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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that laser looks enormous by today's standards! We take tiny, dirt cheap, diode lasers for granted now, but it really casts some perspective on how ambitious the format was in 1982.

I do gain some wry amusement from all the business about "scratch-proof" and the way he said "it doesn't matter how much I manhandle the disk, it will continue to give very good quality" - while holding it gingerly from the edges! Of course we all know now that CDs must be treated with essentially the same care as vinyl records. Tape cassettes were the real durable format. (Bonus chuckle: the lady presenter at the end who has obviously taken "fingerprint-proof" at face value, holding up an absolutely filthy disc...)

Very prescient prediction at the end; the obsolescence of the compact disc was indeed precipitated by the development of solid-state storage, over 20 years later. "Don't laugh!" she assures us. Indeed...

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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.

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.

> 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. )

If you play a vinyl record you’re damaging it permanently.

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

My favourite medium ever. Still rocking one in my car, one in my home studio and one in my lounge entertainment unit. Only ceased production in 2019. I’m hoping it has a comeback like vinyl did! Haha but we all know that any medium that had a record function was killed my American music labels ;:

I still have my old minidisc player. Exquisite piece of hardware mechanical engineering from Sony.

I always enjoyed hearing that satisfying sound of inserting in the minidisc, and closing the door as the internal mechanisms aligns the media and prepares it for playback. Now that’s nostalgia.

Also DAT. (F the RIAA.)

In production, ADAT using S-VHS tapes.

Yeah, I miss the minidisc. But I always thought the sliding door mechanism was a possible point of failure on the units.

And then, they were also rather expensive. Costing about $15 per unit.

And then, there’s data density. It didn’t seem like it could hold enough data. Or transfer it fast enough.

But, can modern day flash drives ever become as cheap as minidiscs?

I always have a concern that flash drives can easily become damaged or corrupted, since you’re actively plugging it directly into an electrical source. I once got my flash drive fried, and the USB port was also fried. I never trusted them again.

So I tend to buy SD Cards, and treat them sorta like minidiscs, for my stale cold storage needs.

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

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