Father of the CD, Norio Ohga, Dead At 81 180
lightbox32 writes "Norio Ohga, who was Sony's president and chairman from 1982 to 1995, died Saturday at the age of 81. He has been credited with developing CDs, which he insisted be designed at 12 centimeters (4.8 inches) in diameter to hold 75 minutes worth of music — in order to store Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in its entirety."
Sayonara, Ohga-san (Score:5, Funny)
"After a private ceremony, Mr. Ohga will be microwaved."
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"After a private ceremony, Mr. Ohga will be microwaved."
I hear the Mythbusters are going to spin him on a modified Rotozip.
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Let's hope the hinges on his coffin lid don't snap off.
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No, that's not his worst sin.... not making room for the friggin song titles is! Seriously: you've got 700MB to play with, and you can't find room for song titles that are less than 1K total?
The original specification had 747 MB (raw) 650 MB (with error correction) and that was an absurd amount of data to work in the early 1980s. Also, the first players (well, even the ones produced in the early 1990s) did not behave much more inteligently than a vinyl player and tried to play as sound even pure-data CDs (the result sounding something like a 8-bit-computer software recorded on an audio tape).
Still, I agree with you in part: they could have reserved a small CD section for songs' names as an op
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Double entendre?
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I get worried when Slashdotters start ranking microwaved geeks by taste. Masterchef this isn't.
Re:Missing a moderation option (Score:5, Funny)
Try adding soy sauce.
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Try adding soy sauce.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-sabi!
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The "significance" of the initial M. is that he writes mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and scifi as Iain M. Banks.
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The "significance" of the initial M. is that he writes mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and scifi as Iain M. Banks.
AIUI, this came about by accident. He always intended to use the "M" for both, but his mainstream publisher decided that the name sounded better without it, so left it out. When he eventually found a publisher for his SF work (he wrote the earliest SF stuff first, but didn't get it published until after his first non-SF[1] novel) that publisher agreed with him that the initial sounded good, so included it.
[1] - I hesitate to call The Wasp Factory mainstream -- it is significantly farther detached from the
Re:Sayonara, Ohga-san (Score:5, Funny)
All this has him spinning in his grave
52x that is
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[insert subject here] (Score:1, Interesting)
It is also the case that they chose that size because it's slightly too large to fit in most pockets, thus discouraging casual sharing.
Re:[insert subject here] (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the day, the problem with Beethoven's ninth, and cassettes in particular, was the times of the movements. From one version:
1st Movement: 13'32"
2nd Movement: 13'09"
3rd Movement: 14'21"
4th Movement: 23'22"
There is no way to put these movements on a two sided cassette without having about 17 minutes of unused space, unless the 3rd movement was split between sides.
So what many (if not most) versions on cassette would do to conserve tape is put the 1st, 2nd, and PART of the 3rd movement on side A of the cassette, and the remaining part of the 3rd movement and the 4th movement on side B. It was kind of jarring to have the tape fade out in the middle of the 3rd movement to switch to the other side.
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Pink Floyd also did this with some (maybe not all) cassette versions of the album Animals. The song "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" would be split half on one side, half on the other. There was a trick to hitting the auto-reverse button at just the right moment, so the song wouldn't be interrupted by the leader tape.
As far as I know, the album was never presented this way on the LP vinyl version, because it's less important that a record be the same length on both sides of the vinyl. You don't end up with dea
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'There is no way to put these movements on a two sided cassette without having about 17 minutes of unused space, unless the 3rd movement was split between sides.'
Well, there was the approach taken by DG's excellent value 'Walkman Classics' series, which was just to stuff something else on the tape until it came close to 90 minutes:
http://www.talkclassical.com/7444-performers-old-dg-walkman.html [talkclassical.com]
(Note to younger readers: the 'Walkman' was one of the technologies that bridged the gap between wax cylinders and
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It seems Symphonies and all were created in those halcyon days of "live performances"
Don't be silly. I'm sure Beethoven had an ipod.
Re:[insert subject here] (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems Symphonies and all were created in those halcyon days of "live performances"
Don't be silly. I'm sure Beethoven had an ipod.
That would explain why he went deaf.
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Re:[insert subject here] (Score:5, Insightful)
This is total rubbish - not just your comment but the entire idea that he made the CD to fit Beethoven's 9th. In what world does Beethoven's 9th have a set length?
Facts: The prototype was 60 minutes. The final product was 74 minutes. Surely they argued what would fit in 74 minutes but not in 60 minutes. Like you say, there's no set length but pretty much all agree Beethoven's ninth takes more than 60 minutes. Most recordings do in fact fit within 74 minutes, including the one most consider the "reference recording".
That's really where the facts end and the speculation begins. Most likely Beethoven's 9th was mentioned as an example of what wouldn't fit a 60 minute disc. There's no credible source to say it HAD to fit. The whole mythos seem to assume everyone else agreed on 11.5 cm, but one man insisted on 12 cm. There's really no proof of that, there was a prototype and they agreed to tweak it a little making it half a cm bigger. When people asked why, Beethoven's 9th was probably a convenient example to use. So after turning a feather into five hens this became this huge mysterious legend.
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Thanks for your post.
It was a rare example of rational thinking that's seldom seen on Slashdot.
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Never had any problems fitting CD cases in jacket pockets. Mind you, I don't wear American jackets, so maybe you should check to see if the RIAA owns the fashion industry that side of the pond.
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The CD single failed in the marketplace.
Good thing he wasn't a Wagner fan! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Good thing he wasn't a Wagner fan! (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots of theories as to why they did this. The most credible IMHO is that the studios balked when a 2 hour CD was proposed. They wanted something around 1 hour to better match the length of an LP (45-50 min) or cassette (60 min) album. They didn't want their customers questioning why they were only filling up half the CD with music, and they didn't want to have to put 2 hours of music on each CD. So they picked a deliberately inefficient sound format to fill up half of the CD with useless "data".
Of course they got hoisted by their own petard when MP3s came out. Because the raw files ripped from CDs were about twice as big as they needed to be, it made MP3 files look twice as small in comparison. That increased the desirability of and accelerated the adoption of MP3s.
may he go back to the source (Score:1)
his invention of the cd has given me endless joy. thank you Mr Ohga.
yet another defective "standard" that caught on (Score:3, Informative)
Too bad they couldn't have used even a $0.10 (back then) codec to get the bit density up, though. Even four more bits per sample (each for left and right), or, better, eight, and, 56,000 samples/second, would have made the CDs actually sound pretty good, and would not have changed the cost of production of the CDs, themselves.
Sure, they were more difficult to scratch than vinyl, and repeated plays on low-cost equipment didn't do damage, but the dynamic range is way down (12-18 dB, depending on the vinyl preamp quality) and the lower sample rate led to audible filter artifacts that particularly affect imaging, most noticeably on orchestral pieces.
All-in-all, I'd really rather he had waited to do it better, or not bothered.
Re:yet another defective "standard" that caught on (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, except the compression on that is crude by modern standards, so you could argue that they should have waited a bit longer... and a bit longer....
Yes, it would have been an *excellent* idea for them to have postponed the CD by 20 years! *cough*
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Perhaps, but there is no excuse for not including meta-information like track names. That would only have taken up less than 1Kb
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Perhaps, but there is no excuse for not including meta-information like track names. That would only have taken up less than 1Kb
Well, yes, but that's something entirely different to the point you were originally trying to make.
For what it's worth, I *do* however agree on this point 100% and I've made it myself in the past. Some have argued that full-text information displays would have been too expensive/complex to implement when the CD format launched. However, if that *had* been the reason it would have been extremely short-sighted; technology was moving all the time and it should have been doable in the near future- all they ha
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Well, yes, but that's something entirely different to the point you were originally trying to make.
I was not this thread's original poster. My first and only comment was about the meta-data.
Glad to hear we agree, though. :-)
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CD-text would have been good, but hey, expecting CDs to work in a 'computer-ish' manner (like reading files) wasn't happening till the mid 90's. I mean, I didn't have a cd-rom in a computer till '95 I think. Before that you looked at CDs as simply music items, like a tape.
Except that we weren't talking about "computer-ish... reading files", 90s style multimedia, et al. We were talking about something *far* more straightforward that would have been very simple to add to the CD specification- a few short strings identifying the track names and artist. That's something that even your technophobic early-1980s consumer would have appreciated and been impressed by, and should have been an obvious "easy add" feature even at the time.
As I mentioned elsewhere [slashdot.org], the increase in maste
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CDs 'sound pretty good' as they are. If they don't, get a better DAC.
Re:yet another defective "standard" that caught on (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it was terrible that they were so inept as to replace a fragile crackly hissy medium with one that the vast, vast majority of people are literally physically incapable of distinguishing from a live performance.
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Actually, the last bit is subject to quantization noise, so it's really 84. Compared to top-quality preamps with 96-+ dB signal to noise, it's down by 12, at least.
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You forget that the filters used in the digital-to-analog conversion have phase artefacts that extend several octaves below the nominal sample frequency, decreasing with "distance" from the filter cutoff frequency. The phase artefacts affect the perception of location by the instrument. Violins, or female voice in the upper registers, in particular, are location-obscured because the overtones have a different phase relationship than the fundamentals.
I don't have to have 22K hearing to observe the phase ef
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nope, he wasn't part of Philips (Score:5, Informative)
Gregg invented in the laserdisc in 1958 (!), selling patent to MCA who developed commercially with Philips. Sony contributed some work on error correction to the Red Book standard, but the hard work of hardware design and modulation technique came from Philips, building on their laserdisc work.
What Sony did, and has ever done since, was see a market to exploit.
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Right, because Laserdisc and CD are nearly the same.
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They're certainly more similar than the CD is to the DVD (except, obviously, for diameter). I thought it was widely accepted that Philips and Sony collaborated to produce the compact disc, based on the earlier laserdisc work.
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They're certainly more similar than the CD is to the DVD (except, obviously, for diameter). I thought it was widely accepted that Philips and Sony collaborated to produce the compact disc, based on the earlier laserdisc work.
I disagree. Laserdiscs were analog, whereas CDs and DVDs are all digital. CDs and DVDs are just bit buckets where you can put whatever digital data you'd like. They had video CDs for a time. There are standards as to how to encode stuff to be playable, but they are still much more similar than an analog format.
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Laserdiscs were analog, whereas CDs and DVDs are all digital. CDs and DVDs are just bit buckets where you can put whatever digital data you'd like.
No, this isn't really true. Red Book audio CDs can't store anything but audio, and the data is played back at a consistent rate of speed, in a kind of "mock analog." Laserdiscs also supported digital audio tracts that were encoded in the same way as CD audio, though you are right in that some laserdiscs were pure analog. Still, the CD-ROM format came later, and was more of a "bit bucket," but there was no way for commercial CD players to play back audio from CD-ROMs until the invention of CD players that su
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No, that was a way for CD-ROM drives to play audio CDs, and was used until OSs and media players could read the data from the audio CD digitally.
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I disagree. Laserdiscs were analog, whereas CDs and DVDs are all digital. CDs and DVDs are just bit buckets where you can put whatever digital data you'd like. They had video CDs for a time. There are standards as to how to encode stuff to be playable, but they are still much more similar than an analog format.
From your post I can tell that you live in softwareland.
The difference between decoding a laserdisc and a CD is pretty much a firmware issue. The difference is that for CD's you will have to check the sampled value against a treshold to decide if it should be encoded as a 0 or a 1 whereas for laserdic you will input the analog value to the video decoding code.
DVDs require different electronics.
The development work to turn a CD-player into a laserdic player vs the work to turn a CD-player into a DVD-player w
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Well, early Laserdiscs were totally analogue, but digital audio eventually dominated. And the CD didn't start digital audio recording - PCM was discovered in the 1930s and we've had recorders since around 1970. Worthwhile historical overview. [aes.org]
Whether CD is more like laserdisc or more like DVD depends on how you weight the differences (purpose, physical structure, manufacturing technique, modulation, encoding / error correction, data structure, etc.), of course. And LD too 's just pits and lands [access-one.com].
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What are you talking about? Laserdisc was analogue. It almost has more in common with vinyl than with CD...
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Vinyl. [synthgear.com]
LD and CD. [modeemi.fi]
From a disc construction and reader hardware perspective, LD is like CD and nothing like vinyl.
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LD is analog. CD and DVD are digital.
This isn't strictly true. Laserdiscs could have either analog or digital audio, and few discs still used analog by the end. When I was a kid (80s and 90s), most laserdisc players could also play audio CDs. And unlike DVDs, neither CDs nor laserdiscs used a filesystem.
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I am nitpicking, but since each session has a 'lead in' area (part of which can be used for CD Text)/TOC, isn't that essentially a file system?
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Gregg invented in the laserdisc in 1958 (!), selling patent to MCA who developed commercially with Philips. Sony contributed some work on error correction to the Red Book standard, but the hard work of hardware design and modulation technique came from Philips, building on their laserdisc work.
What Sony did, and has ever done since, was see a market to exploit.
Jesus H Christ on a popsicle stick, comparing the laserdisc to CD is total engineering fail! The laserdisc is an ANALOG medium - it uses pulse width modulated analog signals, not digital - not ones and zeroes. The length of the "pits" in a laserdisc is not a quantized value. The CD uses a digitally coded signal (so the length of the pits is quantized, which introduces some engineering challenges in exactly counting the number of digits that a given length of a pit represents) with addressing and redundant
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The thread has addressed this narrowminded view already. You may want to read it.
How about the inner diameter? (Score:2)
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That's pure speculation until you check the diameter of ohga's willy.
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The better myth is that the platter size was picked to be the same as a Heineken coaster. Perhaps the engineers foresaw the whole AOL CD spam thing, knowing how most of these CDs would end up being used...
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That doesn't prove anything. If you can find a citation *from the time of the CD design process*, then that will give more credibility to that idea.
eBay was for a long time passing off the "it was started to trade PEZ dispensers" myth until they finally admitted it was a myth.
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That's still just an anecdote. People's memory becomes hazy, and they may start to believe the myths. That's why a citation *from the original time* is useful.
Get some perspective and show some respect. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of people grumbling about how they think CDs are inferior etc. I don't get why.
Sony plucked this guy from an operatic career, and his passion for sound quality made a big difference. The CD standard is pretty darn nice, especially compared to cassettes, and this guy was responsible for a lot of the push to make it a market reality. He also provided a lot of good leadership for Sony in other ways (getting them into gaming, for instance) and was an important supporter of the arts.
After his retirement Sony has had a lot more trouble both avoiding being evil (rootkit saga!) and finding vision. Furthermore, while Philips and Sony designed the CD standard around engineering constraints and human perception, media formats since that time have instead been designed around marketing (OMG this says 192 kHz! it must be 4 1/3 times as good as CDs!) and content protection/DRM. I certainly wish more companies would find executives like Mr. Ohga.
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There's nothing to get. We're talking about audiophiles here; the kind of people who claim that they can tell the difference between gold and copper cabling in headphones. To them, of course CD players are inferior when compared with whatever obscure technology they use to make themselves feel superior to the common man.
Apparently, a scratchy vinyl analogue copy on a turntable will sound superior to a digitised recording mad
they're not playing a "scratchy vinyl analog copy" (Score:2)
They're not comparing to your dad's turntable. They're using fancy turntables with cartridges that cost more than your computer. Under ideal conditions, vinyl can sound really good.
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They're not comparing to your dad's turntable. They're using fancy turntables with cartridges that cost more than your computer. Under ideal conditions, vinyl can sound really good.
Plus, vinyl's got the electrolytes that your ears crave!
Obligatory snopes link (Score:2)
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What?
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Beats using the "Minute Waltz" as an empirical measurement.
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This Wired article is a bit more detailed [wired.com].
Ironically, the mastering techniques of the day limited CD recordings to 72 minutes. The unusually long Furtwängler "Ninth" was not released until 1997.
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Compare it to a full record and you will see ..
Re:I don't see what's "compact" about those discs (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually, this is no longer the case. You can get combo DVDs that have both the theatrical and the "special" versions. Here [amazon.com]. Unfortunately, the theatrical is only in Dolby 2.0 and the video hasn't been remastered like the re-release, but it's certainly better than VHS.
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Unfortunately, the theatrical is only in Dolby 2.0 and the video hasn't been remastered like the re-release, but it's certainly better than VHS.
AIUI, the theatrical version on these DVDs is a direct copy of the content of the laserdisc.
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Phonograph? [youtube.com]
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Lets say I have a 8 GB microSDHC card full of mp3s. That nail-size is too large, so let me burn the music to a digital audio COMPACT disc. Uh oh, I would need about 100 of these 12-cm discs.
You are missing an important variable, here.
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+ 1 stupid
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The plastic boxes weren't nearly as much of a problem as the cardboard insets they used to use - the sulphur content would literally dissolve sections of the CD.
Terrible packaging from unresponsive oligopolists (Score:4, Interesting)
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Too bad the record industry spoiled it with lousy packaging. Flimsy plastic jewel boxes covered with shrink wrap and security tape that is really a pain (occasionally, literally) to remove.
You weren't around to remember how CDs were originally packaged? The jewel case was put in a 12" long cardboard box [yormeister.be] up until 1993 [latimes.com], quite wasteful since you would immediately throw out that big box. It was probably designed so that record shops could use their old record bins for holding the box (and to visually justify the 50% more expensive product that cost less to produce.)
What is unfortunate is that is that for an equal amount of plastic as the jewel box, the design could have included putting the disc
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You weren't around to remember how CDs were originally packaged? The jewel case was put in a 12" long cardboard box [yormeister.be] up until 1993 [latimes.com]
Eh? Is that true?! I live in the UK and bought CDs from the late-1980s onwards, and I don't recall *ever* having seen one inside one of those stupid longbox designs.
The article implies that this was a US-only thing ("[switch to jewel boxes] as is already done in virtually every other country?"), but I'd expect to have at least heard of it anyway. I thought they'd only use packaging like that for stupid, contrived, multi-disc box sets.
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As for why the longboxes were developed in the first place, qubezz already mentioned one reason (i.e. re-using the old LP bins to hold two longboxes side by side). The other reason was that u
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'Eh? Is that true?! I live in the UK and bought CDs from the late-1980s onwards, and I don't recall *ever* having seen one inside one of those stupid longbox designs.'
I saw a few in a classical CD sale in London just a few years ago. Must have been languishing in a warehouse somewhere for well over a decade.
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What is unfortunate is that is that for an equal amount of plastic as the jewel box, the design could have included putting the disc into a caddy
Some of us had caddy-loading CD-ROM drives. For that matter, some car CD changers still use caddies... Nonetheless, caddies came, and for the most part they went away. It ended up being just another thing to break, lose, etc. And the caddies themselves were annoyingly expensive without adding much value.
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Re:rumor hinted; origins of hymenology uncorked (Score:4, Funny)
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but worse: now we have kids for whom low-bitrate MP3 files and even Youtube videos are acceptable!
320kbps = low-bitrate?
Besides, you could try judging music by how good it is, instead of what medium it was published on.
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Not all MP3 files are 320kbps. 128 and even 64kbps are common among my 12 year old brother's friends. Of course, they listen to it on a cellphone speaker, so higher bitrates wouldn't necessarily improve the sound quality.
Good enough. (Score:3)
...and that's good enough.
The kids just want some background noise. 64kbps MP3 on Smartphone speaker is more than enough.
No need for them at all to be forced to use some theoretically superior format, which anyway requires a living room with 5000$-worth audio equipment to be enjoyed at it fullest.
Stop bitching about the fact people only take the cheapest solution that fills their needs, and that 99.999% people out there have needs at only a fraction of what you personally need.
If you're really, really such
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Or is the actual complaining about audio quality what you really enjoy in music ?!?
Is there anything wrong with that though? It's pretty cathartic to get off on a rant about something you're passionate about....
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Stop bitching about the fact people only take the cheapest solution that fills their needs, and that 99.999% people out there have needs at only a fraction of what you personally need.
If you're really, really such a big music fan, stop complain, log of audiophile forums, shut down your computer, get out of your living room, buy a nice ticket in the opera of your city and have a nice evening listening to live music.
You're going to enjoy the experience much better than thinking about people without your tastes listening music on sub-5000$ equipment.
Or is the actual complaining about audio quality what you really enjoy in music ?!?
Uh, I'm not the who was complaining, I just replied to the "320kbps is low bitrate?" comment. Personally, I use el-cheapo headphones and have no problem listening to 128kbps files if I have nothing better.
I do have a problem with cellphone speakers, but that's because asshats use them to force their music on everyone else in public transports and similar.
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320 kbps is not bad, but I once downloaded music in 96kbps. It sounded like absolute shit, of course, but the person who encoded it didn't realize he was doing it seriously wrong. And I bet that, if you pointed it to him, he would call you a nitpicker. After I saw my sister listening to music on her cell phone -- and I mean without earbuds, really using the phone's tiny, crappy built-in speaker -- I realized that people are used to absolute crap sound.
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320 kbps is not bad, but I once downloaded music in 96kbps. It sounded like absolute shit, of course, but the person who encoded it didn't realize he was doing it seriously wrong.
I'm not really defending 96kbps- at least, not for MP3- because I doubt that you could *ever* get great sound at that bitrate. But using files you downloaded (possibly years ago) as an example is flawed.
I downloaded quite a few tracks during the early-2000s. They were 128kbps- the de facto standard bitrate at that time. Many of them *were* obviously poor quality and demonstrated why 128kbps MP3s were maligned by those who cared about sound quality. But the thing is, I encoded many of my own MP3s at 128kbp
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When you realize that the 320kbit MP3 you've downloaded is actually ripped from a 192kbit CD, however...
MP3 is a lossy codec, though. A trained ear can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 quite easily, and once somebody's pointed it out to you, you'll notice a big difference between an analog source and a digital source. You do need high end hi fi equipment to hear the difference, but when you're in that range, you won't ever want to go back to digital.
The problem is, it's precious difficult to find
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
MP3 is a lossy codec, though. A trained ear can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3 quite easily, and once somebody's pointed it out to you, you'll notice a big difference between an analog source and a digital source. You do need high end hi fi equipment to hear the difference, but when you're in that range, you won't ever want to go back to digital.
So I need a trained ear, someone to point it out, and high end equipment just to hear how much my CD collection sucks? When you put it that way... I'd rather remain ignorant.
Indeed, RIP.... (Score:2)