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Fun stuff I read since his passing yesterday in the Dutch newspapers. Although he had indeed humility about his contribution to the cassette tape and the CD, h

Fun stuff I read since his passing yesterday in the Dutch newspapers. Although he had indeed humility about his contribution to the cassette tape and the CD, he also was frustrated what Sony did in this department. He wanted the CD to be 11,5 cm instead of 12 cm and was disappointed Sony sold the first CD and invented the concept of a walkman instead of Philips. His opinion about cassette tapes and vinyl having a revival because of the analog experience? "I am not a psychologist, but that music experience is of course all nonsense. Nothing can match the sound of the CD. It is absolutely noise and rumble free. That never worked with tape. But who am I to say what's better, I'm over ninety and have old ears. I have made a lot of record players and I know that the distortion with vinyl is much higher. But some people call it "warm audio." I think people mostly hear what they want to hear. But there are always madmen who want to look back to the past. There is always a market for that.”

marshmallow_12 6y ago
what is the advantage of 11.5 over 12?
- drcode 6y ago
  0.5cm smaller.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rsneekes 6y ago
  According to this [1] interview because it's approx the same size as a cassette tape. [1] (pdf, dutch) http://docs.mfbfreaks.com/div/De_Ingenieur_Lou_Ottens.pdf http://docs.mfbfreaks.com/div/De_Ingenieur_Lou_Ottens.pdf
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  Philips decided on it because it would make the case closer in size to cassette tapes, and they already had a factory capable of producing it. I guess 12 cm would have required more retooling, which would cost them some of their advantage over Sony. Source: https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minutes/ https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minu... "Philips engineer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink writes that Philips were pushing for the CD to be close in size to the cassette tape, whereas Sony were pushing for a slightly larger 12cm disc, partially because they knew that Philips already had a factory capable of producing 11.5cm CDs and if they could decide on 12cm as the industry standard then they would erase Philips' head start in manufacturing."
  - marshmallow_12 6y ago
    Interesting that the universal standard was created for such a petty reason. I was hoping to hear that there was some subtle but huge difference in 0.5cm. But no, it's just to screw Philips over, and we all have to play along.
    - parsimo2010 6y ago
      It’s not like Sony and Philips are friends. They’re competitors. And the reason Philips wanted 11.5 cm is because it gave them an advantage, aka just to screw Sony over. This is normal business, not some moral failing.
      - rowanG077 6y ago
        Actually it is a moral failing. All that equipment had to be end of lifed earlier and much more work had to be put in. More garbage, more wasted energy. I can't see how that is anything but a moral failing.
        rexpop 6y ago
        I agree, and am glad you recognize it as such. When Sony erased Philips' "head-start", they obsoleted an investment made with the finite endowment of global resources (not to mention time). It's an underhanded tactic which disadvantages everyone to advantage a few.
    - aksss 6y ago
      I, for one, appreciate the additional 2MB of storage that gave us. /s
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      I wonder how many more minutes of audio 0.5 cm gets us?
      - selcuka 6y ago
- the-dude 6y ago
  Timmer, the Philips CEO at the time, is on record [0] saying it had to do with the max recording length. He claims Sony's CEO liked one particular recording of Beethoven's 9th so much, he insisted it had to fit on a CD. And this particular recording was 74mins, 33 seconds. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kytmE4mrXWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kytmE4mrXWM, Dutch edit: It was not Timmer, but Kees Immink and Hans Mons @ 8:25
  - dn3500 6y ago
    Immink says the myth is that Sony exec Ohga's wife insisted on the 74 minute length, based on a very slow performance of Beethoven 9, which normally isn't that long. But he also says it's not true. This is in his classic paper on the history of the CD. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322951358_Shannon_Beethoven_and_the_Compact_Disc https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322951358_Shannon_B...
lc9er 6y ago
> That never worked with tape. 80’s thrash metal and tapes go together really well. The cutting, trebly sound of tapes really works with the staccato, percussive sounds of bands like Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica, etc. There’s been a resurgence of bands putting out limited runs on cassette. I think a lot of this is nostalgia (often from people too young for much exposure to tape). Cassette sound quality is definitely inferior, but that can be adopted as part of the overall sound.
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  There's also lo-fi hip hop, where adding bad radio, tape or vinyl static to songs is basically a given (as the name kind of implies I guess). I think it makes a kind of sense, in the same way white noise can be soothing
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    lo-fi basement dweller black metal is another one, I mean feast your ears on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oFnjWS4cpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oFnjWS4cpU. Ironically, that album has been released on everything; cassettes, FLAC, 4 lp wooden box set, and a wooden USB stick with 128kbit MP3. The medium is part of the art? Anyway, taste aside I can appreciate this particular artist and their work, it's a lot of midrange noise but the musical elements (mostly percussion tbh) emerge from the swamp with a good listen.
    - arp242 6y ago
      A very long time ago some of the Darkthrone tracks I downloaded from Napster were corrupted and had glitches/noise in them. I didn't know they were glitches, and I listened to this for years and thought it sounded great. I actually regret not having those "damaged" MP3s any more. 60s-era blues is another good example. The recording equipment at the time certainly wasn't bad, but it was not yet perfected. It added a certain sound to recordings from the time that I kind of miss in later recordings.
      - 6y ago
VMG 6y ago
I would slightly disagree with him about CDs: there are some annoying high-frequency noises from a typical CD drive motor. Higher-end ones probably have some buffering.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  You can always mimic the sound you'd get from analog media using a CD the same way you can emulate a CRT using a modern HDR high-resolution display with fidelity well beyond our ability to differentiate them. With a high-end GPU we can do CRT emulation in real time.
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    That's not what the person you're replying to is talking about though - they're stating that the motor that spins the disc is causing interference in the signal. (I have a hard time imagining that it's worse than the electric motors used to drive vinyls or cassette tapes, but if it's there it's there I suppose)
duxup 6y ago
IIRC I recall the lack of 'warm tones' on early CDs was due to the technique they used with early CDs to transfer the audio from tape to the CD. I know my old CDs very much had a weird sorta cold, almost distant sound and I felt that later CDs did not.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  Was it not the sound of the 80s that was responsible for that? (See "In The Air Tonight".)
  - stan_rogers 6y ago
    No, it was the inability to oversample given the technology of the day. Because the actual sampling happened at 44.1 KHz, you needed a brick wall filter to eliminate any signals past 20 KHz before sampling in order to avoid aliasing. Analogue brick wall filters do horrible things to the phase of the signal, screwing up the time relationships between tones and overtones. It was several years before gentler filtering and sampling at higher frequencies, then downconvertig to 44.1 KHz, made CDs listenable at all on a decent system - long enough for there to be a considerable catalogue of awfulness, and for a lot of people to have made up their minds that CDs had to suck. ("The sound of the '80s" had little to do with, say, classical and jazz recordings, which were subject to the same sampling problems.)
  - duxup 6y ago
    It applied to most any type of music on early CDs. They seemed to just really do badly converting it from tape to CD, but improved a great deal as time went on.
coldtea 6y ago
Well, vinyl is indeed "warmer audio" in a sense, in that it is more compressed and has higher saturation (due to the format properties), both of which can sound naturally pleasant. (It's also more tactile, which adds to the warmness psychologically). CDs didn't have that great dynamic range or noise floor anyway (they were copied from -usually- 2inch master tapes, so tapes were still involved, and thus noise). 24bit/48 or 96Hz, on the other hand, now we're talking (but still most people wouldn't hear much of a difference in most mixed music, and in the majority of cheap headphones/speakers).
excitom 6y ago
Whenever I hear people talk about the superior sound quality of vinyl my response is "Yeah, there's nothing quite like the sound of a rock being dragged over bumpy plastic!"
- captainredbeard 6y ago
  Let me translate to what they are trying to say: "the dynamic range in the music mastered for vinyl sounds good".
  - isolli 6y ago
    Yes, by buying a vinyl record from the 70s (especially from renowned labels), you're buying a sound that is free from the digital remastering craze of the following decades.
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      Is that really true though? If they have the original recordings (which have a much better dynamic range than vinyl) the digitally remastered ones can indeed be more true to the sound of the original recording.
      - isolli 6y ago
        They can be, for sure, but in my experience it's hit and miss. For instance, I believe the CD reissues of Living Stereo records (from the master tape) are very good. On the contrary, I once bought the integral of Hector Lavoe, remastered, and the sound was very disappointing, with excessive highs giving an unnatural quality to the sound. Whereas my experience with vinyl records from Decca/London pressed in the 70s is consistently good. If you're willing to experiment and take risks, you can probably find good and bad everywhere. I was suggesting a disappointment-minimizing path...
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Well a lot of CD's swapped out loudness (amplitude) for dynamic range and really they aren't much better than vinyl. So there's a bit of truth to it. A properly mastered CD is far superior to vinyl in a technical sense. Not being an audiophile though I don't mind either as long as the record ain't scratchy and it's not a cheap deck with crappy electronics. Obviously the best "sound" is in the ear of the beholder and some people prefer the sounds of their child/teen years to a higher fidelity version available on CD.

marshmallow_12 6y ago

what is the advantage of 11.5 over 12?

drcode 6y ago
0.5cm smaller.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rsneekes 6y ago
According to this [1] interview because it's approx the same size as a cassette tape. [1] (pdf, dutch) http://docs.mfbfreaks.com/div/De_Ingenieur_Lou_Ottens.pdf http://docs.mfbfreaks.com/div/De_Ingenieur_Lou_Ottens.pdf
parsimo2010 6y ago
Philips decided on it because it would make the case closer in size to cassette tapes, and they already had a factory capable of producing it. I guess 12 cm would have required more retooling, which would cost them some of their advantage over Sony. Source: https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minutes/ https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minu... "Philips engineer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink writes that Philips were pushing for the CD to be close in size to the cassette tape, whereas Sony were pushing for a slightly larger 12cm disc, partially because they knew that Philips already had a factory capable of producing 11.5cm CDs and if they could decide on 12cm as the industry standard then they would erase Philips' head start in manufacturing."
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  Interesting that the universal standard was created for such a petty reason. I was hoping to hear that there was some subtle but huge difference in 0.5cm. But no, it's just to screw Philips over, and we all have to play along.
  - parsimo2010 6y ago
    It’s not like Sony and Philips are friends. They’re competitors. And the reason Philips wanted 11.5 cm is because it gave them an advantage, aka just to screw Sony over. This is normal business, not some moral failing.
    - rowanG077 6y ago
      Actually it is a moral failing. All that equipment had to be end of lifed earlier and much more work had to be put in. More garbage, more wasted energy. I can't see how that is anything but a moral failing.
      - rexpop 6y ago
        I agree, and am glad you recognize it as such. When Sony erased Philips' "head-start", they obsoleted an investment made with the finite endowment of global resources (not to mention time). It's an underhanded tactic which disadvantages everyone to advantage a few.
  - aksss 6y ago
    I, for one, appreciate the additional 2MB of storage that gave us. /s
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    I wonder how many more minutes of audio 0.5 cm gets us?
    - selcuka 6y ago
the-dude 6y ago
Timmer, the Philips CEO at the time, is on record [0] saying it had to do with the max recording length. He claims Sony's CEO liked one particular recording of Beethoven's 9th so much, he insisted it had to fit on a CD. And this particular recording was 74mins, 33 seconds. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kytmE4mrXWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kytmE4mrXWM, Dutch edit: It was not Timmer, but Kees Immink and Hans Mons @ 8:25
- dn3500 6y ago
  Immink says the myth is that Sony exec Ohga's wife insisted on the 74 minute length, based on a very slow performance of Beethoven 9, which normally isn't that long. But he also says it's not true. This is in his classic paper on the history of the CD. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322951358_Shannon_Beethoven_and_the_Compact_Disc https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322951358_Shannon_B...

lc9er 6y ago

> That never worked with tape. 80’s thrash metal and tapes go together really well. The cutting, trebly sound of tapes really works with the staccato, percussive sounds of bands like Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica, etc. There’s been a resurgence of bands putting out limited runs on cassette. I think a lot of this is nostalgia (often from people too young for much exposure to tape). Cassette sound quality is definitely inferior, but that can be adopted as part of the overall sound.

vanderZwan 6y ago
There's also lo-fi hip hop, where adding bad radio, tape or vinyl static to songs is basically a given (as the name kind of implies I guess). I think it makes a kind of sense, in the same way white noise can be soothing
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  lo-fi basement dweller black metal is another one, I mean feast your ears on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oFnjWS4cpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oFnjWS4cpU. Ironically, that album has been released on everything; cassettes, FLAC, 4 lp wooden box set, and a wooden USB stick with 128kbit MP3. The medium is part of the art? Anyway, taste aside I can appreciate this particular artist and their work, it's a lot of midrange noise but the musical elements (mostly percussion tbh) emerge from the swamp with a good listen.
  - arp242 6y ago
    A very long time ago some of the Darkthrone tracks I downloaded from Napster were corrupted and had glitches/noise in them. I didn't know they were glitches, and I listened to this for years and thought it sounded great. I actually regret not having those "damaged" MP3s any more. 60s-era blues is another good example. The recording equipment at the time certainly wasn't bad, but it was not yet perfected. It added a certain sound to recordings from the time that I kind of miss in later recordings.
    - 6y ago

VMG 6y ago

I would slightly disagree with him about CDs: there are some annoying high-frequency noises from a typical CD drive motor. Higher-end ones probably have some buffering.

rbanffy 6y ago
You can always mimic the sound you'd get from analog media using a CD the same way you can emulate a CRT using a modern HDR high-resolution display with fidelity well beyond our ability to differentiate them. With a high-end GPU we can do CRT emulation in real time.
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  That's not what the person you're replying to is talking about though - they're stating that the motor that spins the disc is causing interference in the signal. (I have a hard time imagining that it's worse than the electric motors used to drive vinyls or cassette tapes, but if it's there it's there I suppose)

duxup 6y ago

IIRC I recall the lack of 'warm tones' on early CDs was due to the technique they used with early CDs to transfer the audio from tape to the CD. I know my old CDs very much had a weird sorta cold, almost distant sound and I felt that later CDs did not.

pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
Was it not the sound of the 80s that was responsible for that? (See "In The Air Tonight".)
- stan_rogers 6y ago
  No, it was the inability to oversample given the technology of the day. Because the actual sampling happened at 44.1 KHz, you needed a brick wall filter to eliminate any signals past 20 KHz before sampling in order to avoid aliasing. Analogue brick wall filters do horrible things to the phase of the signal, screwing up the time relationships between tones and overtones. It was several years before gentler filtering and sampling at higher frequencies, then downconvertig to 44.1 KHz, made CDs listenable at all on a decent system - long enough for there to be a considerable catalogue of awfulness, and for a lot of people to have made up their minds that CDs had to suck. ("The sound of the '80s" had little to do with, say, classical and jazz recordings, which were subject to the same sampling problems.)
- duxup 6y ago
  It applied to most any type of music on early CDs. They seemed to just really do badly converting it from tape to CD, but improved a great deal as time went on.

coldtea 6y ago

Well, vinyl is indeed "warmer audio" in a sense, in that it is more compressed and has higher saturation (due to the format properties), both of which can sound naturally pleasant. (It's also more tactile, which adds to the warmness psychologically). CDs didn't have that great dynamic range or noise floor anyway (they were copied from -usually- 2inch master tapes, so tapes were still involved, and thus noise). 24bit/48 or 96Hz, on the other hand, now we're talking (but still most people wouldn't hear much of a difference in most mixed music, and in the majority of cheap headphones/speakers).

excitom 6y ago

Whenever I hear people talk about the superior sound quality of vinyl my response is "Yeah, there's nothing quite like the sound of a rock being dragged over bumpy plastic!"

captainredbeard 6y ago
Let me translate to what they are trying to say: "the dynamic range in the music mastered for vinyl sounds good".
- isolli 6y ago
  Yes, by buying a vinyl record from the 70s (especially from renowned labels), you're buying a sound that is free from the digital remastering craze of the following decades.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Is that really true though? If they have the original recordings (which have a much better dynamic range than vinyl) the digitally remastered ones can indeed be more true to the sound of the original recording.
    - isolli 6y ago
      They can be, for sure, but in my experience it's hit and miss. For instance, I believe the CD reissues of Living Stereo records (from the master tape) are very good. On the contrary, I once bought the integral of Hector Lavoe, remastered, and the sound was very disappointing, with excessive highs giving an unnatural quality to the sound. Whereas my experience with vinyl records from Decca/London pressed in the 70s is consistently good. If you're willing to experiment and take risks, you can probably find good and bad everywhere. I was suggesting a disappointment-minimizing path...
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Well a lot of CD's swapped out loudness (amplitude) for dynamic range and really they aren't much better than vinyl. So there's a bit of truth to it. A properly mastered CD is far superior to vinyl in a technical sense. Not being an audiophile though I don't mind either as long as the record ain't scratchy and it's not a cheap deck with crappy electronics. Obviously the best "sound" is in the ear of the beholder and some people prefer the sounds of their child/teen years to a higher fidelity version available on CD.