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I don't care for cassettes, but I hope the Compact Disc never dies. It is a nearly perfect physical music format. Edit: I really appreciate the simplicity of i
by TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
I don't care for cassettes, but I hope the Compact Disc never dies. It is a nearly perfect physical music format.
Edit: I really appreciate the simplicity of it, it's DRM free (the only DRM-free digital prerecorded physical format still pressed?) and contains lossless uncompressed stereo PCM at the frequency and bitdepth that is still the standard for digital music, good enough no human ear can distinguish it from theoretically superior successors.
- forinti 8y agoThe first CD players let you stick the disk in with case and all. You would never get a scratch. It was a shame it didn't stay that way.
- dagw 8y agoNot the cases the CD came in though. You had to buy special cases that where compatible with your CD player. Handy, but it started to get expensive once you had more than 20 or so CDs.
- chib 8y agoWow, I never knew this. Can you give an example of such a system? My initial search has returned nothing.
- rjsw 8y agoSome pictures here [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)
- gideonparanoid 8y agoHa, not too dissimilar to a floppy disc really.
- misnome 8y agoAlso, our early CD drives for our computer had this, except the caddy could be opened up and the CD inside changed. We had one caddy for the computer.
- jacobush 8y agoAFAIK it was an open question, if they were going the diskette way, or go with open discs. The polycarbonate plastic was deemed so tough, and of course it was cheaper to just produce the discs without a caddy, so they went with naked discs. IIRC.
- magduf 8y agoYep. It's too bad the CD format didn't specify this caddy, so that every commercial CD came in a caddy and was non-removable from it.
- nakedrobot2 8y agoI guess you weren't alive back then because.... no, no they weren't, this never happened.
- driverdan 8y agoYou don't know what you're talking about. I had one of these types of CD drives in my first decent computer. It used special cases with a spring loaded cover that opened when you inserted it into the drive.
- jamesrcole 8y agoI know what you're referring to, but I think you're talking about something different to the grandparent. They said "The first CD players let you stick the disk in with case and all. You would never get a scratch" which implies something where you never take the disc out of its case, because unless you never take it out of the case how does it avoid all scratches?
- forinti 8y agoThe case could very well have been the caddy. There wasn't a practical reason to have both; it was a design decision.
- jamesrcole 8y agoI don't think there was a caddy for every single CD. My recollection was that you had a single caddy for the drive and swapped discs in and out of it. So I don't see how the caddies made much practical difference for stopping CDs from getting scratched.
- driverdan 8y agoIt depends on the user. We had caddies for almost every CD we regularly used.
- 8y ago
- anc84 8y agoRotating plastic that relies on sensitive optics? No thanks, that seems far from perfect for lossless, digital data. I will take a solid-state medium any day over spinning discs.
- tempodox 8y ago“lossless, digital data” is a contradiction in terms if the source is analog. When converting analog to digital, resolution is finite.
- LordHeini 8y agoNo it is not! As long as you stay in the frequency range of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem the source signal is indeed lossless. There are a lot of misconceptions about this you should look it up. Don't forget, that a vinyl has frequency limits as well.
- sjwright 8y agoAll practical analog audio signals are band limited and have a nominal noise floor. Given those characteristics, the conversion from analog to digital can be considered mathematically lossless. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_the... Then you consider the fact that our own ears are band limited and dynamic range limited and you realise pretty quickly that CD audio at 16 bits 44100 Hz is, for all practical purposes, an objectively lossless audio format.
- throwaway2048 8y agoThe mistake is thinking the precision of analog sound is infinite.
- adrianmonk 8y agoIn this context, lossless refers only to what happens after the data is already digital. Some digital formats apply data compression the reverse of which doesn't recover the original bits exactly. Some digital formats (including CD) use no data compression or a form of compression that recreates exactly the same bits. It's similar to the difference between JPEG and PNG. There is a quality parameter when creating a JPEG because the decompressed image will not be exactly the same, but there is no such quality parameter for PNG because PNG will restore the exact value of every pixel.