
The CD is 30 years old today - esolyt
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/10/01/the-first-commerically-available-cd-album-player-released-30-years-ago-today/
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ChuckMcM
I remember when Sun Micro decided they could give their customers CDROM drives
and save money shipping SunOS on CD rather than quarter inch tape (QIC). As I
recall they were the first to do that. I also remember Eric Schmidt cringing
at the price of buying a 'gold master' machine that could cut a master disk
for the replication services.

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joeyh
<http://article.olduse.net/7038@philabs.UUCP>

That's the second ever mention of the CD made on Usenet, back in July 1982.

"It has no grooves, the digitally encoded recording lies beneath the disc
surface, invulnerable to dirt and damage."

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dollarpizza
_invulnerable to dirt and damage_

Yeah. Who'd'a thought they'd end up being even more perishable, & _way_ more
disposable than vinyl....

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sjwright
Compared to vinyl, the CD would have seemed invulnerable to dirt and damage.
_Even more perishable?_ What bunkum. Every time you _play_ a vinyl record,
you're causing a very small amount of irreparable damage. Whereas I can still
retrieve a bit-perfect copy of my 20+ year old CDs, even if the underside is
severely scratched.

That said, how can you resist the psychological conundrum of knowing that
every time you play a record, you are forever damaging it a little bit... That
you're forced to destroy what you love. That like life itself, every minute
it's turning brings death a step closer. That one day your old records might
match your own ears' diminished high frequency response.

There's something poetic there.

~~~
dollarpizza
_What bunkum._

OK, let me qualify: Vinyl (when played on commodity equipment) does, almost
unavoidably, suffer mild (or worse) _analog_ degradation. This is why (if
you're of a certain age) you'll recall that for high-value purchases, we
usually made cold replicas (uh, "tapes") to insure that the "master" got
played as infrequently as possible.

CDs, however, not only degrade spontaneously (even when stored "properly"),
but the degradation is pretty much "either-or" -- when they do degrade,
usually the whole thing is pretty much unplayable (unless you're putting it in
a very expensive player).

In any case, from my own extensive experience over the years, item for item,
I've had quite a few vinyl records suffer "moderate" deterioration (aftr
_heavy_ playing), but virtually all were still playable to some degree. Really
- unless you leave them in the back of your car for too long, that's usually
the worst that happens.

Meanwhile, an annoyingly high % if CDs simply get scuffed, or are left out in
the air too long -- and end up irreparably damaged and unplayable (at least on
generic players).

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sjwright
What bunkum.

Other than some exceptionally rare examples of "bit rot" where errors in
manufacturing cause the chemical composition of the plastics prematurely
deteriorate, a compact disc will survive at least 50 if not 100 or more years,
even with the most exceptionally modest storage and handling conditions.

A scuffed CD is often perfectly playable, and can otherwise be polished back
to near-perfect playability with toothpaste and/or ultra-fine sandpapers.

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mtoddh
Funny, I still remember buying my first CD as a kid, Motley Crue's Girls,
Girls, Girls (ouch!). The packaging back then was different and they'd put the
CDs in long boxes whereas now you just buy it in the jewel case. I remember
how cool it was getting a boombox that had a tape deck and a CD player and
being able to make better mixtapes.

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ChuckMcM
Long boxes so that when you put them into the place where the store used to
display LP albums the title was still at a comfortable reading height.

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kree10
I remember reading that longboxes were a way to prop up the LP jacket
manufacturers, since the materials and process were similar, but... "citation
needed".

~~~
squarecat
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longbox>

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cowmix
I'm freakin' out that /. is exactly half the age of the CD.

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erickhill
When is the music industry going to actively promote (and select) a high
definition music format? Like, Blu-Ray for audio-only?

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dsk2012
Never. First, CD audio quality is good enough. Second, the market is in
transition (already transitioned?) to a pure digital format, distributed
either via flat files (e.g. mp3s), or via SaaS streaming services.

Similarly, Blu-ray is probably the last physical format for movies.

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runjake
NPR mentioned this morning that digital music download sales far exceed
physical media music sales already. This might explain there being virtually
no record stores around anymore.

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squarecat
Heard that story this morning:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/10/01/162062347/the-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/10/01/162062347/the-
cd-at-30-is-feeling-its-age)

Made me consider stockpiling a supply of CD players to gouge future hipsters
with...

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gbeeson
This article also reminds me of where I used to pick up CD's back when they
first came out - Tower Records in Mountain View, CA. CD's - still around;
Tower Records - not so much. Interesting how it all worked out.

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stan_rogers
The reason we loved Tower is the reason it died: just about every one of its
stores was a record museum. You could find almost anything you were looking
for, which meant that they had to stock just about everything anyone would
ever be looking for. If I'd damaged (or inadvertently "lent" permanently) an
album that was a somewhat obscure gem in a less-than-popular genre when I'd
bought it ten years previous, I could always walk into Tower and get a new
copy. Great for the customer, but I can't see it being a great business model
overall.

~~~
Turing_Machine
It seems to work for Amazon. Of course they don't need to stock copies in
zillions of locations.

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tisme
Three years late to the party (because I couldn't afford a CD player) one
customer instead of defaulting on a payment offered me his CD player instead.
It came with this CD:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_in_Arms_%28Dire_Strait...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_in_Arms_%28Dire_Straits_album%29)

And I'm going to have to play it now, for old times sake. Haven't played a CD
in years.

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jasongullickson
After reading this I just had to check just to see if we had a copy of 52nd
Street, yep - <https://www.murfie.com/albums/billy-joel-52nd-street--2>

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acchow
The compact disc has always felt to me to be a decade ahead of its time. In 30
years of removable storage media, we've only managed to go from CD's 700MB to
BDXL's 128GB. That's only 182 times the capacity, or 2^7.5

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msh
I am sad that the minidisc lost out to the cd :(

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sjwright
No way! The CD is almost everything you could have asked for in a pre-1995
physical distribution medium. Better-than-your-ear sound quality, cheap to
manufacture, no moving parts, relatively robust, allowed for very simple
playback hardware designs...

MiniDisc had audibly imperfect sound quality. The media has a complex diskette
design with moving parts, is less robust, and requires more complex playback
hardware. It was a backwards step in every respect except size and
writability.

The perfect product given the technology of the time would have been to just
squeeze the regular CD format with all 700MB of data into the 8cm "CD3" form
factor. Perhaps adding a "long play" mode suitable for audiobooks (e.g. mono
12 bit/32 kHz PCM).

~~~
msh
The cd was bad when moving, skipping due to bump was a big issues.

