storage google up why cds have a 74min length. Urban myth says it's something to do with Beethoven.

 

[F1GTR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jahn my first computer didn't even have a hard drive. i was SO jealous of folks with commodores and their awesome tape data storage! eventually i got a computer, but i was one of the last on the block to get one - ah, i loved my 5.25 floppies! and no WAY did i even connect the idea that my computer would ever intersect with actual CDs. not even in college when i upgraded to a Mac LC. back then it was the 3.25 floppies - again, still no hard drive, and definitely no CD-Roms! DRM, MP3, compression, tagging - none of that was a blip in the consumer's mind back when I got my first Discman, a Sony D-15 my folks got as a door prize at a party (and I didn't use for several years until 1987 when i finally bought our house's first CD - New Order's "Substance"!) Heck, the normal joe on the street didn't even know what a bit versus a byte was. and honestly i never ever heard the term "redbook" until I came to head-fi. so yeah, consumers are a bit slow on the uptake, and the manufacturers and designers back then probably couldn't even imagine some of the stuff we have now. i totally don't blame them for not having the foresight - heck, in 2 years we won't believe how we can get music to our ears i bet!

Ahhhh yes...the good ol' days.

Odyssey, Intellivision, Commodore 64, the Amiga, Atari, and my all-time favorite....programming in LOGO in fifth grade with those lovely, malleable 5.25 floppies. I would go back in an instant if I could.

 

[Leporello]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garbz Not really. Back then the first CDplayers used 14bit DACs which for a lack of better description sounded horrible.

My 14-bit Philips CD104 (got it in 1985) sounded pretty much the same as my Denon DCD-685 sounds today. I guess the shortcomings of "early digital" have been vastly exaggerated.


Regards,

L.

 

[memepool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by trains are bad Is it because technology was different back when it was created? Is it DRM motivated? Could it possibly be that the idea of embedding an audio waveform on a spinning disc, to be played back in real time, was too ingrained? .

You seem to be putting the cart before the horse so to speak.

The concept of "Home computers" barely existed in the 1970s outside the minds of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates et al and so CD's purpose was as a music carrier not a data carrier, this came later. Without the music industry we wouldn't have computer CDR as tape was and still is more reliable.


Quote:

Originally Posted by trains are bad Of course when I buy CDs, I put them in my computer and use a special program to extract the audio to a usable format. Then if I want to play it in one of the gazillion CD players that somehow got popular, I have to use another special program to put it back to Redbook so that it can be susceptible to the individual transport and errors EVERY time it's played.

Many would say that mechanisms like the original 80's Philips CDM-0/1 are far superior than the cheap DVD-ROM versions used in most computers and dedicated cd players these days precisely because they can play in real-time and don't subject the programme to superfluous amounts of error correction as a substitute for proper engineering tolerances.


On another note maybe you should also re-evaluate your opinion of mass transit as if we keep on expending all our fossil fuels for delivering Big Macs to Arkansas there won't be any left for anything else and that includes making plastics for computers. According to a recent Rolling Stone article the USA has less railways than Bulgaria...that's just shameful.

 

[Oliver :)]

I think the mere idea that you would have enough computing power in a consumer item to do say FLAC decoding in real time would have been perceived as quality sci-fi in the late 70s

To have digital audio at all was a big thing, and lasers, whow, I mean LASERS! Before DiscoVision there was TED (Television Disc), a video format that would employ a disc read with a needle. Then came DiscoVision (aka Laserdisc), fully analog, which later spawned CDDA and got digital sound too. Those were the days when apparently it was more important to sell stuff that worked, and make stuff work with what was available, instead of throwing more CPU horsepower at it and trying to figure out how to control what people can do.

 

[JahJahBinks]

I remember 30 years ago, hard drive size is like 2MB, memory is about 512 bytes.

 

[fewtch]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leporello My 14-bit Philips CD104 (got it in 1985) sounded pretty much the same as my Denon DCD-685 sounds today. I guess the shortcomings of "early digital" have been vastly exaggerated.

Isn't the DCD-685 an older player?

Anyway... I think the problem with early digital was primarily the 'software' -- dithering wasn't well understood, and so there was a stairstep effect because there was typically no dither applied in the mastering stages. Analog to digital transfers would typically have some hiss near the noise floor that obviated the problem, but DDD transfers would have had it.

 

[labrat]

Deleted.

 

[pabbi1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by majid As Philip Greenspun puts it, the fact Sony and Philips engineers did not consider putting album and track titles and other metadata speaks volumes about how far opposite of computer-centric they were. The convergence of consumer electronics and computers is a very recent phenomenon, both in terms of products and engineering cultures.

Philip as an EE Prof at MIT, and purveyor of Photo.net - a true source to be quoted, for sure.

 

[JahJahBinks]

In the old days, there was zero crossing problem with older DAC.