5 Responses to “[ VC&G Anthology ] A Detailed Timeline of Compact Disc Technology (2012)”

1. Philip Says:
   November 8th, 2015 at 3:12 pm

   It’s amazing how we take CDs for granted now – and that they are largely forgotten/ignored on many new computers. They really were quite amazing when they were new.

   Speaking of your comment that “omitted info, while generally understood to be true, is actually false,” – have you ever written an article on common technology misconceptions or myths? I’m trying to think of examples, the only one I can think of is that whenever there are two competing technologies (like VHS vs Beta) the ‘winner’ has always been whichever was supported by the porn industry. There may be some truth to that, but it seems vastly oversimplified. I cringe whenever someone draws that comparison when forecasting the demise of some new technology.
   Thanks!

2. Benj Edwards Says:
   November 9th, 2015 at 10:40 am

   Philip,

   I don’t think I have written a piece like that yet, but I have definitely brainstormed it before. It is a good idea — I’ll think about it some more.

   I also don’t really like the porn-tech adoption analogy. Like most tech memes, it is too pat and simple to be completely accurate. It reads like “Oh wow, I guess that does make sense” mind candy, which is why it spreads easily.

   As humans, we construct convenient narratives to explain complex issues to ourselves in a simple way, and sadly, they aren’t always true. To put it another way: almost every simple explanation is actually wrong — the streamlining of details in every field becomes a fiction that lets us easily explain away something complicated.

3. Frank Dana Says:
   November 13th, 2015 at 10:17 pm

   In my own memory of the audio CD’s rise as the dominant consumer format, there’s an aspect of the “Brothers in Arms” album success that can’t be overstated. (Though perhaps that makes me a vector for one of those “too pat” tech memes mentioned above.) It’s covered in the source article you link to:

   “In 1985, one of the most famous bands in the world, Dire Straits, adopted the CD. The infamous album ‘Brothers in Arms’, as one of the first fully digital recording (DDD) to be brought to market, went on to become the top selling CD at the time, and the third greatest selling CD of the decade. The joint collaboration with Philips entailed Philips and Dire Straits jointly promoting the sound quality of the CD to consumers, making ‘Brothers in Arms’ the first album to sell over one million copies in this new format, marking the success of the CD as the emerging format of choice for music quality.”

   It’s hard to imagine now, but in the early days there was a lot of widespread skepticism about digital audio reproduction. A lot of people simply believed that the sound quality from a CD could never match analog records or tapes “because digital”. CDs were (maybe still are) labeled to indicate whether the source audio was analog or digital at the recording and mastering stages — as well as the playback stage, somewhat pointlessly, since by definition for a CD that was always digital. Early CDs were largely “AAD” releases from analog masters of analog recordings. “ADD” CDs for newer releases using digital mastering, plus digitally-remastered releases of older albums, began showing up more and more.

   Still, when “Brothers in Arms” — a huge success that sounded absolutely amazing — came out carrying that “DDD” tag, indicating the only analog equipment involved in making it was the artists’ instruments, it didn’t just demonstrate the viability of the CD format, but it became a proxy validation for digital audio itself.

   (It’s also why I RELENTLESSLY mock a friend for his treasured vinyl copy of the “Brothers in Arms” album, as the very existence of that record almost seems like a cruel prank someone pulled on the anti-digital “audiophile” set.)

4. Mattel Aquarius Says:
   December 5th, 2015 at 11:27 am

   I remember there was some growing belief in the early days of CD, that coloring the outer rim with a green marker would somehow add extra clarity to the sound. Some hardcore audiophiles swore by this. What a crazy world!

5. LongRunner Says:
   May 7th, 2016 at 2:47 pm

   It’s ironic to note that the ‘Direct Stream Digital’ encoding used by “Super” Audio CD is in many ways actually inferior to the old CD-audio format.

   The details of this case are rather technical, but for those interested, see this whitepaper: http://sjeng.org/ftp/SACD.pdf

   In short, SACD’s only real advantage is lower noise at the low frequencies. Its shortcomings are inferior performance from 10kHz on up (it does extend to 50kHz ‘on paper’, but with rapidly declining dynamic range – even supposing for the sake of argument that response above the 22kHz limit of old-school CD is worth anything), 4 times the storage requirements, more complicated mastering, and the distortion mechanisms inherent to all 1-bit delta-sigma modulators. It should be noted too that 1-bit delta-sigma mods are (in high-end audio anyway) now a thing of the past, for the very reasons described in that paper; on that basis, it’s safe to describe SACD as a “dead-end” technology.

   Even if you happen to think that the 44.1kHz, 16-bit sampling of regular CD is inadequate, then DVD-Audio (introduced 2000) is a much better “high-resolution” format. (DVD-A uses PCM at up to 192kHz with 24-bit depth. Mind you, going to 192kHz is considered to in fact be more harmful than beneficial for audio quality anyway – see: https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

   Overall, the reasoning behind Sony/Philips’ choice of DSD instead of PCM was summed up pretty well by Peter Aczel in his former magazine The Audio Critic, now freely downloadable here: http://www.biline.ca/audio_critic/audio_critic_down.htm See Issue #26, page 32. Quoting: “…the real answer has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with business. Copy protection is considerably easier with DSD than with multibit PCM, and intellectual property is a bigger business issue than sonic fidelity.”

   The main problem with audio CDs sold nowadays is not the format itself, but the tremendous over-use of dynamic range compression to make the music as loud as possible – in the process squeezing the ‘life’ out of it. (Often combined with abuse of equalisation, too.) The non-mainstream audio formats, being sold to more discerning listeners, are often mastered differently, for better (albeit quieter) sound – which is far more likely to explain differences heard between the same record obtained on CD vs. SACD or DVD-A, than any technical differences between the formats. On that note: http://stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm

   I guarantee that exactly the same would have happened with SACD or DVD-A had they become mainstream…

   Hope this helps, or is at least an interesting aside to the subject of this article.

Leave a Reply