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Put the Compact Disc Out of Its MiseryThe new CDs: Neither compact nor disks. Discuss.

By Paul BoutinPosted Monday, Jan. 6, 2003, at 11:26 AM ET

This spring, the compact disc celebrates the 20^th anniversary of its arrival in stores, which puts the once-revolutionary music format two decades behind Moore's Law. The IBM PC, introduced about a year and a half earlier, has been revved up a thousandfold in performance since 1983. But the CD has whiled away the time, coasting on its Reagan-era breakthroughs in digital recording and storage. The two technologies, the PC and the CD, merged not long after their debuts—try to buy a computer without a disc player. But the relationship has become a dysfunctional one. The computer long ago outgrew its stagnant partner.

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To the new generation of music artists and engineers, "CD-quality sound" is an ironic joke. In recording studios, today's musicians produce their works digitally at resolutions far beyond the grainy old CD standard. To make the sounds listenable on antiquarian CD players, the final mix is retrofitted to compact disc specs by stripping it of billions of bits' worth of musical detail and dynamics. It's like filming a movie in IMAX and then broadcasting it only to black-and-white TV sets.

It doesn't have to be this way. The modern recording studio is built around computers, Macs or PCs. Beefed up with high-performance analog-to-digital converters and super-sized disk drives, they digitize music up to 192,000 times per second, storing it as 24-bit data samples. That "192/24" standard captures more than a thousand times as much detail as the CD's "44.1/16" resolution. Moreover, this music data is just another computer file, an icon on a desktop. Double-click it, and it plays. It would play on your home computer, too, if you could get your hands on it. All you would need to enjoy studio-quality sound at home are high-end speakers or an amplifier with digital connections to your computer. That's the "digital hub" scenario touted by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others. Plug everything into a home network, load up the computer with tunes, and press play from anywhere in the house. A three-minute pop song in 192/24 format fills about 200 megabytes of hard-disk space, which means Dell's latest 200-gigabyte drive could hold nearly a thousand of them.

But instead of gearing up for digital home hubs, record companies have rolled out two more shiny-disc formats: DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD. Both sound great, but you're forgiven if you haven't heard of them. Following the radical makeover of consumer electronics in the past two decades, these discs have wandered in like Rip Van Winkle, unaware how behind the times they are.

In sound quality, at least, each disc brings the listening experience up to modern standards. DVD-A, developed by an audio industry working group, pumps up the old CD format 500 to 1,000 times in data density to match that now used in studios. SACD, on the other hand, is based on a new form of digital recording developed by Sony and Philips that converts sound waves into bits (and back again) more smoothly. Both bring studio data to the listener, bit for bit, and include extra surround-sound channels for home-theater systems. Properly engineered, their improvement over CD sound is striking. Can the average person hear the difference? Instantly. As Fred Kaplan noted this past summer in Slate, it's enough to make you buy new speakers.

Yet both kinds of discs, despite being developed in the 'Net-head late '90s, are odd throwbacks to the pre-PC era. Most obviously, they're the same size as the original CD. Can you name any other digital device that hasn't shrunk in 20 years? The players for them are bulky, closer in size to Sony's first CD decks than to Apple's iPod, which holds 400 albums rather than just one.

Flip one of the players over, and you'll find another retro sight: analog output jacks. To prevent buyers from running off bit-for-bit copies of the new discs, gear-makers have agreed not to put digital ports on either DVD-A or SACD players. Yet old-fashioned analog connections erode pristine digital sound and are prone to interference from televisions, lights, and computers—the objects they'll be placed next to in modern homes.

The real deal-breaker is that a stand-alone player is the only kind available. By manufacturers' consensus, there won't be any network ports on the players, nor will there be any DVD-A or SACD drives available for computers. Some makers are promising a digital link from the player to a home-theater console, but it'll be deliberately incompatible with any of the jacks on a computer. In bringing the CD up to date with the PC, the music industry is also trying to split the two technologies asunder again.

It's no wonder that gearheads who buy the latest, greatest everything have ignored DVD-A and SACD in favor of MP3 players and CD burners. Computer-friendly music formats let you archive hundreds of albums on a laptop, create custom playlists that draw from your entire collection, and download them to portable players smaller than a single CD jewel box. Today's fans want their music in a form that fits the pocket-sized, personalized, interconnected world of their computers, cameras, phones, and PDAs. Asking digital consumers to give that power back in exchange for a better-sounding disc is like offering them a phonograph needle.

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Paul Boutin is a writer living in San Francisco.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

Critics of Boutin's piece sound many of the same notes: that CD sound is good enough (or the limit of human capacity); that a world of digital-only music is a cold one—one without cover art—and a dangerous one—one with aggressive Digital Rights Management; that people want more compact (MP3) not more data. Update: dd67 indicates that rippable DVD-A's are just around the corner.

Remarks From The Fray:

The new Creative Labs Audigy2 coupled with a DVD-ROM drive will play the new DVD-A's right on your computer. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to rip them. To those nay-sayers who have not heard one I suggest you listen before you bash.

-- dd67

(To reply, click here.)

How about "average person can readily tell the difference?" Way too many variables for that one to fly. Rule of thumb for A/B audio comparisons? "Which ever is louder sounds better". MP3 actually REDUCES the data density by a factor of 10. Audiophiles will notice the difference between 44.1/16 and any mp3. Average listener wouldn't care since the difference is so small.

Bottom line... CDs are good enough. or would you rather rebuy your music collection AGAIN?

-- Studio_Rat
(To reply, click here.)

[Quoting his Chief Engineer] "Okay, I'm not going to get into Nyquist theorem and digital sampling here, but it seems to me that most people are more interested in compressed audio nowadays than audio standards with digital resolutions in the billions of bits. If CD is a black-and-white TV, then MP3 is cave paintings."

-- Contable
(To reply, click here.)

Call me a paranoid slashdotter [slashdot.org], but it seems to me that the reason a lot of geeks and audiophiles aren't champing at the bit to get all-digital music is because we don't know what future attempts at Digital Rights Management (DRM) will do. Microsoft has already hinted at its next DRM system, Palladium, that has some scary potentials to disallow certain software from running on your computer -- even software you want to run. (Think: Linux.) It's not hard to imagine a world in which all our music is owned by the RIAA, and we have to rent each song (which is basically what's happening now, piracy aside), or even each listen. With a system like Palladium, the RIAA could squash start-up artists, indie labels, and anyone else who didn't charge their ridiculous fees. Thank you, I like having a physical copy of my music just fine, and I think a lot of people stand with me on this.

-- saintp
(To reply, click here.)

Personally, I don't want my music to come only thru the ether or on ROM chips. I like CDs (or the CD size) because you can read what's on the CD label (I love cover art) and they don't get lost easily or end up eaten by the cat.

-- FastFashn
(To reply, click here.)

Unfortunately, consumers can only hope to get the RIAA to realize what opportunities it is missing. It is impossible to disband or decentralize the music industry for one simple reason: people are sheep. For music to become popular enough to make it worthwhile to fund, it must be adopted by a certain number of people.

People don't judge music based solely on its merits, but rather on a cliquish popular wave which they start riding sooner (the hip) or later (the unhip.) Thus advertising and a lot of capital are necessary to get most bands and music off the ground to get the crucial momentum going. It's a shame that the companies that have become successful at this think the only two valid ways to make money are increasingly overpriced concert revenues and discrete physical media sales.

-- Tattva
(To reply, click here.)

At some point, the digital signal coming off the disk is going to have to be converted from digital to analog. In all but the lowest end of the market, the box which decodes the signal (the DAC - either the receiver, an external converter or the player itself) and the amplifier (which is connected to the speakers) are in separate boxes. The connection between the DAC and the power amplifier is, in 99.9% of cases (I'll ignore Meridian, Wadia and a couple of other very expensive cases) analog. Yep. Analog. So sure, DVD-A and SACD players have DACs built in and don't output a digital signal. But there is nothing archaic about that. In most cases, the sound would be way, way better than sending the digital signal out of the player using those horrible Toslink optical connections.

-- SFish
(To reply, click here.)

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