According to this Inquirer report, there’s a new kind of CD in town.
A JAPANESE SOUND boffin has come up with a glass CD which he reckons does not warp, distort, and looks and sounds nicer than those nasty plastic creations… He said that plastic CDs were not completely transparent, information on them cannot be read perfectly. They are also susceptible to bending or warping if left in sunlight or humid areas, which leads to sound distortion.
That doesn’t make sense. CDs are digital information, so there’s either data there or there isn’t. You can certainly damage them, but putting your zeros and ones in glass instead of plastic isn’t going to make any difference to the sound quality.
Comments
0 responses to “Glass CD sounds better. Eh?”
Yes, I’d say you are correct. Also, if you drop a plastic CD, it usually survives…
Incidentally, CDs are pressed from a glass master. Not particularly interesting, but true!
CDs don’t store ones and zeros (at least not directly). It’s been years since I studied it but they use some strange way of encoding the data onto the disk. This may well be more suceptable to error as a result of warping etc. I still don’t think a glass one would help much…
Incidentally, everyone knows that CDs were invented by Philips SV and not the Japansese right?
If the glass was perfect then there would be a difference but on the vast majority of audio systems it would not be noticable. CDs are made from pretty cheap plastic which has a fair amount of deformations on every disk. Apparently the company that orders the CD makes the decision on the tolerances (in a not-dissimilar way to silicon chip yields). All CD players have error correction algorithms. It’s not that it reads any individual piece of data better – it’s that it reads *all* of it so doesn’t have to interpolate the gaps.
Good point on the interpolation thing. Hadn’t thought of that.