When CDs Launched in America (2016)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I didn't get my own CD player for another 5 or 6 years. I hesitated because I had a very good LP collection by that point, there weren't many CDs I liked that were available, and what about digital audio tape which was constantly hinted at. I also remember Neil Young's criticism of digital sound ... he used a screen door analogy (http://archive.harpers.org/1992/07/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1992-...) which seemed reasonable. But the prices of players and CDs were dropping. I got my first CD player, a Sony Discman, for about $100 in 1990, and my first CD, a Clash double disc ("Story of the Clash"?), which was $13 or $14 at Tower Records. The prices were comparable with phonographs and cassettes, so why not?
I remember like fm quality more than cd, the involontary mix sounded "better" musically, even though half the details went through the window
Also customers are never in control of the audio processing pipeline. You can have crystal clear mathematics at one point but lacking mic setups, bad studio.. so you'll get clear shit. All this in the possibility that back in the days, before digital-to-digital, people paid more attention on all the links of the music production chain (something I cannot attest but read a few times).
This article describes a lot of the problems with early DACs in the 1980s: https://www.stereophile.com/content/pdm-pwm-delta-sigma-1-bi...
> But they didn't go for the Burr-Brown solution of adding an adjustment pin to the converter chip, prescribing the use of an external trim pot, and praying for constant temperature.
Yikes! Some early CD players' sound quality was temperature dependent!
And explained via Video: https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
"A bandlimited continuous-time signal can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed from its samples if the waveform is sampled over twice as fast as it's highest frequency component."
This is where the magic 44.1 Khz sampling rate comes from. It is twice the limit of human hearing at 22 Khz.
Now I don't really understand why 16-bit or 1-bit makes a difference. Maybe someone can explain that to me.
You can think of quantisation error as introducing a noise term which gets added onto your signal. Higher bit depth lets you either reduce the amplitude of quantisation error or increase the range of signals you can represent (this is called dynamic range). Once you get to about 16 bits the quantisation noise is inaudible in even the quietest listening environments while at the same time the dynamic range is high enough to cause instant hearing damage. So, in a similar way to Nyquist telling us that more than 44kHz sample rate is pointless, dynamic range tells us that more than 16 bit depth is pointless (for playback. Things get a little more complicated for recording and editing).
Edit: as linked by another commenter, Monty from Xiph explaining it better than me: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013821/http://people.xip...
The short answer is that a commodity 1-bit DAC operating highly in excess of 44khz sounds a lot better than the earlier commodity DACs from the 1980s. The above link explains a lot of the problems that those DACs had, like the "zero crossing problem."
Otherwise, the quantization error becomes audible over ~80db. (Normal speech.)
Undithered / unshaped 16-bit audio can sound better than a record or cassette, although some people might prefer the sound of analog hiss to the choppiness of rounding.
> Under ideal laboratory conditions, humans can hear sound as low as 12 Hz[11] and as high as 28 kHz
It's just a fraction of an octave over 22khz, but that probably explains why some people swear that 96khz sources sound better than the CD.
Related: When I ripped my DVD-A collection, (I like music in surround,) I downsampled everything to 48khz, 16-bit. Later, if I played the original 96khz version, I did notice a slight crispness to the music. It's anecdotal, and I thought it was placebo effect, until I came across the above link.
Short answer: It's a means to an end. A 1-bit DAC with a DSP is easier to make than a 16-bit DAC with no DSP.
Long answer: If you're using dithering, every time you double the sampling rate, the perceived "bits per sample" for everything else doubles. IE: For sounds below 22khz, a 16-bit, 44khz will sound just as good as 15-bit, 88khz, or 14-bit, 176khz. Add some noise shaping, (basically, tuned hiss,) and the perceived bits per sample also go up.
Thus, a 1-bit per sample DAC at a super-high sampling rate, coupled with a well-designed DSP, and an analog low-pass filter, will perfectly preserve all of the information in the original 16-bit, 44khz signal. What the DSP does is move all of the distortion into frequencies well above the cutoff of the analog low-pass filter. That's how a 22khz tone comes out as a sine wave instead of a square wave.
I started reading this and it hurts. I looked author up and he is an Engineer who got EE degree in the fifties and simply doesnt understand digital electronics :( Still thinks signal coming out of Digital player is a staircase, makes comparison to cutting something down to micrometers and how its super difficult while digital chips have been fabbed on smaller processes more than 10 years before this article was even written. Thinks bits in the ADC dont flip all at once etc.
Remember, any time you see someone even mention jitter when it comes to CD audio you know they are an audiophool talking nonsense. Blind test studies proved even "golden ears" idiots cant tell the difference up to hundreds of nanoseconds of jitter. For example https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/26/1/26_1_50/_pdf Cheapest crystal oscillators have rms jitter measured in picoseconds, and obviously no one ever used RC oscillators in CD players :-) yet you see those morons replace factory crystals with "audio quality" snake oil ones to "fix jitter".
This is where the magic 44.1 Khz sampling rate comes from. It is twice the limit of human hearing at 22 Khz.
Now I don't really understand why 16-bit or 1-bit makes a difference. Maybe someone can explain that to me.
“…Except for early adopters -- such as college students with fast Net connections”
I suppose it used to be the college kids had the fastest internet, in the dorms and such, and were the drivers of innovation. I graduated a state school recently and let me tell you, our dorm internet was garbage. On top of that, it was heavily policed by IT and I don’t think it’d be possible for a student to host a web server or even burn some CD’s from torrents.
https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9f...
If I were a few years older, I'm sure I would have had binders full of CDs.
I wonder if they even will achieve that kind of status, a CD represents a perfect digital copy which is just as easily available in the same quality on things like Tidal*. Vinyl at least isn't just retro appeal, some of it is down to being a tangible way to support artists when streaming is perceived as not being profitable for all but the largest acts and it does have a different subjective quality to digital music.
*Having said that, I've been building up a library of offline digital music for the first time in over a decade because of rights holders randomly deleting tracks off streaming services on a whim. In a pleasingly circular way some of these are rips of my record collection!
I was working with a scientist who had connections with Sony Japan, who had 6'-tall rackmount CD writers.
We would mail a 9-track tape to Tokyo with sample remote sensing data, and they'd mail back a CD. Although it didn't contribute to the scientific projects directly, we were able to demonstrate the new technology to various groups at a national lab.
Overall the feeling was that it was very cool to have that amount of data on a device that small.
I'd say the first pressed data CD I saw was the Microsoft Encarta (encyclopedia) CD around 1993:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta
About a year or so later I was one of the first users of the Optimem 1 GB 12" optical drives. We used that to archive large amounts of software and experimental data. It was nice to be able to write your media incrementally. One small project was to copy the world's freeware (about 500 5.25" floyy disks) onto a single optical disk for users to find sample code and utilities.
I printed out an index on paper and distributed that to several programmers, and they would let me know what they needed.
So, if you want to record 60 minutes of CD-quality digital audio you need about 600 MB of raw data storage. In the 1970s this was an impossible amount of data. 600 MB of hard drive space would cost as much as a house.
Without a way to easily store that huge amount of data, the CD could not be developed. And in the 1970s the computer industry had no answer to that problem.
The solution was ingenious.
They take a stream of digital bits, convert it in to standard broadcast video, and record it with a plain old VCR.
Broadcast video refreshes at 60 FPS, 245 scan lines per frame. If you draw 96 black-and-white pixels per scan line, that works out to three 16-bit stereo samples per scan line.
3 samples X 245 lines/frame X 60 frames/second = 44100 samples/second. Hence, the CD audio standard that we still use today.
So, to answer your question, they weren't burning CDs in '84. They encoding 600 MB of data on to plain old VHS tapes, and sending those off to be mastered.