Father of the CD, Norio Ohga, Dead At 81

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."

Re:I don't see what's "compact" about those discs

[tepples]

CDs were far smaller than the vinyl phonograph records of the day.

yet another defective "standard" that caught on

[dltaylor]

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.

nope, he wasn't part of Philips

[Hazel Bergeron]

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.

Re:Good thing he wasn't a Wagner fan!

[Solandri]

Or not so good. CDs could potentially hold 2 hours of music losslessly, except the spec calls for sound intensity to be stored on a linear scale. Human hearing works on a logarithmic scale. So on the really quiet parts, there probably isn't enough granularity between different intensity levels. Meanwhile on the loud parts, the granularity is so fine that there's no way you'll notice even (relatively) large changes on the linear scale. If they'd gone with a logarithmic scale, they could have cut down the sound file size considerably and squeezed more music onto a single CD. An 8-bit u-law (logarithmic) sound file is considered roughly equivalent to a 14-bit wav (linear) sound file (CDs are 16-bit linear).

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.