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This doesn't make any sense. You haven't explained how CD is "terrible"; you just made some comparison to an obsolete digital camera. You put the CD in, press

This doesn't make any sense. You haven't explained how CD is "terrible"; you just made some comparison to an obsolete digital camera. You put the CD in, press play, and a nearly perfect representation of the source signal with enormous dynamic range and clarity comes out of your DAC. How is this like a 20 year-old digital camera?

sterwill 7y ago
The more I think about it, the better metaphor is: CD is the RED 32K camera from 2025 whose product is video indistinguishable from seeing it with your own eyes, but it came out in 1982 and all the theaters can project it.
numpad0 7y ago
Well, at very least, Compact Disc is a 1980 standard... not like 20 years old, more like 40 years old. I don't understand why statement like above is met with a response like yours. It's a shitty '80s format that beat vinyl in affordability, why defend it as if CD is the pinnacle of digital recording technology? It is not, never was. Just say yeah CD sucks you gotta try DSD, and move on. Anecdotal but I feel some sort of acoustic 'odor' to CD, that no other digital formats have: CD rips and even CD-DSD conversion has distinct tone that tells the data had been on a disc. Something's wrong with the standard and/or its mastering.
- cormacrelf 7y ago
  CD may be 40 years old, but human ears didn't change at all in that time. If you can tell CD from other recordings, it is almost certainly because the mastering (which is not something intrinsic to the standard) was deliberately changed for CD because it could reproduce sound better, so no format-specific mastering hacks were needed to make it sound good. Face it, you don't have golden ears. For example, if a studio today were to master something for cassette, it would dramatically turn up the high end to compensate and probably bypass some saturation or exciters because the format has its own. Similarly, any studio not tweaking their masters for the perfection of CD was probably doing the material a disservice. Heck, today, some tracks are deliberately mastered to sound good on iPhone earbuds. (The usual article cited in these discussions is https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html, which happens to make this point briefly under "Different media, different master" and "Better masters". Edit: another fun article is https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-quality-is-still-great-16518/ https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-..., with the fantastic pull quote, "There is no safe listening level to hear the difference between these files".) CD doesn't need to be the pinnacle of digital technology, because our ears don't know any different beyond it.
  - numpad0 7y ago
    Did you know: Nyquist sampling theorem assumes, and only applies to, pure sine waves. Apparently this is a novice level knowledge in DSP community at StackExchange: https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/45032/suitable-sampling-rate-for-triangle-wave https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/45032/suitable-sampl...
    - unlinked_dll 7y ago
      The Shannon-Nyquist theorem doesn't assume or apply just to sines (that's a gross mischaracterization of the proof and it's implications). It assumes ideal samplers and reconstruction filters can exist, which they can't. In the real world, ADCs and DACs' inherent filtering, noise, and distortion characteristics are quantifiably superior to any analog storage media and reproduction system.
    - jdsully 7y ago
      Records don't have infinite bandwidth either. I'd actually love to see a comparison of vinyl vs digital reproducing a triangle wave, it would be a lot more illuminating than blindly quoting Shannon Nyquist.
- sterwill 7y ago
  I said your example digital camera was 20 years old ("640x480 prototype camera from 2001"), not the CD format. I used primitive digital cameras in the mid 1990s and CDs in the 1980s so I remember the chronology here. You still haven't told me why CD is a "shitty" format. The audio quality is essentially perfect for human ears listening to recorded music. With a good DAC you're able to reproduce the source with accuracy well beyond the limits of human hearing. This is an incredible feat for the early 1980s, and I think it's still incredible today! The CD is pretty much the pinnacle of home audio reproduction! You'll want higher sample rates and bit depth for mixing and mastering, but that's for the recording studio. If you think the compact disc audio standard is deficient in some technical way, back it up with some facts or measurements, not just your feelings about "acoustic odor." It's true that not all CDs are mixed or mastered well, but that's also true for vinyl records. What, specifically is so bad about the CD?

sterwill 7y ago

The more I think about it, the better metaphor is: CD is the RED 32K camera from 2025 whose product is video indistinguishable from seeing it with your own eyes, but it came out in 1982 and all the theaters can project it.

numpad0 7y ago

Well, at very least, Compact Disc is a 1980 standard... not like 20 years old, more like 40 years old. I don't understand why statement like above is met with a response like yours. It's a shitty '80s format that beat vinyl in affordability, why defend it as if CD is the pinnacle of digital recording technology? It is not, never was. Just say yeah CD sucks you gotta try DSD, and move on. Anecdotal but I feel some sort of acoustic 'odor' to CD, that no other digital formats have: CD rips and even CD-DSD conversion has distinct tone that tells the data had been on a disc. Something's wrong with the standard and/or its mastering.

cormacrelf 7y ago
CD may be 40 years old, but human ears didn't change at all in that time. If you can tell CD from other recordings, it is almost certainly because the mastering (which is not something intrinsic to the standard) was deliberately changed for CD because it could reproduce sound better, so no format-specific mastering hacks were needed to make it sound good. Face it, you don't have golden ears. For example, if a studio today were to master something for cassette, it would dramatically turn up the high end to compensate and probably bypass some saturation or exciters because the format has its own. Similarly, any studio not tweaking their masters for the perfection of CD was probably doing the material a disservice. Heck, today, some tracks are deliberately mastered to sound good on iPhone earbuds. (The usual article cited in these discussions is https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html, which happens to make this point briefly under "Different media, different master" and "Better masters". Edit: another fun article is https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-quality-is-still-great-16518/ https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-..., with the fantastic pull quote, "There is no safe listening level to hear the difference between these files".) CD doesn't need to be the pinnacle of digital technology, because our ears don't know any different beyond it.
- numpad0 7y ago
  Did you know: Nyquist sampling theorem assumes, and only applies to, pure sine waves. Apparently this is a novice level knowledge in DSP community at StackExchange: https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/45032/suitable-sampling-rate-for-triangle-wave https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/45032/suitable-sampl...
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    The Shannon-Nyquist theorem doesn't assume or apply just to sines (that's a gross mischaracterization of the proof and it's implications). It assumes ideal samplers and reconstruction filters can exist, which they can't. In the real world, ADCs and DACs' inherent filtering, noise, and distortion characteristics are quantifiably superior to any analog storage media and reproduction system.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    Records don't have infinite bandwidth either. I'd actually love to see a comparison of vinyl vs digital reproducing a triangle wave, it would be a lot more illuminating than blindly quoting Shannon Nyquist.
sterwill 7y ago
I said your example digital camera was 20 years old ("640x480 prototype camera from 2001"), not the CD format. I used primitive digital cameras in the mid 1990s and CDs in the 1980s so I remember the chronology here. You still haven't told me why CD is a "shitty" format. The audio quality is essentially perfect for human ears listening to recorded music. With a good DAC you're able to reproduce the source with accuracy well beyond the limits of human hearing. This is an incredible feat for the early 1980s, and I think it's still incredible today! The CD is pretty much the pinnacle of home audio reproduction! You'll want higher sample rates and bit depth for mixing and mastering, but that's for the recording studio. If you think the compact disc audio standard is deficient in some technical way, back it up with some facts or measurements, not just your feelings about "acoustic odor." It's true that not all CDs are mixed or mastered well, but that's also true for vinyl records. What, specifically is so bad about the CD?