pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



Compact Disc is generall perfect but the only thing I'll ever hold against it was going with 44.1khz instead of 48khz like it should have been. Yes I understand it was literally the 80s and they were pioneering the very concept of digital audio but still they should have used their future goggles to see into the future and how annoying that would get for us now.


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in reply to @pendell's post:

Oh, ok! So, when they first started doing digital audio, any amount of digitized audio of reasonable quality was simply massive. A CD's 600 to 700 megabytes, which in 1980 was simply too much. Sooo, they needed to use some format that carried a lot of information, and ideally was relatively cheap.

Fortunately, there actually totally is one: video tape. As it turns out, you can modulate an awful lot of bits into a reasonable video signal. So they did! In the late 70s, there were these devices called "PCM adapters" which'd let you stick digital audio onto a video signal, and get it back out later. Use a video recorder on the signal, and voila: digital recording. And you don't even need a fancy recorder; a VHS deck is plenty.

Anyways, this doesn't explain the number. The number comes from the following math:

  1. NTSC: 245 lines per field * 60 fields per second * 3 samples per line = 44,100 samples per second
  2. PAL: 294 lines per filed * 50 fields per second * 3 samples per line = 44,100 samples per second

And finally, when the CD spec was being devised, this format already existed as the de facto standard digital audio format. It even lasted as the standard digital audio recording format for a while -- even after the CD existed, video tape was the only practical way of getting digital audio to a mastering facility before dedicated media formats got to be a thing.