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A Compact Disc (CD) is an optical disc used to store digital data, originally developed for storing digital audio. The CD, introduced in 1982, remains the standard physical medium for commercial audio recordings as of 2006. An audio compact disc consists of one or more stereo tracks stored using 16-bit PCM coding at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. Standard compact discs have a diameter of 120 mm or 80 mm. The 120 mm discs can hold approximately 80 minutes of audio. The 80 mm discs, sometimes used for CD singles, hold approximately 20 minutes of audio. Compact disc technology was later adapted for use as a data storage device, known as a CD-ROM, and to include record-once and re-writable media (CD-R and CD-RW). CD-ROMs and CD-Rs remain widely used technologies in the personal-computer industry as of 2006. The CD and its extensions have been extremely successful: in 2004, the annual worldwide sales of CD-Audio, CD-ROM, and CD-R reached about 30 billion discs.
History In 1979 Philips and Sony decided to join forces, setting up a joint task force of engineers whose mission was to design the new digital audio disc. Prominent members of the task force were Kees Immink and Toshitada Doi. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the taskforce produced the "Red Book," the Compact Disc standard. Philips contributed the general manufacturing process, based on the video LaserDisc technology. Philips also contributed the Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation, EFM, which offers both a long playing time and a high resilience against disc handling damage such as scratches and fingerprints; while Sony contributed the error-correction method, CIRC. The Compact Disc Story, told by a former member of the taskforce, gives background information on the many technical decisions made, including the choice of the sampling frequency, playing time, and disc diameter. According to Philips, the Compact Disc was thus "invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team." The Compact Disc reached the market in late 1982 in Asia and early the following year in other markets. This event is often seen as the "Big Bang" of the digital audio revolution. The new audio disc was enthusiastically received, especially in the early-adopting classical music and audiophile communities and its handling quality received particular praise. The far larger popular and rock music industries were slower to adopt the new format, especially in the huge consumer markets in Europe and the United States, the first notable success being Brothers in Arms in 1985. The design of the CD was originally conceived as an evolution of the gramophone record, rather than primarily as a data storage medium. Only later did the concept of an 'audio file' arise, and the generalising of this to any data file. From its origins as a music format, Compact Disc has grown to encompass other applications. In June 1985, the CD-ROM (read-only memory) and, in 1990, CD-Recordable were introduced, also developed by Sony and Philips. Physical details Compact discs are made from a 1.2 mm thick disc of very pure polycarbonate plastic. A thin layer of Super Purity Aluminium (or rarely gold, used for its data longevity, such as in some limited-edition audiophile CDs) is applied to the surface to make it reflective, which is protected by a film of lacquer. The lacquer can be printed with a label. Common printing methods for compact discs are silkscreening and offset printing. CD data is stored as a series of tiny indentations (pits), encoded in a tightly packed spiral track of pits moulded into the top of the polycarbonate layer. The areas between pits are known as 'lands'. Each pit is approximately 100 nm deep by 500 nm wide, and varies from 850 nm to 3.5 μm of length. The spacing between the tracks, the pitch, is 1.6 μm. A CD is read by focusing a 780 nm wavelength semiconductor laser through the bottom of the polycarbonate layer. The difference in height between pits and lands leads to a phase difference between the light reflected from a pit and from its surrounding land. By measuring the intensity with a photodiode, one is able to read the data from the disc. The pits and lands themselves do not directly represent the zeroes and ones of binary data. Instead, Non-return-to-zero, inverted encoding is used: a change from pit to land or land to pit indicates a one, while no change indicates a zero. This in turn is decoded by reversing the Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation used in mastering the disc, and then reversing the Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Coding, finally revealing the raw audio data stored on the disc. Pits are much closer to the label side of a disc so that defects and dirt on the clear side can be out of focus during playback. Discs consequently suffer more damage because of defects such as scratches on the label side, whereas clear-side scratches can be repaired by refilling them with plastic of similar index of refraction. Disc shapes and diameters The digital data on a CD begins at the center of the disc and proceeds outwards to the edge, which allows adaptation to the different size formats available. Standard CDs are available in two sizes. By far the most common is 120 mm in diameter, with a 74-minute audio capacity and a 650 MB data or an 80-minute audio capacity and a 700 MB data. 80 mm discs are also available, Each such "miniCD" or "Maxi CD" can hold 21 minutes of music, or 184 MB of data (this form factor has also been called "CD3", since it is about three inches across) Audio format The technical format of an audio compact disc (Compact Disc Digital Audio -- CDDA) is laid down in a document produced in 1980 by the format's joint creators, Sony and Philips. The document is known colloquially as the "Red Book" after the colour of its cover. The format is a two-channel 16-bit PCM encoding at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Four-channel sound is an allowed option within the Red Book format, but has never been implemented. The sampling rate of 44.1 kHz is inherited from a method of converting digital audio into an analog video signal for storage on video tape, which was the most affordable way to get the data from the recording studio to the CD manufacturer at the time the CD specification was being developed. A device that turns an analog audio signal into PCM audio, which in turn is changed into an analog video signal is called a PCM adaptor. This technology could store six samples (three samples per each stereo channel) in a single horizontal line. A standard NTSC video signal has 245 usable lines per field, and 59.94 fields/s, which works out at 44,056 samples/s/stereo channel. Similarly PAL has 294 lines and 50 fields, which gives 44,100 samples/s/stereo channel. This system could either store 14-bit samples with some error correction, or 16-bit samples with almost no error correction. There was a long debate over whether to use 14 or 16 bit samples and/or 44,056 or 44,100 samples/s when the Sony/Philips task force designed the compact disc; Philips already developed a 14 bit D/A converter, but Sony insisted on 16 bit. In the end, 16 bits and 44.1 kilosamples per second prevailed. Philips found a way to produce 16 bit quality using their 14-bit DAC by using four times oversampling. Storage capacity and playing time The original target storage capacity for a CD was one hour of audio content, and a disc diameter of 115 mm was sufficient. However, according to Philips, Sony vice-president Norio Ohga suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony on a single disc.* Kees Immink of Philips refutes this.* The extra playing time required changing to a 12 cm disc. According to a Sunday Tribune interview * the story is slightly more involved. At that time (1979) Philips owned Polygram, one of the world's largest distributors of music. Polygram had set up a large experimental CD disc plant in Hanover, Germany, which could produce huge amounts of CDs having, of course, a diameter of 11.5cm. Sony did not yet have such a facility. If Sony had agreed on the 11.5cm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the market. Sony was aware of that, did not like it, and something had to be done. The long-playing time of Beethoven's Ninth imposed by Ohga was used to push Philips to accept 12cm, so that Philips' Polygram lost its edge on disc fabrication. The 74-minute playing time of a CD, being more than that of most long-playing vinyl albums, was often used to the format's advantage during the early years when CDs and LPs vied for commercial sales. CDs would often be released with one or more bonus tracks, enticing consumers to buy the CD for the extra material. However, attempts to combine double LPs onto one CD occasionally resulted in an opposing situation in which the CD would actually offer fewer tracks than the LP equivalent. Main physical parameters The main parameters of the CD (taken from the September 1983 issue of the compact disc specification) are as follows: The program area is 86.05 cm², so that the length of the recordable spiral is 86.05/1.6 = 5.38 km. With a scanning speed of 1.2 m/s, the playing time is 74 minutes, or around 650 MB of data on a CD-ROM. If the disc diameter were 115 mm, the maximum playing time would have been 68 minutes, i.e., six minutes less. A disc with data appearing slightly more densely is tolerated by most players (though some old ones fail). Using a linear velocity of 1.2 m/s and a track pitch of 1.5 micrometre leads to a playing time of 80 minutes, or a capacity of 700 MB. Even higher capacities on non-standard discs (up to 99 minutes) are available at least as recordables, but generally the tighter the tracks are squeezed the worse the compatibility will be. Data structure The smallest entity in the CD audio format is called a frame. A frame can accommodate six complete 16-bit stereo samples, i.e. 2×2×6 = 24 bytes. A frame comprises 33 bytes, of which 24 are audio bytes (six full stereo samples), eight CIRC-generated error correction bytes, and one subcode byte. The eight bits of a subcode byte are available for control and display. Under Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation (EFM) rules, each data/audio byte is translated into 14-bit EFM words, which alternates with 3-bit merging words. In total we have 33 Current manufacturing processes allow an audio CD to contain up to 77-78 minutes (varies from one replication plant to another) without requiring the content creator to sign a waiver. Thus, in current practice, maximum CD playing time has crept higher while maintaining acceptable standards of reliability. CD-ROM For its first few years of existence, the compact disc was purely an audio format. However, in 1985 the Yellow Book CD-ROM standard was established by Sony and Philips, which defined a non-volatile optical data storage medium using the same physical format as audio compact discs, readable by a computer with a CD-ROM (CDR) drive. Manufacture Replicated CDs are mass-produced initially using a hydraulic press. Small granules of raw plastic are fed into the barrel while under heat and increasing amount of pressure melt the plastic and force the liquified material into the mold cavity. Equipped with a metal stamper the mold closes, allowing the plastic to cool and harden. Once opened, the disc substrate is removed from the mold by a robotic arm, and a 15 mm diameter center hole (called a stacking ring) is removed. This method produces the clear plastic blank part of the disc. After the foil layer is applied to the clear blank substrate the disc is ready to go to press. To press the CD first a Glass Master is cut using a high power laser on a device not dissimilar to a CD writer, the glass master being around 12 inches diameter and up to one inch thick as it needs to be strong for pressing. This glass master is a positive master. After testing it will then be used to make a die by pressing it against a metal disc. The die then becomes a negative image, a number of them can be made depending on the number of pressing mills that will be running off copies of the final CD. The die will then go into the press and press the image onto the foil layer of the blank CD leaving a final positive image on the disc. A small circle of varnish is then applied as a ring around the centre of the disc and a fast spin will evenly spread it over the surface. The disc will then be printed and packed. The method used to press an LP record is very similar except the molding of the plastic disc is a separate process with CDs. Recordable CD Recordable compact discs, CD-Rs, are injection molded with a "blank" data spiral. A photosensitive dye is then applied, and then the discs are metallized and lacquer coated. The write laser of the CD recorder changes the color of the dye to allow the read laser of a standard CD player to see the data as it would an injection molded compact disc. CD-R recordings are permanent. The resulting discs can be read by most CD-ROM drives and played in most audio CD players. Over time however (estimated to be about 5 years) the dye will fade causing read errors and data loss until the reading device cannot recover with error correction methods. CD-RW is a re-recordable medium that uses a metallic alloy instead of a dye. The write laser in this case is used to heat and alter the chemical properties of the alloy and hence change its reflectivity. A CD-RW does not have as great a difference in the reflectivity of lands and bumps as a pressed CD or a CD-R, and so many CD audio players cannot read CD-RW discs, although the majority of stand-alone DVD players can. CD-Rs follow the Orange Book standard. Copy protection The Red Book audio specification, except a simple 'anti-copy' bit in the subcode, does not include any serious copy protection mechanism. Starting in early 2002, attempts were made by record companies to market "copy-protected" non-standard compact discs. Philips has stated that such discs are not permitted to bear the trademarked Compact Disc Digital Audio logo because they violate the Red Book specification. Moreover, there has been great public outcry over copy-protected discs because many see it as a threat to fair use. See also | |||||||||||||||||||||
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