Were CDs the peak of physical media?

Were CDs the peak of physical media?
>high quality, 16-bit with dithering and 44.1kHz ought to be enough for anybody
>Red Book audio standard was very strict making sure record labels didn't fuck around too much and devalue the brand
>no DRM or copy protection unless you disregard Red Book like that Sony rootkit and others
>high compatibility, only one real major compatibility break in the format's lifetime with CD-RW/mp3 CDs.
>portable, lightweight and cheap
>easily rip and burn data (yes I know CD drives and burners came out well after CDs were established), only disadvantage was recordable/erasable CDs were never very popular and had issues, were never a complete replacement to floppies
>relatively durable, and while scratched easily modern players can easily get around this. Only longevity issue is disc rot.

Every other popular physical media format had much worse issues, vinyl is inconsistant quality, takes a high end setup to sound good and is generally inconvenient. Tapes are extremely inconvenient due to being linear with no random access and have degrading quality. DVDs are fine but only 480p and have inconsistent masters, mostly anamorphic widescreen (720x480, not square pixels) and lossy surround sound. Blurays look good but have crippling DRM issues, they are still difficult to play on computers even 12 years after the format came out.

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Compact discs still is the epitome of physical media, for the purpose of distribution of music. vinyl is comfy but expensive and technically inferior.

You are both absolutely correct.

According to Nyquist, carefully and precisely sampled 16 bit/44.1 kHz linear PCM samples will capture all signals in two discrete channels from DC - 22,050 cycles per second per channel, in such a way that no assumptions are made about the original frequency components, their relative phases or amplitudes.

All the information in each of the left and right 22.05 kHz wide base band channels will be preserved, and can be recovered later as Analog to Digital and D/A tech improves.

Which is important if the musicians are now dead, or the band broke up.

What gave digital a bad name at first were poor A/D and D/A converters. Real-world circuits are messy, so to capture an accurate 44.1/16 bit data stream, you really want ten-bit, 176.4 kHz A/D and D/A's, since a couple of bits always get "lost in translation."

This situation was made worse by an early marketing slogan, "perfect sound forever", which the hastily re-mastered-on-very-lousy-early-SONY A/D converters, which could barely sample 44.1 kHz with poor analog brick-wall filters, with perhaps 14 or 15 bits of actual precision, clearly weren't.

Once high-speed, time-accurate oversampling converters, with digital anti-aliasing filters were introduced, the sound got *really good* - basically transparent.

But the next fuck-up was that the 90+ dB of dynamic range afforded by 16 bits, intended to capture the full range of an orchestra from solo violin to full roar with levels set just right, began to be abused.

Since most pop music needed nowhere near 90+ dB of dyn range, bands started demanding that mastering engineers keep increasing their "loudness", moving the sub-band of dynamics they were actually playing in higher up the 16 bit, 90+ dB range of the actual PCM samples, making their disc sound "louder" (Hey, these amps go to 11!) given the same overall system loudness setting.

That's the loudness wars, which fucked up PCM sound again.

cont.
Now, people think vinyl sounds better than digital because of this, but what the hipster brain may not grok is that vinyl, by severely limiting dynamic range, forces the mastering engineers to tell the bands to fuck off when they say "Crank it up to 11", because the needle will jump right out of the goddamn groove if they do.

Also, it's really easy to hear shitty sounding digital anywhere.

People fucking around with vinyl usually have systems capable of sounding even better with digital - but not when fed from a shitty USB DAC of laptop's headphone jack.

t.fifty year old EE who saw it all unfold, and was never so happy to never have to deal with fucking vinyl cleaning, needles, distortion, mistracking, cleanin, surface noise wow or fucking flutter again.

Based boomer.

I should have said:

"All the information in each of the left and right 22.05 kHz wide base band channels will be preserved, and can be recovered later as D/A tech improves."

If your A/D is bad, that information's obviously gone forever.

>my method of digital data storage is better than your method of sigital data storage

Nope.

Based Generation Jones.

We are the first, distinct post-Boomer generation. We're not really Gen X but we're often mistaken for them, or even worse - Boomers.

If you Google us, you'll find we're most definitely not either one of those.

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no CDs are the worst of media. There's a reason they are becoming obsolete in many countries.

look on ebay or charity shops people can't get rid of them fast enough. You can buy like 20 for a pound

I wish there was a single thread without edgy contrarians

>most of Generation Jones did not grow up with World War II veterans as fathers, and for them there was no compulsory military service and no defining political cause, as opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War had been for older boomers

so even shittier than millenials who had to grow up in the banking crisis, thinking everybody pays with monopoly money all around the world?

Hehe yes goy. Stop buying physical media. Subscribe to our new streaming service or buy lossy music from our online store.

>live forever for some reason
>use streaming services
>pay infinite money for music

>minimal storage size
>easily ruined by scratches or debris

Sure they’re cheap, but fuck off if you think they’re anywhere near the best physical media. Hell, a portable hard drive is superior to CD’s

I vote flash drives are the superior storage media

Lossless digital sampling is quite different from processed signals, such as MP3 for audio or h.264 for video, obviously.

It's not just media we're discussing here.

However, I've found that physical media indeed have certain human-factor advantages:

1) The media persists and can be read without requiring any host system to continue functioning. A USB stick will fail in time, as will any complex storage device, whereas chemically stable media will not fail unless grossly abused (e.g. 90% RH, 100+ degree Fahrenheit storage for years, 24/7 UV exposure, etc.)

2) PHY media travels easily. It isn't sitting on a big backing store with a lot of your other, private shit, and it's cheap as fuck, so you can just say "Here" and give it to someone, or take it with you to listen to or watch, on a wide array of common and cheap playback devices, without fear of loss.

3) Physical media persists, and wanders around the world. You never know whose life it may change, or who may discover something they really love when your disc falls into their hands some day.

Why encourage anyone to abandon this technological option?

The hacker ethic embraces freedon of choice and options for all.

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You have to care for things, Jr.

You can't just jizz on everything, then rub Cheeto dust into it, and expect it to work.

You need to swing a fucking vacuum cleaner around the house once in a while, chief.

I've got a fuckton of PHY media stored in cool dry places since 1987 or so, and not a single disc has failed, so fuck right off with the FUD you fucking hoser.

All active electronics will fail, if just left to sitting for years. Lead-free solder and tin whiskers exacerbate this.

This is why old quartz watches aren't worth jack, but a 1950 Omega Automatic mechanical watch can bring a fortune.

Most of all y'all niggas' haven't been out of your daddy's dick long enough to learn this - but you'll see soon enough.

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All that's been said nothwithstanding, we could really use a higher-density optical disk, perhaps using a UV laser.

A reliable, 1TB recordable optical disk for a buck or two would be pretty useful, I'd think.

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>implying I mistreat my tech or don’t clean my house

Anyone who denies the fragility of CD’s is a liar. You have to handle them like they’re a priceless artifact or something just to keep them from breaking.

Sure tech will degrade, but at what point are you going to be unable to continually back up your data to new drives? At what point is your collection of data going to be so valuable that it absolutely has to be preserved on a CD to prevent it being lost to a bad drive? The only time that would happen is if the world ended and then chances are you’re no longer alive, your fragile CD’s have already been ruined, or it doesn’t even matter anymore because no one cares about what you have stored and there’s no optical drive around to view your media.

You’re just a nostalgic boomer who can’t get over the joy of having to insert multiple CD’s during an install or have to constantly change CD’s to listen to more than 10 songs. The future is now, old man. Get used to it.

>You have to handle them like they’re a priceless artifact
Not really, you just put them back in their case when they're done. Just don't touch the bottom of it and you're fine. Not saying CD was the best, just saying they're not THAT delicate.

>You have to handle them like they’re a priceless artifact or something just to keep them from breaking.
Show us your gorilla hands.

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No. Laserdisc was.
>all the stuff you said about CDs applies to them because there's a CD audio track modulated into most of them
>LP sleeves, huge artwork, liner notes
>Literally the best quality consumer standard definition analog video medium, also best quality consumer high definition analog video medium if you have a Hi-Vision player and a MUSE decoder
>Durable as fuck, even more so than CDs. Don't mention disc rot, it also happens to CDs
>can encode DTS or AC-3 5.1 surround sound
>CAV discs store every single frame discretely, something no physical media has done since
>Have short content like music videos or promotional stuff? There's CD-Sized LDs, and also 8" LDs

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Streaming is garbage, music streaming is like 192kbps and movie streaming is even worse. A typical HD stream has a similar bitrate to 480p DVDs, and a 4k stream has as similar bitrate to 1080p blurays. CDs are great for the reasons I listed in OP, they provide near perfect audio with no DRM.

thanks for the post

i love going to Goodwill and picking up CDs for $2.00 while ppl give them away not knowing how to tap their potential

So when I download music, do I need to search for CD images, as opposed to mp3? Even if theyre 320kbps v0?

I guarantee that you cannot hear the difference.

>>Durable as fuck, even more so than CDs. Don't mention disc rot, it also happens to CDs
Citation needed fgt

CDs were awesome because they figured out what human ears could hear and they didn't compromise to bring the cost down. If you weren't satisfied with the sound from a CD you knew it wasn't due to the format. If DVD did the engineering equivalent with video it would have been something like lossless, 100Mpixel frames, 240Hz, and 6 byte pixels.

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>thinkpad gf with magnesium chassis
>get her hot and wet
>she explodes
forever doomed to no love life

That or get flacs ripped from CDs. A properly encoded flac loses nothing. If you're like me then you can't hear the difference, but I transcode flac to 256kbps opus in situations where space matters. 256k opus beats 320k mp3 in transparency and space savings.

mp3 was invented after a decade of evolution
no one can hear the difference between v0 and lossless

ill just stick with WAV

what is v0

>Red Book audio standard was very strict

lol no it wasn't, it doesn't define a ton of shit properly, like the starting block of each sample or anything/everything regarding subcodes.

The only "strict" part was that they started suing labels who put bullshit on their discs so they did not conform to Red Book but to some other book instead.

I still have a bunch of Cactus Shield cds which have shitload of errors making them unreadable, but a cdda player can interpolate over the bad sectors to still sound fine.

The enhanced maxi cds with the music videos were dope as hell for their time. This was before YouTube, when downloading a music video (assuming you can find one) took a full day.

I believe FLAC is better than WAV for archiving because it has better tag support, and of course a slightly lower file size. WAV is only good for editing and burning Red Book CDs for distribution.

LAME (mp3 encoder) preset for highest quality with variable bitrate

I really hope that gauges die out forever. I would be so fucking ashamded of my children if they got gauges in their ears.

CD's were engineered to be audibly transparent.
16bits/44.1KHz is absofuckinglutely perfect.
I hate shitniggers who believe they *need*a better nsr than 92dB
I have my fucking doubts that anyone who enforces these claims can hear a 18500Hz tone anyway.
I hate being able to hear it, since it'll all go down from here anyway.

>tl:dr try to redbook std. Vs hi res ABX

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I rarely use PHY media, preferring to stream WAV or video files from a local machine, but I enjoy the option of making them and using them from time to time.

A single movie or album of songs is a natural logical unit of entertainment, so physical disks make a lot more sense for pbotos, movies or audio now than data or software.

Gold CD/DVD are still the standard for archival data, though.

And NO ONE misses installation floppies/cds/whatever.

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>44.1kHz CBR mp3

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thanks

i prefer WAV since nearly anything can play them

MiniDiscs are, but like always, Americans and the record industry's absolute fear of 'mu stealing music' are too retarded.

For the purposes of mass adoption maybe, but have you heard Blu-Ray Audio? It's incredible.

nope.

While the Sony/Philips patent on the CD format was in force, adherence to the Red, Yellow and Green Book standards were strictly enforced by the patent holders.

After they expired, format violations became more common, as with many standards.

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wtf i love cds now

Anything lossless is fine. Formats like FLAC are great.

WAV is just brain dead simple raw data, like .BMP image files. No compression, no nuthin'.

Doesn't understand that a good mastering engineer can increase loudness and and preserve the dynamic range.

Pre loudness war CDs were the peak of consumer-level audio media quality

>The only "strict" part was that they started suing labels who put bullshit on their discs so they did not conform to Red Book but to some other book instead.
They were suing labels because they using the compact disk logo while breaking standards with their nonsense and giving the certification a bad name. If the labels wanted to press shit to disc, they would not be allowed to use the magic "Compact Disc" logo that says it will play in any standard player.

So much this.
I don't use them like I used to either, but the option is nice. Shame drives are becoming increasingly rare. Being able to sneakernet files on a chucker disk was nice.

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CD get your basic bitch ass out of here

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I love CD but it is too short for muh (((Mahler))), operas, etc.

Your numbers mean absolutely nothing because you're not mentioning codecs or encoding quality settings. Just telling you.

Man, I like Digital Signal Processing. Last semester I was the king of it, it's also relevant to my interests since I enjoy composing music as well. Should I learn more of it? Wondering if there are any job opportunities for DSP.

>best quality consumer high definition analog video medium if you have a Hi-Vision player and a MUSE decoder
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA, no.
Also lrn2greentext.

Just like a good programmer can write good programs, but there's always pressure from the management to do it quickly and dirt cheap.

There was a research into multiple blocking lasers a few years ago that made very high densities possible.
I don't know if we'll ever see it in production, though. After all, it would face competition from cloud in the consumer space and magnetic tapes in enterprise.

I think research into consumer disc based formats have more or less died out. Sad because there was some interesting ones like the holodiscs, but its not viable at all to continue research into those formats. Well not for regular consumers.
Sad really. It will be interesting to see what happens if a company like netflix, apple, amazon went tits up for some strange reason (like that will ever happen...) and millions of people lost their digital media.

Holo discs were the best vaporware.

So, what's the best way to store data? CD, DVD, Blu-Ray Disks or some other? I want to store some shit, and i want that shit to last a really long time.

gold long term storage cd's/dvd's, server grade backup tapes, "cold" backup drives etc. and store it in the best conditions possible.
Do not put all your eggs in one basket, spread out your long term backup out to different media and different locations. No one format is THE best, but some last longer than others and so on.
Unless you can engrave binary into a diamond or some shit.

For long term M-Disc Blu-rays or LTO drives. Tape drives are expensive but tape is cheap, while Blu-ray burners are relatively cheap but the discs are somewhat pricy.

hand size correlates to penis size so you just played yourself
now go put your tiny dick in a cdrom's hole and fuck it

I can't even hear the difference between 128kbs and lossless... :'(

the first word of your whole post already revealed that you're retarded

I don't really like to use them anymore nor I like to burn anything on them but they are good for music and stuff. Still, during all those years I don't know how to store them properly so I will have to go one day through all those boxes of CDs I have and see what can be or is worth of saving.

>deaf vaginal demon
color me surprised

What, me namefagging? Forgot to delet, I was LARPing on Jow Forums.

Read Can anyone provide samples? I'm not deaf, I can hear 18~19kHz no problem. Maybe I just don't know what to listen for, idk.

Minidisc was the peak because it was the most aesthetic.

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You should listen for quality. 128kbps should sound more muffled and "artifacted??" due to compression. The whole point is that you with compression lose some data so the sound isn't so much crisp, it will lose some from its eq range as well, so the basses and highs are not clean or even present, usually such a low quality audio recording has too much mids.

>highs are not clean
I noticed that but on 24/96 where the crash and china sounded better on the higher res version. Tried both the original CD and downsampling, both resulted in the same. I had to really strain my ears though and it was only a specific part of a specific track.

I don't know, I'm not saying like I'm some audiophile who hears every little tiny shit but when you compare 128 and loseless, the cymbals usually sound like if they would be recorded underwater. Like, to be honest, I like lo-fi music because it sounds more natural to my ears, but the difference is very clear for me. However, I don't see a point in storing music for myself in something higher than 320 mp3

this is why I normalize everything to 98%

what's wrong with 101%?

>lossy ATRAC
Nothing of value was lost.

what's wrong with 210% ? afraid of earrape trap?

Hi-MDs record in linear PCM

This media was almost alien in terms of data capacity.
Everyone was there, just riding their 40MB harddrives and 256KB cartridges and then BOOM, 650 Fucking megabytes, out of nowhere.
Took years to we get to actually use this space well.

Did those even come to the US? MD anything was uncommon but I can't remember any players/recorders that supported it.

Good post.

When I master my music, there are two copies. One slammed to the limit for the kiddos I deal with, and one that I intend to listen to.

Nothing worse than a blown out fucked up loud recording IMO.

>Near perfectly mastered CD
>HD800S paired with pricey Chord Mojo DAC/AMP
>.wav files directly ripped from CD
>quiet outside and in my apartment
No better feeling

You know a lot of CDs from the 80s are simply tape transfers. While industrial tape is usually High Quality, it's still analog with some noise. Even the weird 44.1kHz was chosen because of tape transferring.

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>mu stealing music
Nobody here wanted to invest in another format after CDs gained popularity. Not everything is a conspiracy, retard.

youtube.com/watch?v=m31r1GHPPdA

no soundstage brah

>16bits/44.1KHz is absofuckinglutely perfect.

nope. lots of stupid heads in this thread.

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He obviously was saying perfect at being transparent. Transparent simply means that you can't tell the difference between the source and the copy. I'll memeber to use analog when listening to 3 Microsecond beeps.

Pressed redbook CD's are incredibly resilient, even to the worst scratches, the error correction of the spec works incredibly well specially for it's time

Touching the bottom won't fuck up any CD unless your fingers are made of steel
And even then you can polish most scratches away, or fill the deepest ones with something as simple as grease
Scratching the top it's another history altogether
t. only used CDs as a kid, scratching the shit out of them with the pavement

There's a few CDs that also succumbed to disc rot, really few of them though, by the time CDs were popular binders had been ironed out by pretty much everyone
Yes, the consumer HiVision tape systems were pretty bad compared to LaserDiscs

The three middle impulses are due to an oversampling / FIR filter. A filterless NOS dac like the TDA1543x4 has the impulse response you need and demand.

Why haven't we seen albums of uncompressed 24 bit 192k hz music being released on blu rays? Seems like an untapped market, with the lengths audiophiles will go to. Blu rays are pretty cheap now too.

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>>high compatibility, only one real major compatibility break in the format's lifetime with CD-RW/mp3 CDs.

One is audio CD, the other it's Data CD.

Despite the fact that 48 kHz and 24 bit have more quality than any analog medium that has ever been invented, audiophools will still stick with anal because "muh stairsteps".

Folks, I can tell U So Much

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minimum should be 1411.2 kbps ( 16*44.1khz) or 1536 kbps ( 16*48khz )
9216 kbps ( 24*192khz )

>wow DSD looks good
>wait, 3µs duration, what's that
>1s/3µs = 333,333
dang, what is this a sampling from? because it sure as shit ain't human-audible sound

>loudness war means every cd from the the mid 90s was compressed to fuck and ended up being a wall of noise with no dynamic range
Nah