7 ms·

How the compact disc lost its shine

61 points by bufordsharkley 11y ago

jerf 11y ago
"Webster remembers one industry Cassandra, Maurice Oberstein – who ran CBS and then Polygram in the UK – making a similar point. “He was the only one who went: ‘We’re making a huge mistake. We’re putting studio-quality masters into the hands of people.’ And he was absolutely right in that respect. Once you made a CD with ones and zeroes it was only a matter of time before that was converted into something that was easily transferable.”" Emphasis mine. Well, the Loudness War fixed that problem right up, didn't it? Now CDs aren't "studio-quality masters" anymore.
- mark-r 11y ago
  Once you had digital mastering and digital manipulation, the loudness wars would have happened no matter what the output medium. What I don't understand is how this appeals to the bean counters. Were any of the best-selling albums of all time noticeably louder than their peers?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Loud works for radio, which used to drive sales.
    - 6581 11y ago
      Most radio stations use all sorts of sound processing anyway though (including ridiculous dynamic range compression) to make the station sound "better".
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      Loud on radio comes from boxes, not from a disc. If you have unremastered CDs of the top 100 selling albums of all time that were built before CDs, they have a lot of air in 'em. "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Hotel California" and the Led Zep catalog all show this. There's just no good reason to overmodulate a CD. You have a volume control; use it.
  - bsder 11y ago
    The loudness wars were about CD changers. Radio always normalized anyway. You didn't want your CD sticking out as "quiet" when put in a 5 CD shuffle.
- lamby 11y ago
  > CDs aren't "studio-quality masters" anymore Well, not sure many studios are still using 16-bit 44.1kHz either... ;)
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Wow, I had never heard that about anyone in the music business. Amazing. But there is no way they were gonna pass on reselling all the back catalog one more time - at from $15 to $20 a pop retail. 16/44.1 is a studio quality master. The best practice to send a mix in is to use the same format as the end product unless the mastering engineer wants something different.
  - gregsq 11y ago
    Film is 24/48 so 16/44.1 isn't what you'd call a studio master in general. A lot of music used in film originates from 44.1k CD's but then you have up sampling to add to the workflow. 16/44.1k is becoming something of an anachronism.
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      It is certainly difficult to find 16 bit hardware. I bought a new 16 channel interface in 2013 and it basically doesn't work at 16 bit. I wonder if the drivers aren't broken. MP3s generally have a base sampling rate of 44.1 still. It is unfortunate that both CD and film were not at the same sampling rate. 24 bits is fine for tracking but it's overkill for the end delivery format. This is especially true since most audio on even Blu-Ray is lossy-encoded anyway. You can't hear it often, but the irony of "HD audio quality" is amusing.
nemo44x 11y ago
I'll never forget when Apple introduced iTunes (before the iPod) with the tagline "Rip, Mix and Burn". Classic Steve Jobs direct assault at an industry his company was about to take over. Looking back, seeing how the iPod was under development at this time puts the entire strategy together. Apple wasn't the first company to let you rip music, share it and burn CD's, etc but they were the one's who made it accessible to everyone with a seamless, fully integrated user experience. Users ripped all of their and their friends music, got used to the MP3 format and then the ease of buying MP3's from Apples store with iPod integration.
- soperj 11y ago
  Everyone? it took almost 3 years for them to release a windows version. Hell it didn't even run on OSX for nearly a year.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    Harvard Business case studies cite the delayed Windows version as a marketing tactic. "Everyone loved" the iPod, and apparently quite a few people bought a prerequisite Mac in order to use the iPod.
    - frikk 11y ago
      I remember having to buy a firewire PCI port just to use my first iPod with Windows. It only worked sometimes, and I had to use some third party tool to upload music to it (or winamp, I think, had some limited support).
    - nemo44x 11y ago
      Indeed. I looked weird on my college campus with a Mac. However, after the iPod the idea of using a Mac became more acceptable I saw a lot more of them. Now they are ubiquitous - something I would not have imagined 15 years ago.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Porting iTunes to Windows might have been quite the effort, though. IIRC it's not a true native app, and runs on some port of Apple's libraries to Windows.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
I immediately stopped buying CD's forever when I encountered the first "copyright protected" CD I couldn't play in my computer. That was years before the first music downloads were legally available (at least where I live), so you can guess what happened to my music consumption from that point on.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  The copy protected discs were not compliant CDs. Which doesn't mean a whole lot, except that a disc carrying the CD-DA logo won't have any copy protection.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    It's almost surreal when you know this, and you search far and wide, but every CD you're interested in buying has that logo missing.
- killface 11y ago
  Yup. The last album I bought was one where I couldn't rip a couple tracks and put them on my Diamond Rio (how's that for a flashback?). Then they came out with the "You didn't buy this song, you bought a license to play this song on one media type..." And I've been digital since then.
  - doodpants 11y ago
    You've been digital since before then, since all CDs are digital.
- curun1r 11y ago
  I stopped buying when the content industries declared war on my profession. When they started going after tinkerers for being inquisitive instead of the people who used the resulting code to actually commit copyright violations, that crossed a line for me and, because of that, I will never willingly give them another dime of my money. To me, it's abundantly clear that people should be responsible for what they do with code, no matter who wrote it. Writing code should never be illegal.
hackuser 11y ago
Almost everyone has forgotten this vision: We now have a way to distribute works of art (i.e., any that can be digitized, including music) freely, easily, globally, and immediately to everyone, in an open, free-as-in-speech form that enables further innovation. Works of art aren't limited, as they have been for all of human history until now, to a specific object or location. What an incredible boon, a miracle, and or artists too, whose vision can spread from their studio, or parents' basement, around the world, effortlessly. But an industry had been built on the old distribution medium; it earned money by limiting and selling access to the artwork. Rather than someone creatively disrupting that industry and replacing it with something native to and facilitating the advantages of this miraculous medium, instead we've imposed the old industry on the new tech, crippling it with DRM and laws (and by framing the discussion to the degree that everyone refers to music as an article of commerce and not as a work of art, to the point that even artists speak that way and buy into the 'threat' of the Internet). If anything should be open and free, it's art.
- nosuchthing 11y ago
  I agree, but it creates a conflicting economic issue for the artists who spend their time working on these creations. The global economy is in a very awkward transitional state right now thanks to tools and networks of the information era. I imagine a decade or two from now, the prevalent models for creative media outlets would be youtube + advertising views = payment to artists, subscription based netflix / spotify will still be around for niche markets, and as it is now - local copies of recorded media will be sold as physical artifacts bundled with other artwork that cannot be digitized like shirts or toys.
  - alexqgb 11y ago
    Great, so artists are reduced to "content producers" that learn to tailor their work - first and foremost - to the comfort level of advertisers. That's not progress. That's a reversion to the medieval. It's like, "Sure, you can paint or write whatever you like - just as long as it doesn't run counter to the political agenda of the King or the Pope, and honestly, if you know what's good for you, you'll focus on who you're really working for, okay?" I mean, the whole point of copyright was to get away from the suffocating effects of the patronage system, which was one in which a tiny handful of insanely rich and hugely self-serving players set the cultural agenda for everyone. And by the way, if you think that advertisers are okay with having their brands associated with anything and everything that attracts audiences, you've clearly spent zero time dealing with advertisers.
beloch 11y ago
In the nineties, there was a great local record shop that was set up in a former bank that had been built in 1930. Marble floors and walls. Wrought iron railing with a loft above the main floor, which had a huge vaulted ceiling. There were listening stations where you could sample music and several floors above, all full of music in various genres. It wasn't quite a large as Tower Records, but it was a much nicer building and was just a 15-minute walk from my high-school. I blew far too much money there. In terms of the sheer percentage of my disposable income it gobbled up, no other format has ever come close to CD's. As great as this store was, it was still sometimes hard to find specific albums. Imagine special ordering physical media these days! I forget if you had to pay in advance or just put down a deposit, but sometimes it took months to get some albums in. Today, even if you still have to have physical media, you can get the most obscure releases off of amazon (heck, even amazon japan) in less time. In every measurable way, online distribution of physical media is superior to the old mega-stores, and digital media is more convenient still. However, there was something special about walking into a big space that was packed with tens of thousands of different albums and being able to wander down the aisles browsing album art. One of my big hopes for virtual reality is to bring this kind of experience back to life, only with all the advantages of digital media. Imagine shopping in a virtual record shop, being able to walk down the aisles, pick a random album off the shelf and, just by looking at it, be able to listen to the tracks. Maybe there will even be a way to chat up other people browsing the same genre!
happycube 11y ago
Semi-related: MCA (Yes, Universal) invented the Laserdisc, their bean counters made the disks crappy (by underspeccing the factory), Phillips made unreliable crappy players that couldn't play said crappy disks... and Pioneer made it all actually work.

jerf 11y ago

"Webster remembers one industry Cassandra, Maurice Oberstein – who ran CBS and then Polygram in the UK – making a similar point. “He was the only one who went: ‘We’re making a huge mistake. We’re putting studio-quality masters into the hands of people.’ And he was absolutely right in that respect. Once you made a CD with ones and zeroes it was only a matter of time before that was converted into something that was easily transferable.”" Emphasis mine. Well, the Loudness War fixed that problem right up, didn't it? Now CDs aren't "studio-quality masters" anymore.

mark-r 11y ago
Once you had digital mastering and digital manipulation, the loudness wars would have happened no matter what the output medium. What I don't understand is how this appeals to the bean counters. Were any of the best-selling albums of all time noticeably louder than their peers?
- DanBC 11y ago
  Loud works for radio, which used to drive sales.
  - 6581 11y ago
    Most radio stations use all sorts of sound processing anyway though (including ridiculous dynamic range compression) to make the station sound "better".
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    Loud on radio comes from boxes, not from a disc. If you have unremastered CDs of the top 100 selling albums of all time that were built before CDs, they have a lot of air in 'em. "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Hotel California" and the Led Zep catalog all show this. There's just no good reason to overmodulate a CD. You have a volume control; use it.
- bsder 11y ago
  The loudness wars were about CD changers. Radio always normalized anyway. You didn't want your CD sticking out as "quiet" when put in a 5 CD shuffle.
lamby 11y ago
> CDs aren't "studio-quality masters" anymore Well, not sure many studios are still using 16-bit 44.1kHz either... ;)
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Wow, I had never heard that about anyone in the music business. Amazing. But there is no way they were gonna pass on reselling all the back catalog one more time - at from $15 to $20 a pop retail. 16/44.1 is a studio quality master. The best practice to send a mix in is to use the same format as the end product unless the mastering engineer wants something different.
- gregsq 11y ago
  Film is 24/48 so 16/44.1 isn't what you'd call a studio master in general. A lot of music used in film originates from 44.1k CD's but then you have up sampling to add to the workflow. 16/44.1k is becoming something of an anachronism.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    It is certainly difficult to find 16 bit hardware. I bought a new 16 channel interface in 2013 and it basically doesn't work at 16 bit. I wonder if the drivers aren't broken. MP3s generally have a base sampling rate of 44.1 still. It is unfortunate that both CD and film were not at the same sampling rate. 24 bits is fine for tracking but it's overkill for the end delivery format. This is especially true since most audio on even Blu-Ray is lossy-encoded anyway. You can't hear it often, but the irony of "HD audio quality" is amusing.

nemo44x 11y ago

I'll never forget when Apple introduced iTunes (before the iPod) with the tagline "Rip, Mix and Burn". Classic Steve Jobs direct assault at an industry his company was about to take over. Looking back, seeing how the iPod was under development at this time puts the entire strategy together. Apple wasn't the first company to let you rip music, share it and burn CD's, etc but they were the one's who made it accessible to everyone with a seamless, fully integrated user experience. Users ripped all of their and their friends music, got used to the MP3 format and then the ease of buying MP3's from Apples store with iPod integration.

soperj 11y ago
Everyone? it took almost 3 years for them to release a windows version. Hell it didn't even run on OSX for nearly a year.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Harvard Business case studies cite the delayed Windows version as a marketing tactic. "Everyone loved" the iPod, and apparently quite a few people bought a prerequisite Mac in order to use the iPod.
  - frikk 11y ago
    I remember having to buy a firewire PCI port just to use my first iPod with Windows. It only worked sometimes, and I had to use some third party tool to upload music to it (or winamp, I think, had some limited support).
  - nemo44x 11y ago
    Indeed. I looked weird on my college campus with a Mac. However, after the iPod the idea of using a Mac became more acceptable I saw a lot more of them. Now they are ubiquitous - something I would not have imagined 15 years ago.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Porting iTunes to Windows might have been quite the effort, though. IIRC it's not a true native app, and runs on some port of Apple's libraries to Windows.

makeitsuckless 11y ago

I immediately stopped buying CD's forever when I encountered the first "copyright protected" CD I couldn't play in my computer. That was years before the first music downloads were legally available (at least where I live), so you can guess what happened to my music consumption from that point on.

maxerickson 11y ago
The copy protected discs were not compliant CDs. Which doesn't mean a whole lot, except that a disc carrying the CD-DA logo won't have any copy protection.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  It's almost surreal when you know this, and you search far and wide, but every CD you're interested in buying has that logo missing.
killface 11y ago
Yup. The last album I bought was one where I couldn't rip a couple tracks and put them on my Diamond Rio (how's that for a flashback?). Then they came out with the "You didn't buy this song, you bought a license to play this song on one media type..." And I've been digital since then.
- doodpants 11y ago
  You've been digital since before then, since all CDs are digital.
curun1r 11y ago
I stopped buying when the content industries declared war on my profession. When they started going after tinkerers for being inquisitive instead of the people who used the resulting code to actually commit copyright violations, that crossed a line for me and, because of that, I will never willingly give them another dime of my money. To me, it's abundantly clear that people should be responsible for what they do with code, no matter who wrote it. Writing code should never be illegal.

hackuser 11y ago

Almost everyone has forgotten this vision: We now have a way to distribute works of art (i.e., any that can be digitized, including music) freely, easily, globally, and immediately to everyone, in an open, free-as-in-speech form that enables further innovation. Works of art aren't limited, as they have been for all of human history until now, to a specific object or location. What an incredible boon, a miracle, and or artists too, whose vision can spread from their studio, or parents' basement, around the world, effortlessly. But an industry had been built on the old distribution medium; it earned money by limiting and selling access to the artwork. Rather than someone creatively disrupting that industry and replacing it with something native to and facilitating the advantages of this miraculous medium, instead we've imposed the old industry on the new tech, crippling it with DRM and laws (and by framing the discussion to the degree that everyone refers to music as an article of commerce and not as a work of art, to the point that even artists speak that way and buy into the 'threat' of the Internet). If anything should be open and free, it's art.

nosuchthing 11y ago
I agree, but it creates a conflicting economic issue for the artists who spend their time working on these creations. The global economy is in a very awkward transitional state right now thanks to tools and networks of the information era. I imagine a decade or two from now, the prevalent models for creative media outlets would be youtube + advertising views = payment to artists, subscription based netflix / spotify will still be around for niche markets, and as it is now - local copies of recorded media will be sold as physical artifacts bundled with other artwork that cannot be digitized like shirts or toys.
- alexqgb 11y ago
  Great, so artists are reduced to "content producers" that learn to tailor their work - first and foremost - to the comfort level of advertisers. That's not progress. That's a reversion to the medieval. It's like, "Sure, you can paint or write whatever you like - just as long as it doesn't run counter to the political agenda of the King or the Pope, and honestly, if you know what's good for you, you'll focus on who you're really working for, okay?" I mean, the whole point of copyright was to get away from the suffocating effects of the patronage system, which was one in which a tiny handful of insanely rich and hugely self-serving players set the cultural agenda for everyone. And by the way, if you think that advertisers are okay with having their brands associated with anything and everything that attracts audiences, you've clearly spent zero time dealing with advertisers.

beloch 11y ago

In the nineties, there was a great local record shop that was set up in a former bank that had been built in 1930. Marble floors and walls. Wrought iron railing with a loft above the main floor, which had a huge vaulted ceiling. There were listening stations where you could sample music and several floors above, all full of music in various genres. It wasn't quite a large as Tower Records, but it was a much nicer building and was just a 15-minute walk from my high-school. I blew far too much money there. In terms of the sheer percentage of my disposable income it gobbled up, no other format has ever come close to CD's. As great as this store was, it was still sometimes hard to find specific albums. Imagine special ordering physical media these days! I forget if you had to pay in advance or just put down a deposit, but sometimes it took months to get some albums in. Today, even if you still have to have physical media, you can get the most obscure releases off of amazon (heck, even amazon japan) in less time. In every measurable way, online distribution of physical media is superior to the old mega-stores, and digital media is more convenient still. However, there was something special about walking into a big space that was packed with tens of thousands of different albums and being able to wander down the aisles browsing album art. One of my big hopes for virtual reality is to bring this kind of experience back to life, only with all the advantages of digital media. Imagine shopping in a virtual record shop, being able to walk down the aisles, pick a random album off the shelf and, just by looking at it, be able to listen to the tracks. Maybe there will even be a way to chat up other people browsing the same genre!

happycube 11y ago

Semi-related: MCA (Yes, Universal) invented the Laserdisc, their bean counters made the disks crappy (by underspeccing the factory), Phillips made unreliable crappy players that couldn't play said crappy disks... and Pioneer made it all actually work.