Ffff

[tgies]

"Blu-spec CD is a specification for an improved version of a conventional Audio CD, introduced by Sony Music Entertainment. Instead of a traditional infra-red laser, a blue laser is used for recording the pits on the CD master that is needed for disc replication. The blue laser creates more precise pits, causing less distortion in the optical read-out process and supposedly resulting in higher-quality audio."

On a semi-related note, tehslugbug has been making videos about things and how they work:

Tape flanging video
tape flanging video II: record flanging video
cd player video

Comments

[caladri.livejournal.com]

Sony have discovered a new bit between 0 and 1.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

Basically

the funny thing is that i pretty much never get CDs with recovery errors on them except for sony pressings which are as screwed up as possible on purpose to try and make it harder to rip them

sony is a terrible company

[bdu.livejournal.com]

They call it the "semibit". Totally useful.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

clarification for people who don't know about things:

any CD is guaranteed to have a ton of errors on it; CDs are not perfect. however, there is a redundant error correction system in place so that the CD player can fill in the blanks in the data and get back exactly the original information. if it's close enough that the error correction can make it perfect, it's perfect. you can recover the exact original information off of basically any CD ever when it's new

sony are trying to pretend that this is not the case and are treating CDs like an analog medium again

audiophilez

[jhskulk.livejournal.com]

Gustave Solomon is rolling in his grave at the moment

[tgies.livejournal.com]

the pioneers of information theory have been maintaining a pretty good angular velocity in their graves for a while now

[bofh1459.livejournal.com]

But of course. You merely need to consider extended binary, consisting of the bits 0, 1 and FileNotFound.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

yeah the bit I copied out of the spec for my image refers to some bullshit "new" polycarbonate they are supposedly making the discs out of (I just picked a bit at random with pictures in it and didn't care about the text because like two people who read Japanese look at this anyway), but right before that it says this:

『Blu-spec CDTM』の特徴①
Blue Laser Diode （ブルー レーザー ダイオード）～半導体レーザー カッティングによる
極微細加工でマスターテープクオリティを忠実に再現することに成功
Blue Laser Diode （ブルー レーザー ダイオード） カッティング
・最適化された光ファイバーの採用により、Blue Laser Diode(BLD)のビーム品質を向上。
・より短波長のブルー レーザー を用いることにより極微細加工を実現。
・半導体レーザーの採用により、カッティングマシンの冷却効率を向上させ、ファンなどに
よる振動を完全に排除した正確なカッティングを実現。

please note that this is all made more ridiculous by the fact that a laser is only involved once in the manufacture of a mass-produced CD, in basically controlled laboratory conditions, when the original glass master is etched. also nobody has used air-cooled gas lasers for that since 1991 and yet they are talking about using semiconductor lasers like it is a new thing. also some of the official literature i read describes the ~old method~ as involving an infrared laser (as is reflected in the wikipedia article) — funny thing about that is that nobody has ever used an infrared laser for CD manufacturing; it is basically a physical impossibility.

tl;dr sony is bad and appear to just be making shit up at this point

[tgies.livejournal.com]

I suppose, to be absolutely generous, that minimizing the recoverable errors which are present on the disc as manufactured means that it can take that many more scratches or whatever before the accumulated error is unrecoverable, but that is going to be a seriously negligible difference.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

important update: i just found out that mastering plants are all using ~blue~ lasers to do masters anyway. since the 1990s (before that they were gas UV lasers)

[jhskulk.livejournal.com]

maybe I am stating the obvious here but I think Sony is just trying to play on people's knowledge of "blu-ray" by giving some negligibly improved audio disc a name which is similar to that.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

basically
high-end consumer audio has always had a pretty big market share in Japan, but the impression I actually get is that the target market is informed enough to not fall for this kind of bullshit. I mean all the major "hey here's songs but now in professional edition" brands in Japan have been actual improvements over the normal stuff

sony is just a stupid company and i expect this to be a commercial failure

[anti-esque.livejournal.com]

the pioneers of information theory have been maintaining a pretty good angular velocity in their graves for a while now

HAHAHAHAHA

I died


just thought I'd, uh, let you know

okay, back to my cave.

[anti-esque.livejournal.com]

did you know that you can record elecjronic music things on some damn tin foil and uh it works

[anti-esque.livejournal.com]

or actually it's that you can make a CD player out of aluminum foil

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Three-valued logic in the hizzouse!

[tgies.livejournal.com]

IMPOSSIBLE how does this work

[tgies.livejournal.com]

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_.aspx

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Seen it. They didn't seem to know about this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_logic), though.

[tgies.livejournal.com]

I suck and actually meant to reply to bofh1459's comment above for the benefit of people who don't know what the hell.

The funny thing is that ternary logic actually is used in electronics and algebraic error correction a lot, so it's not really unreasonable to think that one might find a value that is not 1 or 0 useful when talking about a CD player. I actually saw an Insane Audiophile Screed once which involved misapplying ternary logic and various error correction formulae to prove mathematically that putting some kind of nail polish on your CDs will make them sound better.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

The Mathematics of Nail Polish: Theory and Practice

[tgies.livejournal.com]

This sounds like the title of an actual article in an audiophile rag.