The Compact Disc (1982) [video]

A bit of survivorship bias here, if I may... the really crappy stuff from any non-current era does not get posted and reposted periodically here.

40s naval engineering videos are the peak pedagogical value. It's ELI5 yet describing analog computing or sophisticated mechanical engineering devices. Then there's US college videos about waves and impedance.. another piece of beauty.

minidiscs were also quite rugged.. a real pity that this format never blossomed

I think they meant it more as in how FM radio quality is also better than AM, until it doesn't

> Of course we all know now that CDs must be treated with essentially the same care as vinyl records

Not really. There is really a magnitude of improvement here. It doesn't matter how many fingerprints you leave on the CD, just wipe them off with cloth (and particularly almost any cloth, since I don't know of many cloth types than can scratch plastic -- unless they are full of dirt+sand to begin with). If you put your fingers on a vinyl, the oil in your fingers is already degrading the data permanently. And if you try to wipe it off with cloth, likely you will only mess it even further.

And if you ever have a real problem with tape, good luck.

With all due respect, for a medium that has no fixed protective case, CD is almost indestructible. (For nitpickers: In comparison to everything else. It is obviously not truly indestructible. )

CDs are actually fairly resilient... on the bottom. Unfortunately the reflective data layer is very close to the label on the top, so it’s pretty easy to damage them from that direction. Label-side damage is visible as the little pinpricks of light shining all the way through the now-damaged reflective layer when held up to a light. This is why taking a CD out of something and setting it upside down to “protect it” while it’s not in its case is actually the most dangerous thing you can do. This is also why “all-over print” discs are more resilient than discs with simple lettering printed on to the silver disc top surface, e.g. Japanese PSX games vs American ones.

That all depends on the player.

I has a SONY car changer for a decade or so. It was made in the 90's.

It played everything near perfectly. Seriously. I took scotch brite to a promo disc once, and it still played, the only difference being about a 2x buffer time to get started and a bit more sensitivity to road bumps.

I have never owned anything as good.

It played discs I could not rip a track from.

In my view, and based on that experience, the format was way more robust than most of us experienced in practice.

Cost cutting on the error correction and laser handling had a negative impact on overall robustness to a fault.

That SONY was so good, I could go to the street market and buy discs a few for a buck and nearly all of them played well. I got asked how I was playing them regularly by the vendors selling me a lot of cheap, too scratched to work discs.

I was similarly amazed to learn that a couple of years ago, after borrowing a concert recording CD from a library marked "Recorded in West Germany ©1983." One that the disc was in such great condition after 3 decades, and two that I had modern devices still able to read it. The same could not be said for many other types of digital or analog media...

8 Bit Guy is very cool.

I'm saddened to hear the CD called a "retro format". Next you'll tell me the DVD is not the cool new thing from the future :(

(Seriously though, I have a hard time dealing with people calling the CD retro. To me not even the audio tape is really old... I grew up listening to music on tapes, the CD was the new thing!)

The interesting thing about vinyl compared to any other format is that not only is it analog, it’s also mechanical! I think that gives the technology an aesthetic that can’t be matched by other analog formats, it also works without electricity! The whole idea of engraving sound into a physics object is a still pretty wild and something that’s been going on for over 100 years!

Well they were expensive... like 30€ a disk. cassettes were easy to duplicate and cheaper.

Those are nitpicks. The capacity (450x) and speed jumps (20% more at just 1X, to 7 MiB/s at 48X) from floppies to CDs was enormous. Vinyl doesn't have ECC, while most kinds of CD tracks do.

CD-R was partially muti-use if not closed and adding another session.

I never had a CD stand-alone player or computer CD writer or player wear-out. Sony Discman and Plextor burners. I was doing daily, multi-disc (9-10) backups to media and never had a problem. You must've been using cheap drives or unbalanced media at too high of a speed.

> Aside from their limited space, I much preferred the floppy to the CD.

The use cases where each of those would be more convenient than the other are largely different. The CD had a capacity that you couldn't even begin to approach with any reasonable amount of floppies, and the read or write speeds of floppies would have made handling larger files rather cumbersome even if they had the capacity.

If you had a 20 kilobyte Word file or perhaps even a few smallish image files that you wanted to transfer, a floppy would of course be much, much more convenient than going through all the trouble of burning a CD.

Indeed, so prescient at the end but also at the end, for contrast, too newb to not keep their fingerprints off the read side of the disc!

Especially the back. They fixed this with DVDs so the reflective layer is sandwiched between polycarbonate. Not sure if they could have pulled that off, though, seeing how big of an issue disc rot can be.