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Compact Disc


Jeff Wexler

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Good article in The Guardian about the birth of the CD and why it's a format on the way out.

"Thirty years ago this month, Dire Straits released their fifth album, Brothers in Arms. En route to becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time, it revolutionised the music industry. For the first time, an album sold more on compact disc than on vinyl and passed the 1m mark. Three years after the first silver discs had appeared in record shops, Brothers in Arms was the symbolic milestone that marked the true beginning of the CD era.

“Brothers in Arms was the first flag in the ground that made the industry and the wider public aware of the CD’s potential,” says the BPI’s Gennaro Castaldo, who began a long career in retail that year. “It was clear this was a format whose time had come.”         READ the ARTICLE

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My first CD was the Japanese pressing of Abbey Road, which came out around October/November 1983. I didn't even own a player until the spring of 1984. Thriller was definitely among the very first CDs I bought at Tower Records on Sunset not long after I bought the player. A few years later, a music video producer/client of mine was kind enough to get it autographed for me, after he had a meeting with Jackson:

Thriller%20CD%20copy_zpsoug5sban.jpg?t=1

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My first CD was the Japanese pressing of Abbey Road, which came out around October/November 1983. I didn't even own a player until the spring of 1984. Thriller was definitely among the very first CDs I bought at Tower Records on Sunset not long after I bought the player. A few years later, a music video producer/client of mine was kind enough to get it autographed for me, after he had a meeting with Jackson:

Thriller%20CD%20copy_zpsoug5sban.jpg?t=1

​How was the Milk and Cookies?

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When CDs first came out, a lot of reasonable people said they sound horrible.

They often did sound horrible: engineers hadn't had to deal with aliasing distortion before, oversampling wasn't available, Nyqist filtering was usually in the analog domain... and we didn't even have a common language or measurement procedure for it.

CDs were 'metallic' or 'brittle' or whatever you wanted to call it... but IMHO this was usually a way to try to describe aliasing or the distortions of too sharp a filter.

Then we got into trouble with cumulative math errors in 16 bit files, and the first common solution was very low level gating. (A mastering engineer friend of mine asked "what happened to the echo tails?" on the classical piece he was doing.) Popular language: CDs were too sterile.

Those problems eventually got fixed. While some people prefer analog distortion, very few are trying to make the case now that 16 bit linear is no good.

-

My point? The same kind of development can be happening to compressed digital music. We're developing new algorithms, encode and decode hardware  is getting smarter, and storage / transmission costs are going down. So while I mourn the CD (and all my now useless CD/DAT hardware), I have every faith that quality will continue.

 

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I read The Guardian online all the time. 

Hey, pindrop, how about a Profile image for you? If you send me something I can put it up for you (or you can do it yourself, very simple now with the new site, just drag and drop). I'm on the campaign, again, to get images in place of the boring and faceless silhouettes. 

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Not mentioned in the article was the huge campaign from major label records to recruit salespeople at retail to encourage the customers to shift to purchasing CDs  I worked as manager of a small chain of stores (Wuxtry Records) from the early to late 1980s, and the pressure was relentless.

I was curious why, and as many of my college classmates had gone to work at major labels in marketing, I asked them, and their bosses.  I was told by the field reps that the labels had discovered that they had a much higher profit margin on a CD than on a vinyl LP, but that they had discovered that the public did not like the 'experience' of using CDs.  A large proportion of the public liked handling LPs, and had a love of the artifact of the LP.  The brief, at least in the SE USA at major labels was to use the arguments of superior sound quality, durability, and 'convenience' (in storing smaller media) to convince people that they really didn't need to be that attached to the artifact that contained the experience they loved.

Ultimately, by the time MP3s became a useable way of carrying the music listening experience to the public, the labels were in a huge danger because they did not provide a perceived value to the public.  In the wake of the successful marketing of the MP3 player, was a collapse in traditional revenue at record labels, since customers did not really care if they bought or copied their files.

I see we have traveled a similar path with home video, with similar effects on the revenue streams for catalog content.

 

Edited by Christopher Mills
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Legend, hearsay, anecdotal~~~ Philips had surveyed music people about their new technology in the 70s and asked "How long should our device record?"

Otto Klemperer, a prominent conductor, said that it should be able to hold his version of Beethoven's 9th symphony, a rather lethargic version at 72 minutes.

Done deal

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When CDs first came out, a lot of reasonable people said they sound horrible.

They often did sound horrible: engineers hadn't had to deal with aliasing distortion before, oversampling wasn't available, Nyqist filtering was usually in the analog domain... and we didn't even have a common language or measurement procedure for it.

CDs were 'metallic' or 'brittle' or whatever you wanted to call it... but IMHO this was usually a way to try to describe aliasing or the distortions of too sharp a filter.

Then we got into trouble with cumulative math errors in 16 bit files, and the first common solution was very low level gating. (A mastering engineer friend of mine asked "what happened to the echo tails?" on the classical piece he was doing.) Popular language: CDs were too sterile.

Those problems eventually got fixed. While some people prefer analog distortion, very few are trying to make the case now that 16 bit linear is no good.

-

My point? The same kind of development can be happening to compressed digital music. We're developing new algorithms, encode and decode hardware  is getting smarter, and storage / transmission costs are going down. So while I mourn the CD (and all my now useless CD/DAT hardware), I have every faith that quality will continue.

 

​Hear hear (pun intended).

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I have one of the original proof-of-concept CDs, a solid glass platter (12cm wide, that was already agreed on) about 1/4in thick that had a few tracks of raw data on it. These were provided by Philips to companies who were developing CD players, so that they could design a compatible laser pickup assembly.   This was of course before the red-book standard was in place.

 

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My first CD was the 1988 release of Sgt. Pepper, which I traded an original (though beat up) copy of the LP for. Though I was now embarking on a digital life of CDs, I never stopped listening to vinyl, cassette, 8-track, or reel-to-reel until I had to move abroad. Years after I came back to the states I was reintroduced to analog music, and frankly will probably never buy another CD again. With all the rereleases of so many great albums, I can get a new copy of a beatles LP with a better mix/master than the original, and I don't have to compromise listening to/wearing out a collectors item (or pay the price of said collectors item!). Plus, everything comes with a free digital download as well, so why not?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Vinyl isn't dead.  I've had a big resurgence in interest in my NOS LPs from the 1980s, and even had a current label license old albums from our label for vinyl re-release.  Vinyl will never be the standard release format for music again, but there is a significant market for the format.  Re last-ability--we are still selling NOS LPs that were pressed in 1980, LPs that have been somewhat indifferently stored in sheds, attics etc. --they play just fine.

The CD has worked well for us in the same fashion cassettes did, only better.  For a small a label being able to do short runs of albums as needed (duping cassettes, then burning CDs, and now using CD fulfillment services like Kunaki) has been a great boon.  As an artist I have resisted having my albums atomized by having the separate pieces avail as individual downloads--it is important to me that work exist somewhere available to listeners in the order I conceived it to be heard, with the artwork I intended to accompany it and with the verbiage I would like to listeners to be able to read, if they choose to, while listening.  There is also the devestating, 19-th century style economics of downloads vs CD sales as they impact the actual makers of the music etc..  Case in point: I just received my statement from CDBaby, which handles digital distro as well as CD sales online.  The statement ran for many pages--impressive.  The bottom line: $57.33.  This was the income from hundreds and hundreds of tiny sales, many for $.01 each.  $57.33 was about what I might have gotten for selling 4 LPs full retail via our old mail-order business.  Thus I'll probably keep making "albums" in some physical form (prob CD) for some time--they serve me better both musically and financially.

philp

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