Pay attention to how clearly information was presented in those days. I've not come across any media today that can present information in systematic and concise manner without trying hard to grab my attention, perhaps a handful of YT channels are an exception.
Right, consider the thousands of hours of online technical training content on Udemy, etc. Much of that is very clear, well-paced, and precise. Conversely, watching any number of peppy newsreels on e.g. British Pathe[1]. They're just as blaring and superficial as any contemporary correlate.
My father taught English, and had a long-standing rant about how universities since about the 80s or so produced writers that were amazingly talented at using a thousand words to say absolutely nothing.
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.
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...
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. )
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.
But the SD Card still requires a physical electrical contact. Whereas the minidisc uses a non-contact laser. The minidisc wins this one. But the minidisc require a mechanical spin, whereas the SD Card is solid state. The SD Card wins on this category.
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.
I clearly remember burning CDs up until around 2010, but I never realized that the technology was already around 30 years earlier.
I still have rose-colored glasses nostalgia of the days of PC games in large cardboard boxes containing multi-CD jewel cases and elaborate manuals.
I bet you the CD will come back as a vintage retro format in about 10-15 years when the kids who never grew up with them learn to treat it as a cool hipster format. Just like my generation did with vinyl, which I never experienced myself back in the day, having arrived too late on the scene.
Friendly plug for LGR and 8 Bit Guy channels on Youtube who often dive back into these antique devices.
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!
I also think perhaps we over estimate how "digital" CD playback is.
I repaired a CD player recently and learned that the control system which guides and powers the laser is entirely analogue. Only the audio pickup was a digital signal.
I'm sure designs vary, but it made a great deal of sense when you consider a design from the 70s and 80s.
A CD is digital, but a CD _player_ is a surprisingly analogue device.
You should see how tiny the MicroLine diamond is on my Audio-Technica MM cartridge. 90% of the cost is in that replaceable, fragile part of an MM cartridge: the stylus.
MC cartridges typically don't have replaceable styluses. Bust an AT-ART9XA, and get ready to lay-out 1.3k clams.
Is the AT-ART9XA the MM stylus?
I’ve heard a bit about the MM stylus, though never used one myself. Just getting into vinyl gear for DJing soon, but will be starting lower end. Especially at 1.3k! What makes that stylus so good?
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!)
I guess I'd say CD is and isn't retro. It's looking close to being the ultimate physical digital medium for music, with vinyl being the ultimate analog medium. It's really only retro in the sense that there isn't much reason to keep physical copies.
I have a theory that fashion (set design, clothes, makeup, UX) progresses as fast as the audio/video media begins to show age. Pictures are clearly dated by the media itself, which means the contents of the pictures are also inevitably dated.
Fashion seemed to progress quickly during the 70s/80s and then begin to decelerate from the 90s onwards.
It is more difficult now to date recordings from the 90s based only the audio/video quality which means it takes longer before it "feels old".
It’s fascinating to me that the CD didn’t enter my household until the mid-90s. It speaks to exactly what the woman in the video said about cartridges and tapes. I can’t say that I know why it took more than a decade for CDs to become common place, but I do find it fascinating.
I hated CDs. Too big to be carried in a pocket. Read-only, until CD-R
came out. Single use, until CD-RW came out. Required careful handling,
to avoid getting fingerprints on the read-side etc.
In some ways not unlike vinyl, in its proneness to damage. Lastly,
I had terrible luck with CD players and CD drives; they'd wear out after
a couple years of heavy use.
For me, CD was a step backward, lacking the robustness and convenience
of cassette.
As a medium of information exchange between computers, I can make
a similar comparison between the CD and the 3.5-inch floppy. Aside from
their limited space, I much preferred the floppy to the CD.
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.
>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.
Pretty impressive to see a 40-year-old technology still around with modern, popular devices still being shipped that can read the discs. Future technologies like DVD and Bluray using the same form factor was a huge reason, and despite what Neil Young would have you believe, 16 bits and 44kHz really is good enough for human perception.
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.
