Compact disc story (1998) | Hacker News Reader

Compact disc story (1998)

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I remember seeing my friends dad’s first cd player. Huge jazz fan and it did sound great. Especially the quiet parts (No tape hiss or record pops) and easy to use. He bought a couple of cds of rock and man they sounded good.

Every other media at the time required some maintenance to sound good. Records would scratch, those tape pinch rollers would need to be cleaned. Nothing was easy, cds were (skip forward with a button push). Cassettes still were the only way to record, better for portability and sounded pretty good (we did some a:b testing cd vs cassette as kids).

Late 80s, cds were everywhere. I stopped buying records. At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.

My friends dad who liked jazz did lament that a lot of the jazz he had in record form would never be re-released as cds. Not digital so a lot of music lost to time and a format change.

Early CDs were labeled as to the processes used, a 3 letter code As and Ds, so:

AAD == Analog recording, Analog mastering, Digital media

ADD == Analog recording, Digitally re-mastered, Digital Media

DDD == Digital recording, Digitally re-mastered, Digital Media

This is known as a SPARS Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code

Your dad's friends should have imported from Japan --- they were big on Jazz, and a lot of my Jazz CDs have spines labeled in Japanese on one side and English on the other.

Late 80s or early 90s there was also a DAD type, which often sounded really good.

From that Wiki link-

In practice, DAD was very rare, as many companies (especially the well-known classical music labels) used digital tape recorders (which were not prohibitively more expensive than analog tape recorders) during the editing or mixing stage.

I don't know if I have such a CD --- do you have an example which is noted as sound markedly better than other editions? (I'd especially be interested in a DAD disc which sounds better than an updated DDD disc)

My CDs are in storage, and I never did an A/B comparison with any later remasters.

Why did you write "re-mastered" instead of simply "mastered" for ADD/DDD?

Because most of my CDs are older and had previously been released as pure analog, so that's how I think of them, and that's where my experience is --- fair point though, putting parentheses around (re-) would have been better.

Close, but not quite.

The first letter was the recorder used for initial recording, say a Studer A800 as an example of an analog multitrack or DASH as an example of a digital one).

The second letter was the recorder for the mixdown, i.e. usually some 2-channel system like an analog ATR-102 or Studer A80 or a digital DAT.

The third letter was the recorder for the master, which for CD by definition was always digital. In the early days usually a Sony U-matic, which funnily enough was an analog video tape format which got reused for digital audio (and is the reason for the odd 44.1 kHz sampling rate of the CD).

Edit:

The code was actually always considered a bit meaningless.

For example, you could record on a digital DASH, but mix on an analog SSL console and print the mix to a digital recorder. That would have been a DDD CD.

On the other hand, you could record on an analog A820, mix on a digital Studer desk, print the mix on an analog A80 and that would have been a AAD CD.

So, two codes indicating "pure" digital or "pure" analog, even though both processes used both technologies.

Or record on a ADAT and mix on a Yamaha 02/R, which would have been DDD but probably sounded worse than the AAD recorded on a Studer analog tape ;)

> Sony U-matic

3/4" tape and was the only tape format that had the take up reel on the left.

> At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.

History repeats itself: right now you can now buy loads of CDs for cheap on eBay.

I was one of the bozos believing that the dimensions of the CD had to do with Beethoven 9th symphony. :(

Yes I did went and paired up a CD with a cassette this morning OMG!!! Is true.

I could not afford the $300.00 USD Sony Portable CD but I friend of mine did.

First CD he let me listen to: Genesis "Genesis"

First DDD CD: Peter Gabriel "Security"

That last one probably the most influential music in my upbringing.

Funny though, I have hundred of CDs but I don't have those two.

I guess I have to go back to my friends house to listen to them.

I heard Bob Weir on a Desert Island Discs broadcast with the Dead. He said the song Shock the Monkey was the song that got him willing to start using MIDI and digital tech, which the rest of the group had already embraced. Hearing how one artist I loved pulled another artist into a new direction really clicked for me as a music lover. I can't figure how to search their archive or whether it was an American copy with a slightly different title like desert island albums or songs. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr/episodes/player

PG always loved playing with tech. He dropped a decent chunk in the late 90s, early 2000s to build one of the first real music streaming platforms. I worked for him for a while. I put forth the idea of releasing his Up album online in 5.1 surround, and he was happy to do it, and it was the first. (I only did this because I'd just installed a 5.1 system in my car and wanted more content for it)

> First DDD CD:

I remember listening to Donald Fagan’s Nightfly. Still sounds fantastic, though to nitpick perhaps a tad harsh. Amazing thought to have recorded that at approximately the same time as the debut of the primitive original IBM PC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightfly

The record sounds GREAT. I've never heard the CD.

I wonder if The Nightfly has now been ruined with dynamic compression (AKA "remastered") like everything else over the last couple decades.

My CD player came with Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, as a demo of dynamic range. That album (a digital recording) has, shamefully, been "remastered" and dynamically compressed.

My uncle had the vinyl, and I got the CD a couple of years later. I see it has "manufactured by Columbia House" on the back. ;-) No loudness war back then, but the treble is brighter than most recordings of the time, leading to a potential tweaking of the knob for the album.

Some early CDs were mastered with pre-emphasis. On players that don't recognise and correct (de-emphasize) this, the sound can sound full of treble. Every hardware CD player should be able to play such discs as intended. iTunes knows about such discs and will rip them correctly, maybe Foobar2000 and CUERipper, but most other software has no clue. I know The Blue Nile "Hats" it's one such disc in my collection. I believe some pressings of The Nightfly were mastered with pre-emphasis. https://www.tnt-audio.com/vintage/procrustes2_pt1_e.html

Thanks!

Similar story! The first disc (and song) I heard was "Let's Dance," David Bowie.

I have hundreds of discs, but only have Let's Dance on vinyl.

I also have the second pop digital recording ever, The Nightly by Donald Fagen, only on vinyl. I use it to show people how good records can sound.

I'm glad I bought and kept so much music when I did, because now the labels have destroyed everything with dynamic (not data) compression. It's disgusting. Now that everyone has dirt-cheap access to pristine recording & playback technology, music sounds like absolute shit because some suits thought it needed to sound "louder."

It's possibly one of the biggest but least-understood crimes against art in all of history.

For a thorough breakdown of everything CDs, here's Technology Connections playlist on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFWBEyCKt4tK...

I'm getting blocked by ClownFlare.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180208182825/https://www.resea...

Got that too. But then when I hit Back, I somehow ended up on the page.

WTH.

A Philips engineer visited our chair end of the 90s and told the same about the size "the cassette could be handled with one hand, let's keep that". He also told us they designed their delicate test equipment so that it would fit on a 1st class seat but not 2nd, so when they had to sit next to it during the flight (much too sensitive stuff to check in), management had to book them 1st class flights to Japan. ;)

If you can read German, somebody also wrote a whole dissertation on the subject of the CD's development history:

https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/record/95066

One of the cool/obscure things is that the center hole exactly matches a then available coin because it made the development and testing easier.

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