8 ms·

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 pla

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.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  physics/acoustics only go so far when dealing with art I remember like fm quality more than cd, the involontary mix sounded "better" musically, even though half the details went through the window Also customers are never in control of the audio processing pipeline. You can have crystal clear mathematics at one point but lacking mic setups, bad studio.. so you'll get clear shit. All this in the possibility that back in the days, before digital-to-digital, people paid more attention on all the links of the music production chain (something I cannot attest but read a few times).
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    I think that’s true. See also, the Loudness War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war). It doesn’t matter what tech you’re using if the final master is ruined.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  A lot of CD players in the early 80s had real flaws that impacted audio quality. It wasn't until the early 90s that digital audio (and CD players) were reliably good. This article describes a lot of the problems with early DACs in the 1980s: https://www.stereophile.com/content/pdm-pwm-delta-sigma-1-bit-dacs https://www.stereophile.com/content/pdm-pwm-delta-sigma-1-bi... > But they didn't go for the Burr-Brown solution of adding an adjustment pin to the converter chip, prescribing the use of an external trim pot, and praying for constant temperature. Yikes! Some early CD players' sound quality was temperature dependent!
  - mc32 5y ago
    Maybe that was so, but this was Neil Young and Steve Jobs introducing uncompressed audio in 2012, not mid '80s, so neither one of them is making sense. As I linked elsewhere this is Monty's response: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xip... And explained via Video: https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      All you really need to know is Nyquist's thereom "A bandlimited continuous-time signal can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed from its samples if the waveform is sampled over twice as fast as it's highest frequency component." This is where the magic 44.1 Khz sampling rate comes from. It is twice the limit of human hearing at 22 Khz. Now I don't really understand why 16-bit or 1-bit makes a difference. Maybe someone can explain that to me.
      - cillian64 5y ago
        Nyquist’s theorem only covers sampling (turning a “continuous” signal (which exists at all points in time) into a “discrete” function (which only exists at certain points in time)). Each of the Nyquist samples is a real-valued number which can take an infinite number of values. To get from Nyquist samples to something we can actually represent digitally we need to do a second step: quantisation. This is where we take the real- valued samples and quantise each to one of a fixed set of values. The bit-depth determines the number of values we can quantise to. The higher the bit depth the more values we can quantise to and so the less error introduced by quantisation. You can think of quantisation error as introducing a noise term which gets added onto your signal. Higher bit depth lets you either reduce the amplitude of quantisation error or increase the range of signals you can represent (this is called dynamic range). Once you get to about 16 bits the quantisation noise is inaudible in even the quietest listening environments while at the same time the dynamic range is high enough to cause instant hearing damage. So, in a similar way to Nyquist telling us that more than 44kHz sample rate is pointless, dynamic range tells us that more than 16 bit depth is pointless (for playback. Things get a little more complicated for recording and editing). Edit: as linked by another commenter, Monty from Xiph explaining it better than me: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xip...
- mc32 5y ago
  Here's a good response by Monty from Xyph: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xip...
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    Also: 16-bit/44.1KHz is literally orders of magnitude better at reproducing waveforms than vinyl. If you like the sound of vinyl, you can return a turntable’s output with a good ADC and then listen to a near-exact copy of it as often as you’d like. It’s impossible to do the reverse.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      All you really need to know is Nyquist's thereom "A bandlimited continuous-time signal can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed from its samples if the waveform is sampled over twice as fast as it's highest frequency component." This is where the magic 44.1 Khz sampling rate comes from. It is twice the limit of human hearing at 22 Khz. Now I don't really understand why 16-bit or 1-bit makes a difference. Maybe someone can explain that to me.
II2II 5y ago
My family never bothered with a CD player even though we had an otherwise decent stereo system since we couldn't justify the cost. It wasn't just the hardware that cost money, but the music collection as well. That didn't stop us from getting audio CDs though. Between our home business and school, we could justify the (then steep) cost of a CD-ROM drive. It didn't take much for me to convince the family to move the stereo system from the living room to the office. I was likely the only kid in school who was digitizing and editing audio in addition to playing it.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  Well, the early (like in 1983) CD players were incredibly expensive (often over $1000 and that was in 1983 money), but by the time CD-ROM drives were a thing nearly a decade later you could get cheap CD players for under $100. We kind of saw the same thing later with DVD players starting as luxuries and ending up as under $50 impulse buys.
Finnucane 5y ago
I got my first CD player at about the same time. The thing was that the early adopters were willing to spend a lot on cds, and people who already had big vinyl collections spent less. When it got to be like ten percent of the market was spending fifty percent of the money, record shops all switched over.
bluedino 5y ago
Remember that a VCR was also like $700 in 1982

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.
agumonkey 5y ago
physics/acoustics only go so far when dealing with art I remember like fm quality more than cd, the involontary mix sounded "better" musically, even though half the details went through the window Also customers are never in control of the audio processing pipeline. You can have crystal clear mathematics at one point but lacking mic setups, bad studio.. so you'll get clear shit. All this in the possibility that back in the days, before digital-to-digital, people paid more attention on all the links of the music production chain (something I cannot attest but read a few times).
- kstrauser 5y ago
  I think that’s true. See also, the Loudness War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war). It doesn’t matter what tech you’re using if the final master is ruined.
gwbas1c 5y ago
A lot of CD players in the early 80s had real flaws that impacted audio quality. It wasn't until the early 90s that digital audio (and CD players) were reliably good. This article describes a lot of the problems with early DACs in the 1980s: https://www.stereophile.com/content/pdm-pwm-delta-sigma-1-bit-dacs https://www.stereophile.com/content/pdm-pwm-delta-sigma-1-bi... > But they didn't go for the Burr-Brown solution of adding an adjustment pin to the converter chip, prescribing the use of an external trim pot, and praying for constant temperature. Yikes! Some early CD players' sound quality was temperature dependent!
- mc32 5y ago
  Maybe that was so, but this was Neil Young and Steve Jobs introducing uncompressed audio in 2012, not mid '80s, so neither one of them is making sense. As I linked elsewhere this is Monty's response: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xip... And explained via Video: https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    All you really need to know is Nyquist's thereom "A bandlimited continuous-time signal can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed from its samples if the waveform is sampled over twice as fast as it's highest frequency component." This is where the magic 44.1 Khz sampling rate comes from. It is twice the limit of human hearing at 22 Khz. Now I don't really understand why 16-bit or 1-bit makes a difference. Maybe someone can explain that to me.
    - cillian64 5y ago
      Nyquist’s theorem only covers sampling (turning a “continuous” signal (which exists at all points in time) into a “discrete” function (which only exists at certain points in time)). Each of the Nyquist samples is a real-valued number which can take an infinite number of values. To get from Nyquist samples to something we can actually represent digitally we need to do a second step: quantisation. This is where we take the real- valued samples and quantise each to one of a fixed set of values. The bit-depth determines the number of values we can quantise to. The higher the bit depth the more values we can quantise to and so the less error introduced by quantisation. You can think of quantisation error as introducing a noise term which gets added onto your signal. Higher bit depth lets you either reduce the amplitude of quantisation error or increase the range of signals you can represent (this is called dynamic range). Once you get to about 16 bits the quantisation noise is inaudible in even the quietest listening environments while at the same time the dynamic range is high enough to cause instant hearing damage. So, in a similar way to Nyquist telling us that more than 44kHz sample rate is pointless, dynamic range tells us that more than 16 bit depth is pointless (for playback. Things get a little more complicated for recording and editing). Edit: as linked by another commenter, Monty from Xiph explaining it better than me: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xip...
mc32 5y ago
Here's a good response by Monty from Xyph: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xip...
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Also: 16-bit/44.1KHz is literally orders of magnitude better at reproducing waveforms than vinyl. If you like the sound of vinyl, you can return a turntable’s output with a good ADC and then listen to a near-exact copy of it as often as you’d like. It’s impossible to do the reverse.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    All you really need to know is Nyquist's thereom "A bandlimited continuous-time signal can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed from its samples if the waveform is sampled over twice as fast as it's highest frequency component." This is where the magic 44.1 Khz sampling rate comes from. It is twice the limit of human hearing at 22 Khz. Now I don't really understand why 16-bit or 1-bit makes a difference. Maybe someone can explain that to me.

II2II 5y ago

My family never bothered with a CD player even though we had an otherwise decent stereo system since we couldn't justify the cost. It wasn't just the hardware that cost money, but the music collection as well. That didn't stop us from getting audio CDs though. Between our home business and school, we could justify the (then steep) cost of a CD-ROM drive. It didn't take much for me to convince the family to move the stereo system from the living room to the office. I was likely the only kid in school who was digitizing and editing audio in addition to playing it.

jhbadger 5y ago
Well, the early (like in 1983) CD players were incredibly expensive (often over $1000 and that was in 1983 money), but by the time CD-ROM drives were a thing nearly a decade later you could get cheap CD players for under $100. We kind of saw the same thing later with DVD players starting as luxuries and ending up as under $50 impulse buys.

Finnucane 5y ago

I got my first CD player at about the same time. The thing was that the early adopters were willing to spend a lot on cds, and people who already had big vinyl collections spent less. When it got to be like ten percent of the market was spending fifty percent of the money, record shops all switched over.

bluedino 5y ago

Remember that a VCR was also like $700 in 1982