Introducing The Amazing Compact Disc | 1982 | Retro vintage 80s technology

Thank You mr. Kirk we will let you know these days it's nothing more than a valuable antique but when this fur negraph first hit the market in 1904 it and the photographs that preceded it were part of a minor miracle these things with their wax cylinder recordings altered forever the way human beings enjoy themselves for the first time music was available at will in the house to those not rich enough to support a private Orchestra the first recording ever made was of these words that was in 1887 the speaker was Thomas Edison himself Florence Nightingale describing the Battle of balaclava followed so did many other recordings of music and poetry Tennyson reading selections from Maude was very popular around 1890 but cylinders were eventually replaced by flat recordings this is the edison diamond disc of 1889 bakelite and shellac fragile heavy and very very thick as seventy-eights progressed they'e lost a bit of weight as the records changed so of course did the players this is the ram's horn player obvious where it got its name the sound is taken mechanically down here and then travels acoustically up the tube and out of the horn no amplifiers or electronics there sometimes these ones came with bamboo needles that had to be sharpened after every single record by the 1920s this was the height of elegance it had metal needles literally needles very indeed and a very heavy head it also had to be wound mechanically electricity of course was the power source by the 50s when the gramophone and the radio shared a cabinet making the radio gram the micro groove long playing record now began to dominate the market and with minor improvement it's been with us ever since but isn't there something better and what you've just been listening to is the ultimate in recorded sound it will make all conventional discs and cassette systems obsolete its dust proof scratch proof digitally recorded read by a laser and it's called the compact disc and that's it the biggest revolution in the recording industry since the invention of the long playing gramophone record but this is no ordinary disc just 12 centimetres in diameter the music is recorded onto it digitally and there's no needle being dragged through a groove that information is being read by a laser light and this is the tiny laser that does all the work a small low-power semiconductor which emits invisible infrared light and plays the record from inside out magnified twelve thousand times this is what the surface of the compact disc looks like you can see the thousands of tiny pits and grooves which the laser has cut into a thin plastic sheet when it's monitored or read off by another laser in the playback machine the length of the grooves and the distances between them give varying light patterns which are then picked up by a tiny diode and unlike a conventional gramophone disc this is totally proof against fingerprints and dust because the information is stored underneath a plastic film it doesn't really matter how much I manhandle that particular disc it will still continue to give very good audio quality this is a one sided disc on the other side simply the label of the record and the record player which plays it is also surprisingly small and compact that information is read by a laser from the underside you simply place the disc in there like a conventional record player and off you go introducing new technology in a popular market has its own problems take the battle between cartridges and cassettes it confused the consumer mightily and it took around a decade for cassettes to establish a clear lead the big manufacturers have learned from that experience with the laser audio discs two of the biggest philips and sony have united to produce compatible hardware half a world away from Holland in Tokyo in Finlay found that although their players look different the discs are exactly the same just put it in to pause for a moment the the thing is that it's very difficult to try and get across the sound to you now like this when you're listening on conventional TV set and also we're recording on a conventional tape recorder so we can't actually get across to you in us in sound terms what this thing can do but basically it revolves around five things the background noise the background there's practically no background noise at all no hiss or anything like that there's no wow or flutter distortion is only point zero five percent which is very very good as any hi-fi buffle no frequency response is roughly similar to existing hi-fi sets between twenty and twenty thousand Hertz the main thing to say about the frequency response though is that it's absolutely flat no pits or Heights in it at all and finally the most important thing is the dynamic range is remarkable 90 DB which hi-fi buffs will we'll agree is very is very remarkable the player itself is a huge advance over conventional record players because it gives you the same sort of control you have on a tape recorder fast forward and fast reverse scanning pause and stop buttons and the ability to instantly select any track you want it's also got a little programmable memory so that instead of playing the tracks in their right order one two three four five and so on you can select your own sequence in advance so that they play in any order you want and all the while the monitor tells you which track you're on and how many minutes and seconds it's been playing in addition the whole thing all of that little computerized Marvel is packed into something which you can pick up and move around like that even shake and nothing happens just quite incredible and means that it's got enormous potential eventually once in the future it's perhaps made a little bit more compact for the car audio industry as well the players are due for release at the end of 82 in Japan and the United States in Australia and Europe sometime in 83 they'll cost between six and eight hundred dollars and the discs should be no more expensive than records now in a way it all sounds too good to be true other systems have heaven knows failed to live up to their pre-release promises to change the way we listen quadraphonic sound for instance died of starvation when not enough quad records were released but with compact discs we're assured there will be a rolling river of material seven major record companies have already signed up to produce on the system with hardware and software both lined up compact discs may well rule the roost at least until someone perfects a method of putting Beethoven's 9th on a silicon chip don't laugh I'm assured that that day in fact is not too far off

Channel: ABC Science

Views: 1,923,086

Rating: 4.9262662 out of 5

Keywords: Compact Disc (Media Format), Towards 2000 (TV series), old school, retro, vintage, technology, CD, vaporwave, vapourwave, 1980s, 80s, cd, windows 10, microsoft windows

Id: _Tx6TYnPat8

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/redditarianism]

Scratch and dust proof? Who are they kidding?

[u/financewiz]

Posted before: If you were a music fan back in the 70s/80s, you probably had a powerful amplifier, a pair of amazing speakers and a turntable. You probably had a cassette player as well.

When CDs were introduced and people bought CD players, consumers were often able to A/B their vinyl against the newly mastered CD on what would nowadays be considered an impossibly swanky playback system. The end result: People dumped their vinyl in great masses and re-bought their entire collections on CD. People could hear the extended bass that vinyl physically cannot reproduce. They could also hear "air" between instruments and the greater definition that comes with a background of silence -- digital's low noise floor. People were quite literally blown away by the difference. I know that I was.

What are people A/B testing vinyl against nowadays? An overmastered MP3 played back over built-in laptop speakers or earbuds, from the sound of it.

I own about 700 records and considerably more CDs. I was poor when I was young and couldn't afford the best turntable (spent all my money on the amp and speakers). My records from the 70s/80s now sound pretty sad. The CDs from the same period sound identical to the day I first bought them. Vinyl is fun to play and great to look at, but it's a rich man's toy when you get down to it. And the current interest in vinyl is largely fueled by the music industry's desire to get you to buy, again, what you already own. Just like in the 80s.

[u/falconzord]

imagine telling that lady at the end that putting it in "the cloud" was not too far off either

[u/shutta]

I love this sort of shows, old school UK TV shows, I see them referenced a lot in some of the UK tech channels on youtube, and most of all on Charlie Brooker's materials, I could watch this sorta stuff for days!

[u/whatllmyusernamebe]

Wow, that line at the end was some accurate foreshadowing:

At least until someone perfects a method of putting Beethoven's Ninth on a silicon chip.