The Rapid Start (& End) of the CD

Errata:
- To quote friend of the show Andy: “You said that JVC’s AHD system used magnetic tape. Actually, as your graphic shows, AHD was a disc-based spinoff (pun intended) from their unsuccessful VHD videodisc system, which used a 25 cm disc that stored data capacitively (yeah, I know—weird!)”

Links:

[n.miller]

I don't understand why everyone thinks the CD is dead. It isn't. Any music shop I visit is full of CDs, records and definitely no pre-recorded tapes. CD sales aren't that pathetic. They still are decent enough to allow the format to exist.

Streaming audio might be partly to blame for lagging enthusiasm for CD audio, but I'd still put my money on the best audio quality experience from CDs and DVDs (especially in the niche market of surround sound audio).

Having started my record collection going back to the late 60's, I gave up vinyl collecting after buying my first (expensive) Technics MASH CD player in the 80's.

My vinyl discs took a back seat for over a decade or more. Only lately have I started playing my record collection and even buying replacement styluses for my "classic" vintage phono cartridges. It ain't cheap! I've also covered myself with buying multiple CD burners, players and Blu-ray players. I know some day these items will vanish and I want my adult children the opportunity to still listen to my vast collection when I'm dead and gone, no matter what format my music is in.

[LatitudeSky]

Worked for a contractor who helped TDK convert a VHS tape factory into one that also made recordable CDs. It was an incredibly expensive project that required adding a huge clean room and massive robot machines to make the blank CDs. It was very odd to see ultra high tech on one side but through the little windows, we could also see the VHS line running. Anyway, TDK threw a ton of money at this plant expecting blank CDs to be in high demand, and TDK was determined to cash in. The plant went online almost the same time similar plants went online in Taiwan and China. The price went from a couple dollars a disc for TDK's premium product, to 10 cents a disc for something from CMC or Taiyo Yuden. TDK made great blanks. But nobody wanted to pay a premium. They ended up scrapping the whole plant, VHS and all, and taking a massive write-off that drove them out of making media at all. It was an unmitigated disaster. Apparently nobody expected the cheaper manufacturers to ramp up so quickly or so cheaply. I have no idea how they didn't see it coming.

[chengong]

The dynamic range for audio is not the range of frequencies it can play but the range of amplitude it can play. More specifically it’s the ratio of the amplitude of noise, and the loudest possible amplitude.

[Francisco....]

Nice documentary! Thank you.
2024 and I'm still buying CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays proudly.

[CaesarNeptuneStudios]

CDs are still awesome and better quality than most streaming services. Also fun to collect

[Markimark]

I still use CDs, because they’re easy to play for a physical media format. Even I kind of prefer CDs over vinyl records nowadays, because vinyl prices have skyrocketed, while CD prices have dropped significantly.

[Wizardess]

In 1982 my ears still worked. A friend ran an AV rental business. He invited me over with a couple other people to hear his new toy. I was utterly gob smacked. It was wonderful even with quiet passages that were wrecked by tape or vinyl record base noise levels. As soon as I could afford one, I got it.

{^_^}

[bill]

@3:00... the steps to create “stampers” for molding a CD is: a glass plate is coated with photoresist, exposed appropriately in an exposure tool, post exposure baked and developed similar to a wafer in a chip fab. Then that device is (spray) coated with a silver solution (to make it conductive) then placed into a nickel electroplating bath (the process is called electroforming.) Once the plating is done, the metal part is separated from the glass master and called the "father." Then many of the next generation (called mothers) can be electroformed from that father. And from the many mothers can be produced many "stampers" - which is the actual part placed into the injection molding machine. Each stamper can produce thousands of CDs. So the succession of “tone” is: glass master is "positive", the father negative, the mother positive, the stamper negative - and thus the molded CD is positive - so you have pits where you want pits…

[otbricki]

I bought my first cds in the 80s. Still have them, and rip them to use in my home music servers. Still sound teriffic. They are widely available inexpensively, many used and sound perfect. Very stable long term. For me they are very alive still.

[natecaine]

If ever there was a "Nobel Prize in Engineering" it should be awarded to Philips and Sony for the Compact Disc.

Incorporating clever physics for tracking and focus, lens design and laser diodes. The use of multiple servos (focus, tracking, etc.). Linear rack-and-pinon track-to-track tracking vs. Philips D'Arsonval-style angular meter-movement-style tracking. 3-beam tracking with diffraction gratings and additional track side sensors. Rod-lens vs. knife-edge focusing. Expensive 16-bit ECL D/A soon replaced by 1-bit bit-stream DACs...with oversampling as well. All allowed the disc to be cheap to manufacture. BLDC motors in spindle design. The incorporation of advanced error detection and correction, further meant cheap and easy to produce discs (because more defects could be tolerated).

There was a perfect intersection between these needs and the semiconductor manufacturing processes at the time. Sony's CDP-101 initially had four VLSI chips to handle the process. The EFM decoder and data recovery. An address sequencer to place the recovered data into a small static RAM, while simultaneously reading data out to be sent to the audio D/A convertors. Meanwhile an Error Detection and Correction accessed the RAMs data and scrubbed it for errors, or possibly interpolating or masking errors. The architecture was cleverly partitioned that should the Error Correction chip not initially work, the remaining system could get by with interpolating and masking. Further, Philips and Sony made several strategic decisions towards a complicated design, but cheap to manufacture. The CD disc MASTERING is very expensive, but allows the CD disk themselves to be easily stamped out for (at the time) about 75-cents each.

So many wonderful technologies, clever physics, robust manufacturing along with the information technology that made the error detection and correction possible. As well as Philips and Sony's correct marketing decisions made it all possible.

Seldom have the stars been so fortuitously aligned!

[RappaTui]

One reason the initial forecasts for CD were so far off is that Sony and Phillips did NOT expect people to replace their entire LP collection. They figured early adopters would be audiophiles with extensive collections who would be older and only buying a few CDs per year (I think the forecast was two per year). Instead, both the players and CDs were much more popular than expected and people did indeed buy CDs of all their favorite recordings.

[nicestmanintheworld]

Genuine question dude, how are you not burnt out? You release awesome vids every day, doesn't it get tiring? Love your content either way, take care of yourself please

[trevorbartram]

Philips, where are they now, so sad. CDs were an easy sell after suffering poor vinyl during the oil crisis of the 70s. I waited for the first Philips front loader in 85 before adopting. I now have >2000 CDs. I worked at Plessey Electronic System Research (Roke Manor, UK) in the 70s & 80s. In the early 80s Philips demoed their HDTV system to our technical society. The video was impressive & so were the half dozen 19" racks of equipment needed to produce it. Philips had a long run producing lasting success from initial failures, their story is worth a YT vid.

[johnz]

I never stopped buying CDs . I started buying CDs in 1986, SACDs in 1999 and Blu Ray Audio discs in 2013. This week I have bought Seven CDs . Listening to CDs is the best fun I can have without taking off my trousers!

[Watcher]

Cds are not dead. In 2009 there were ads saying its the end of cds. 15 years passed, cds are still released

[douglasscott]

There's one last spool of blank CD's in our supply closet, after having burned thousands from 2001-2015. Those last few will never be used!

[xraymind]

I remember my uncle had good vinyl record collection of classical music with a high end vacuum tube amp audio system. He was so shock about CD audio quality that he switch to buying classical music CD instead.

[donaZor]

Why do I love Asianometry, besides quality of subjects and writing, he doesn’t show his face every 5 frames!! It feels so much better and fair when it’s about knowledge. 👍

[FlintIronstag]

The way I got around the high price of CDs in the 1990s was by having multiple accounts with BMG and Columbia House. You could get something like 7 "free"(still had to pay shipping and handling) CDs if you bought 1 at full price. I would cancel my membership after buying the required amount and then wait a bit before starting again. I used my parent's, grandmother's, and my own PO box to make it look like different people. At one point I had 5 memberships going at once. It took them awhile to figure out what I was doing, and I accumulated a pretty big collection of CDs for average price of around $3-$4 per disc.

[tambourine_man]

12:24 If you are sampling above Nyquist, you’re not “approximating” a continuous signal, you’re are *perfectly* representing it. There’s no information loss. You only need two discreet points to perfectly describe a line, no matter how continuous it is. Check out the Nyquist-Shannon theorem.