The CD Revival - So wrong on so many levels

so i recently commented on the current cassette and vinyl revivals i didn't have that much to say that was positive because both are such crazy ideas vinyl is easily audible to be inferior to digital audio and cassette well come on it's dreadful and both of these antique formats are physical issues on top of their audio problems ever had a scratched record a tangled cassette yes of course if you are an enthusiast of either of these formats you've had many and if you are an enthusiast of both of these formats well i admire your suffering for your cause the solution to all of these woes is of course digital audio and that isn't without its problems either compact disc unlike vinyl and cassette is currently on the decline but people often seem to have the delusion that somehow we have lost the true knowledge and that perfect wisdom can only be found in the past and so as compact disk receives into the past there will certainly be a point when someone perhaps a journalist in a hi-fi mag will suggest that there was actually something wonderful about the cd medium that we have now lost and the cd revival must start right now so true to the title of this video i'm going to look at the so many levels upon which the cd revival will when it happens be so wrong level one actually for level one i'm going to comment on a few of the things that cd gets right very right indeed firstly 16 bits of course we use 24 bits now and 24 bits must be eight bits eight bits better or one and a half times better or chalk and cheese better mustn't it well i can tell you because i've heard it that 14 bits can sound perfectly fine even fewer bits can sound amazingly good how about 12 bits no let's go down to a mere 10. is it possible to achieve hi-fi quality with only 10 bits well actually it is i have five letters for you n-i-c-a-m n-i-c-a-m acronymizes acronymizes i didn't make up that word to nicom which expands to near instantaneous compounded digital multiplex you'll sometimes see companding rather than compounded and indeed back in history i remember compounding but hey nikon was used for stereo audio in uk terrestrial television from 1991. nikom starts with a 14-bit recording sampled at 32 kilohertz compared to the 44.1 kilohertz of cd it splits the signal into blocks of 32 samples and the loudest 10 bits of each block are encoded into a 10-bit signal a 3-bit control signal is used to convert this back to 14 bits in the receiver okay that's complicated and i'm skimming the surface but it was 10-bit digital audio and it sounded good well good compared to mono analog tv sound which in itself didn't sound too bad i might stick my neck out and say that nycam sounded at least as good as a good cassette deck demagnetized heads cleaned well set up with chrome or metal tape that's my memory if your memory differs please feel free to comment in the comments the second thing that cd gets right is robustness i've said already that records get scratched and cassettes get tangled i could almost believe that they scratch and tangle themselves at dead of night cds on the other hand are robust if you handle them correctly then you really will get pure perfect sound forever that was the original slogan forever is a long time but i can play cds i bought back in the 1980s and they sound exactly as good as way back then there are some other good points the 74-minute standard maximum duration is excellent there can be up to 99 tracks who would want more they're easy to use great so no problems and we can just get on with the cd revival hold your proverbial horses level two i'm going to start with the big one i said that cds are robust and they are compared to vinyl and cassette but they are far from indestructible and it doesn't take much with the right kind of distress so what can go wrong well the playing surface can get scratched cds are made of polycarbonate which is much harder than vinyl but it can still get scratched the thing is though that the format is designed to be resistant to scratches the digital data stream contains redundant copies of the information so if a scratch spoils a couple or a few or even quite a lot of bits those bits can be replaced from elsewhere in the data stream this is called error correction and it results in perfect audio but if a few more bits are spoiled so that error correction can't work we get error concealment where the player tries to guess the values of the missing bits this sounds a bit hit and miss or a bit bit and miss but it can work well some say that this is the cause of the cd sound but i don't think i've ever been aware of it when listening to music for pleasure but a bigger scratch so that neither error correction nor error concealment can work well the player is supposed to mute so that you don't hear digital glitches and a digital glitch can be far worse than the worst scratch you'll ever get on vinyl but what's more likely is that you'll get clicks or maybe the player will skip it isn't nice some scratches are worse than others cds are very resistant to radial scratches even scratches that are horrifyingly deep but scratches that follow the data around the disc well they can destroy a lot of sequential data which is where the redundant data is to be found or not found because it's been destroyed actually i should say distorted because it's unlikely that any scratch would reach the actual data layer which is in the top surface of the polycarbonate but if the laser pickup can't shine in a straight line through the protective polycarbonate the data is as good as gone so what's the answer to scratches easy very easy the cd should only ever be in one of three places in its case in your hands or in the player nowhere else particularly not on a tabletop either way up do this and there will never be any scratches another problem which affects cds even more than scratches is fingerprints cds hate fingerprints fingerprints block reflect and refract the beam from the laser a fingerprint can be tiny and almost invisible and it will still cause clicks or skips the answer again is easy which is to handle the disc by its edges that's easy for me to do easy for you to do but lend your cd to someone you once called a friend and it will come back in need of a careful and painstaking clean with distilled water on a very soft cloth use a tiny amount of detergent if you have to about a quarter of a drop by the way it is possible to polish out some scratches i've done this myself but i can't remember what i used it certainly wasn't toothpaste like the internet seems to mostly recommend probably brasso or something like that free advice comes without guarantee level three okay so this isn't so much different to what i've said already to recap i said that if the playing service is damaged you may get clicks and skips but what about the label surface surely a scratch on that won't matter but it does the playing surface protects the data with a full 1.2 millimeters of polycarbonate yes it can be scratched but you need a chisel to damage the data itself but on the label side the data is protected only by a thin layer of lacquer a tenth of a millimeter which is almost no protection at all a picture cd is probably a little better off in this respect but not much so because most people think of the playing surface as being the site to protect they may not be so careful about the label side it's worth saying that this was corrected when dvd was introduced the disc is the same thickness but the data layer is sandwiched between two layers of polycarbonate each 0.6 millimeters thick your mileage may differ but i can't ever remember having a problem with a scratched or damaged dvd level 4 cd rot ok we were promised pure perfect sound forever but are there any cds in your collection that you haven't played recently if so take a look at a few chances are that among 20 or 30 cds you'll find one that has turned brownish or bronze in color this according to science is because if the reflective layer of the disc is silver rather than aluminium aluminium the silver can react with sulfur in the paper of the booklet and tray card forming silver sulfate which is bronze in color okay that's one explanation and there are others but the end result is that the disc won't play there are other ways a cd can rot none of them good and none of them recoverable if you have a cd that looks a bit bad copy it quick level five i think i've covered all the negative features of the format and disc itself although i'll keep one up my sleeve to end with level five has got to be the awful awful dual case i don't even know why it's called a jewel case if i had any jewels i'd keep them in a safe actually i do because i looked it up on wikipedia just now it's called a jewel case because the design was considered virtually perfect by phillips come on the jewel case has one major flaw and that is it breaks easily it can break at the hinges or the teeth of the retainer can snap off if the hinges break the case is difficult to use and store if the retainer breaks the cd will rattle around inside the case and possibly get scratched neither are nice a lesser flaw but a flaw nonetheless is that if the booklet is nice and thick with lots of pages and lots of information it's hard to get out of the case and harder to get back in again and you might break off the tabs that retain the booklet oh bother but even if the dual case was unbreakable there would still be a problem in my mind other than breaking a dual case stays perfect for a long time compare this with the sleeve of a vinyl album you'll take it off your shelf put it back again many times put in your bag take it to your friend's house many times as time goes by the sleeve acquires wear you'll wear this wear if you see what i mean with pride like iphone owners are proud of their chipped scratched and screen cracked phones because it shows how much they use them and how many friends and followers they have there is such a thing as pride of ownership and you can have pride of ownership in a vinyl record a cd is just a container for music i vastly prefer the digipak which comes in various forms and can accommodate a considerable amount of creativity like the old vinyl sleeves particularly gatefold sleeves and as you own it and use it it shows where you'll have pride of ownership in your digipak packed cd level six this is the last don't forget that the cd was developed during the 1970s when dinosaurs walked the earth so it is truly an amazing thing not perfect but amazing but i'm also amazed that they left one thing out as i said earlier the standard maximum duration of the cd was set to be 74 minutes my memory tells me although the internet seems to have forgotten that there was also an option for quadrophonic sound which if it retained the same audio quality would have half the duration to 37 minutes i don't think there ever were any quadrophonic players or any quadrophonic discs released but and i'm convinced my memory is correct that the format included provision for quad but the one thing the format didn't cater for and i still can't believe this there was no provision for mono yes mono two hours and 28 minutes of glorious monophonic sound glorious monophonic sound did you get that what use is that audio books how on earth did they miss that historical records too that were originally recorded in mono so the cd revival is so wrong on so many levels as you know from my previous videos on the cassette and vinyl revivals i really don't see the point although i do accept that vinyl has a certain nostalgia value and i'll cover that in the last video in this series but cd well a cd revival seems to have even less points the sound quality of cd is excellent you only have to go one step up from entry level and you get better sound than lossy streaming services but there are already lost less streaming services and i see no reason why they shouldn't become mainstream see what i did in the very near future so with hopefully 24 sound quality even better than cd cd simply has no point the cd revival convince me otherwise i'm david muller course director of audio masterclass thank you for listening you

Channel: Audio Masterclass

Views: 183,893

Keywords: cd, compact disc, cd revival, digital audio, nicam, 16-bit, 10-bit, clicks, skips, scratches, cd rot, cd bronzing, jewel case, vinyl revival, compact disc digital audio, compact disc news

Id: 7gvjzQc-f5U

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 05 2021