7 ms·

When CDs Launched in America (2016)

28 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

TheJoeMan 5y ago
This part was interesting to me: “…Except for early adopters -- such as college students with fast Net connections” I suppose it used to be the college kids had the fastest internet, in the dorms and such, and were the drivers of innovation. I graduated a state school recently and let me tell you, our dorm internet was garbage. On top of that, it was heavily policed by IT and I don’t think it’d be possible for a student to host a web server or even burn some CD’s from torrents.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  From 2000: Napster was taking up a significant amount of bandwidth in colleges at the time, enough for it to be problematic: https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9fdc-19145e034d3b.html https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9f...
- schnable 5y ago
  Ay my school in the early 2000s, we had on-campus fiber to the desktop--we had to buy fiber PCI cards for our computers--and no security whatsoever. I don't remember how fast the connection to the outside world was (fast enough for heavy Napstering and Lime-wiring for sure), but the internal network was blazing fast, and a lot of music and movies made the rounds on SMB shares.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    Early 1990s, we had two 10base-T lines to each dorm. Still most people used old school modems and didn't even know what ethernet was. I bought a load of cheap ethernet cards nearly wholesale and demo'ed-then-sold them to students for a couple of years. Didn't pay my tuition but gave me a few spending coins.
    - stephenhuey 5y ago
      in the late 90s at Rice we had a blazing fast connection and I could video chat via MS NetMeeting with friends at other universities. It seemed so magical, and now it’s a surprisingly rare occasion that I use FaceTime or any desktop video chat option.
- polpo 5y ago
  In 1999 I ran a mail server with qmail that handled incoming and outgoing mail for my personal domain and also a somewhat large (20GB) pirate MP3 FTP site, all from a server in the closet of my campus dorm room. The campus IT never said a word!
- LukeShu 5y ago
  I graduated from a state school in 2016, and in the dorms each student had their own 100Mb/s Ethernet jack, and it was actually easy to pull or push that speed over it. However, there was a limit to how much you data allowed to pull/push from the public Internet in a rolling 24 hour block.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    Hence the need for a local DC++ community (well, ADC these days) so you can enjoy all of the speed with none of the data cap ;)
ilamont 5y ago
The cost of the players really hurt adoption. We had a well-off neighbor who was always trying new tech and he was the only one I knew who could afford a CD player in the early days. I remember his son inviting us over to play Queen's "Another one bites the dust" and The Cars "Moving in stereo" which both sounded amazing at high volume. The son said the player cost $800 which was astounding to us teens, because you could get a decent component cassette player (with Dolby B!) or a Japanese turntable for about $150-$200 at the time. I didn't get my own CD player for another 5 or 6 years. I hesitated because I had a very good LP collection by that point, there weren't many CDs I liked that were available, and what about digital audio tape which was constantly hinted at. I also remember Neil Young's criticism of digital sound ... he used a screen door analogy (http://archive.harpers.org/1992/07/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1992-07-0000927.pdf http://archive.harpers.org/1992/07/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1992-...) which seemed reasonable. But the prices of players and CDs were dropping. I got my first CD player, a Sony Discman, for about $100 in 1990, and my first CD, a Clash double disc ("Story of the Clash"?), which was $13 or $14 at Tower Records. The prices were comparable with phonographs and cassettes, so why not?
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Neil Young is a musical genius and I don’t claim to know a thousandth of what he does about music. However, I contend that I know a whole lot more than he does about sound, because every time he’s ever opined about the physics of sound recording, it’s clear that he refuses to learn about it. Like so many self-labeled audiophiles, he “knows” how things work and won’t let anyone tell him differently.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I've also been suspicious of his audiophile opinions because his hearing must have been damaged by decades of loud music, so how can he hear these fine distinctions?
    - kstrauser 5y ago
      For sure, and also normal non-superstar age-related high frequency hearing loss starts to make a big difference.
vehemenz 5y ago
CDs didn't overtake cassettes in sales until 1991. As a tween in the early 90s, all of my music was on cassettes. By the time I could actually afford a CD player, P2P file sharing and CD burners made purchasing CDs irrelevant. If I were a few years older, I'm sure I would have had binders full of CDs.
- sn_master 5y ago
  Add another decade for outside the US.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Can confirm: am a few years older, had binders full of CDs.
subpixel 5y ago
When CDs came out I was a kid in Western Europe and the chief thing we’d heard about them was they they were indestructible. So we went to the houses of kids from better-off families and threw their CDs around the living room.
redis_mlc 5y ago
I was one of the first people in North America to create CDs, in 1984. I was working with a scientist who had connections with Sony Japan, who had 6'-tall rackmount CD writers. We would mail a 9-track tape to Tokyo with sample remote sensing data, and they'd mail back a CD. Although it didn't contribute to the scientific projects directly, we were able to demonstrate the new technology to various groups at a national lab. Overall the feeling was that it was very cool to have that amount of data on a device that small. I'd say the first pressed data CD I saw was the Microsoft Encarta (encyclopedia) CD around 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta About a year or so later I was one of the first users of the Optimem 1 GB 12" optical drives. We used that to archive large amounts of software and experimental data. It was nice to be able to write your media incrementally. One small project was to copy the world's freeware (about 500 5.25" floyy disks) onto a single optical disk for users to find sample code and utilities. I printed out an index on paper and distributed that to several programmers, and they would let me know what they needed.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  You were burning data CDs in '84? That is impressive. How did you read it? I mean, I think the first general availability for data CD readers was in the NeXT computers in the '89 or so?
  - basilgohar 5y ago
    I don't think anyone was burning CDs in 1984, unless you mean literally burning pits and lands into the master CD to make the inverted submasters (jargon here is probably wrong) that then go on to press/mass produce the actual CDs that ended up on shelves.
  - thought_alarm 5y ago
    This technology was developed in the 1970s. So, if you want to record 60 minutes of CD-quality digital audio you need about 600 MB of raw data storage. In the 1970s this was an impossible amount of data. 600 MB of hard drive space would cost as much as a house. Without a way to easily store that huge amount of data, the CD could not be developed. And in the 1970s the computer industry had no answer to that problem. The solution was ingenious. They take a stream of digital bits, convert it in to standard broadcast video, and record it with a plain old VCR. Broadcast video refreshes at 60 FPS, 245 scan lines per frame. If you draw 96 black-and-white pixels per scan line, that works out to three 16-bit stereo samples per scan line. 3 samples X 245 lines/frame X 60 frames/second = 44100 samples/second. Hence, the CD audio standard that we still use today. So, to answer your question, they weren't burning CDs in '84. They encoding 600 MB of data on to plain old VHS tapes, and sending those off to be mastered.
cheese_van 5y ago
CD's are now to most, an artifact, like cassette tapes, and getting thrown out. You can find remarkably good classical and jazz CD's at thrift stores now. I have expanded my musical "vocabulary" quite nicely, thanks to the trove of discarded CD's the new listening public can't bother with.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
I wonder how long it will be for CDs to have retro appeal like vinyl and to a much lesser extend casettes and reel-to-reel? I think this year LPs are outselling CDs in the UK and US for the first time since the early '90s. I wonder if they even will achieve that kind of status, a CD represents a perfect digital copy which is just as easily available in the same quality on things like Tidal*. Vinyl at least isn't just retro appeal, some of it is down to being a tangible way to support artists when streaming is perceived as not being profitable for all but the largest acts and it does have a different subjective quality to digital music. *Having said that, I've been building up a library of offline digital music for the first time in over a decade because of rights holders randomly deleting tracks off streaming services on a whim. In a pleasingly circular way some of these are rips of my record collection!
- smichel17 5y ago
  I doubt CDs will have the same retro appeal for several reasons, which all boil down to "They're insufficiently different from a FLAC library, which has [almost] all the upsides of CDs with [almost] none of the downsides." In contrast, the limitations of vinyl make for a significantly different listening experience -- especially the difficulty in pausing or seeking to individual tracks -- which nudge you toward active listening of whole albums.

28 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

This part was interesting to me: “…Except for early adopters -- such as college students with fast Net connections” I suppose it used to be the college kids had the fastest internet, in the dorms and such, and were the drivers of innovation. I graduated a state school recently and let me tell you, our dorm internet was garbage. On top of that, it was heavily policed by IT and I don’t think it’d be possible for a student to host a web server or even burn some CD’s from torrents.

smackeyacky 5y ago
From 2000: Napster was taking up a significant amount of bandwidth in colleges at the time, enough for it to be problematic: https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9fdc-19145e034d3b.html https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9f...
schnable 5y ago
Ay my school in the early 2000s, we had on-campus fiber to the desktop--we had to buy fiber PCI cards for our computers--and no security whatsoever. I don't remember how fast the connection to the outside world was (fast enough for heavy Napstering and Lime-wiring for sure), but the internal network was blazing fast, and a lot of music and movies made the rounds on SMB shares.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Early 1990s, we had two 10base-T lines to each dorm. Still most people used old school modems and didn't even know what ethernet was. I bought a load of cheap ethernet cards nearly wholesale and demo'ed-then-sold them to students for a couple of years. Didn't pay my tuition but gave me a few spending coins.
  - stephenhuey 5y ago
    in the late 90s at Rice we had a blazing fast connection and I could video chat via MS NetMeeting with friends at other universities. It seemed so magical, and now it’s a surprisingly rare occasion that I use FaceTime or any desktop video chat option.
polpo 5y ago
In 1999 I ran a mail server with qmail that handled incoming and outgoing mail for my personal domain and also a somewhat large (20GB) pirate MP3 FTP site, all from a server in the closet of my campus dorm room. The campus IT never said a word!
LukeShu 5y ago
I graduated from a state school in 2016, and in the dorms each student had their own 100Mb/s Ethernet jack, and it was actually easy to pull or push that speed over it. However, there was a limit to how much you data allowed to pull/push from the public Internet in a rolling 24 hour block.
- Lammy 5y ago
  Hence the need for a local DC++ community (well, ADC these days) so you can enjoy all of the speed with none of the data cap ;)

ilamont 5y ago

The cost of the players really hurt adoption. We had a well-off neighbor who was always trying new tech and he was the only one I knew who could afford a CD player in the early days. I remember his son inviting us over to play Queen's "Another one bites the dust" and The Cars "Moving in stereo" which both sounded amazing at high volume. The son said the player cost $800 which was astounding to us teens, because you could get a decent component cassette player (with Dolby B!) or a Japanese turntable for about $150-$200 at the time. I didn't get my own CD player for another 5 or 6 years. I hesitated because I had a very good LP collection by that point, there weren't many CDs I liked that were available, and what about digital audio tape which was constantly hinted at. I also remember Neil Young's criticism of digital sound ... he used a screen door analogy (http://archive.harpers.org/1992/07/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1992-07-0000927.pdf http://archive.harpers.org/1992/07/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1992-...) which seemed reasonable. But the prices of players and CDs were dropping. I got my first CD player, a Sony Discman, for about $100 in 1990, and my first CD, a Clash double disc ("Story of the Clash"?), which was $13 or $14 at Tower Records. The prices were comparable with phonographs and cassettes, so why not?

kstrauser 5y ago
Neil Young is a musical genius and I don’t claim to know a thousandth of what he does about music. However, I contend that I know a whole lot more than he does about sound, because every time he’s ever opined about the physics of sound recording, it’s clear that he refuses to learn about it. Like so many self-labeled audiophiles, he “knows” how things work and won’t let anyone tell him differently.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I've also been suspicious of his audiophile opinions because his hearing must have been damaged by decades of loud music, so how can he hear these fine distinctions?
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    For sure, and also normal non-superstar age-related high frequency hearing loss starts to make a big difference.

vehemenz 5y ago

CDs didn't overtake cassettes in sales until 1991. As a tween in the early 90s, all of my music was on cassettes. By the time I could actually afford a CD player, P2P file sharing and CD burners made purchasing CDs irrelevant. If I were a few years older, I'm sure I would have had binders full of CDs.

sn_master 5y ago
Add another decade for outside the US.
kstrauser 5y ago
Can confirm: am a few years older, had binders full of CDs.

subpixel 5y ago

When CDs came out I was a kid in Western Europe and the chief thing we’d heard about them was they they were indestructible. So we went to the houses of kids from better-off families and threw their CDs around the living room.

redis_mlc 5y ago

I was one of the first people in North America to create CDs, in 1984. I was working with a scientist who had connections with Sony Japan, who had 6'-tall rackmount CD writers. We would mail a 9-track tape to Tokyo with sample remote sensing data, and they'd mail back a CD. Although it didn't contribute to the scientific projects directly, we were able to demonstrate the new technology to various groups at a national lab. Overall the feeling was that it was very cool to have that amount of data on a device that small. I'd say the first pressed data CD I saw was the Microsoft Encarta (encyclopedia) CD around 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta About a year or so later I was one of the first users of the Optimem 1 GB 12" optical drives. We used that to archive large amounts of software and experimental data. It was nice to be able to write your media incrementally. One small project was to copy the world's freeware (about 500 5.25" floyy disks) onto a single optical disk for users to find sample code and utilities. I printed out an index on paper and distributed that to several programmers, and they would let me know what they needed.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
You were burning data CDs in '84? That is impressive. How did you read it? I mean, I think the first general availability for data CD readers was in the NeXT computers in the '89 or so?
- basilgohar 5y ago
  I don't think anyone was burning CDs in 1984, unless you mean literally burning pits and lands into the master CD to make the inverted submasters (jargon here is probably wrong) that then go on to press/mass produce the actual CDs that ended up on shelves.
- thought_alarm 5y ago
  This technology was developed in the 1970s. So, if you want to record 60 minutes of CD-quality digital audio you need about 600 MB of raw data storage. In the 1970s this was an impossible amount of data. 600 MB of hard drive space would cost as much as a house. Without a way to easily store that huge amount of data, the CD could not be developed. And in the 1970s the computer industry had no answer to that problem. The solution was ingenious. They take a stream of digital bits, convert it in to standard broadcast video, and record it with a plain old VCR. Broadcast video refreshes at 60 FPS, 245 scan lines per frame. If you draw 96 black-and-white pixels per scan line, that works out to three 16-bit stereo samples per scan line. 3 samples X 245 lines/frame X 60 frames/second = 44100 samples/second. Hence, the CD audio standard that we still use today. So, to answer your question, they weren't burning CDs in '84. They encoding 600 MB of data on to plain old VHS tapes, and sending those off to be mastered.

cheese_van 5y ago

CD's are now to most, an artifact, like cassette tapes, and getting thrown out. You can find remarkably good classical and jazz CD's at thrift stores now. I have expanded my musical "vocabulary" quite nicely, thanks to the trove of discarded CD's the new listening public can't bother with.

BoxOfRain 5y ago

I wonder how long it will be for CDs to have retro appeal like vinyl and to a much lesser extend casettes and reel-to-reel? I think this year LPs are outselling CDs in the UK and US for the first time since the early '90s. I wonder if they even will achieve that kind of status, a CD represents a perfect digital copy which is just as easily available in the same quality on things like Tidal*. Vinyl at least isn't just retro appeal, some of it is down to being a tangible way to support artists when streaming is perceived as not being profitable for all but the largest acts and it does have a different subjective quality to digital music. *Having said that, I've been building up a library of offline digital music for the first time in over a decade because of rights holders randomly deleting tracks off streaming services on a whim. In a pleasingly circular way some of these are rips of my record collection!

smichel17 5y ago
I doubt CDs will have the same retro appeal for several reasons, which all boil down to "They're insufficiently different from a FLAC library, which has [almost] all the upsides of CDs with [almost] none of the downsides." In contrast, the limitations of vinyl make for a significantly different listening experience -- especially the difficulty in pausing or seeking to individual tracks -- which nudge you toward active listening of whole albums.