"Perfect Sound Forever" - Really?!?

[Anderton]

When the CD was introduced, one of the marketing tag lines was "perfect sound forever," meaning that 16/44 was all we needed, and the CD media would last forever. Well, I was reading Medialine the other day (BTW great publication for those in the biz) and found an interesting article about a fungus that attacks CDs. Here's a quote from the article: "Spanish scientists [discovered] a fungus in Belize that ate through portions of a CD's aluminum reflective layer...[the fungus] usually feeds on plants and animals, occastionally infecting the human respiratory system...The [U.K.'s] Daily Telegraph [which first published the article] quoted scientist Victor Cardenas as saying, 'It completely destroys the aluminum. It leaves nothing behind.' "The fungus is believed to have entered the disc in question through the outer edge. CD co-inventor Philips commented...that the incident was most likely a 'freak accident caused by extreme weather conditions.'" As the article, written by Terence P. Keegan, points out "[This serves] as a reminder that optical discs are prey to a host of obscure, hazardous environmental factors never considered in 'acclerated aging' tests." Hmmm...and to think I almost moved to Belize...

[olhhyperback.com]

There have also been problems with chemical interactions between booklet papers, inks and CD coatings. As complexity of composition and chemistry increases, reliability ALWAYS decreases. It's ironic that we still have experimental tin-foil recordings of Edison's voice while many first generation digital master recordings are unplayable.

[bvdd]

This reminds me of how ticked off I got over my Hi Bias and Metal cassettes losing their 'sparkle' after barely 2 years .. yet cheap Radio Shack reel tapes from 1972, totally uncared for and covered with mold, still sounded like new.

[Anderton]

<> Hi Bob, it's always an honor when you participate in the forum. I often wonder about long-term longevity. I was at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and was fascinated by some of the documents written in the 20s. It got me thinking...how many CD-ROMs will we be able to read in the year 2080? It's not just a question of the medium lasting, but also of finding players for the CDs. I'm sure there will be a drive around somewhere that will be able to read CDs, but already, I have keyboards that are only a decade old, and can't find SSDD replacement drives OR media anymore... Or take my Emulator II. I have a bunch of sounds for it, but can't get them out digitally. My only version of Sound Designer that accommodates the EII (and the program runs only on a Mac Plus) is copy protected on a floppy, and the floppy is dead. Digi can't help, E-mu can't help, and they're using a weirdass 8 bit compressed format that no one else can figure out. Bummer. A lot of great sounds are lost to me, apparently forever.

[NKF]

Anderton wrote: >>>Or take my Emulator II. I have a bunch of sounds for it, but can't get them out digitally.<<< Maybe there is help ... if you wnat to rescue the samples and forget the filters, which of course is not everytime desireable ... the filters are actually good sounding on the EII. What I did with my Emulator II was to get the Oberheim DPX-1. As you probably know it can read EII disks but what you may not know is the fact it can dump the samples as sysex to another sampler or program. At least this is possible from a later software revision. I just checked the manual (first edition from Dec.1986)of the DPX-1, on page 26 I found bidirectional sample dump mentioned. and concerning the topic ... Bob Olhsson wrote: >>>It's ironic that we still have experimental tin-foil recordings of Edison's voice while many first generation digital master recordings are unplayable.<<< Aggree, but I think that's on most part an effect of cheap mass production. Capitalism is usually not focused on longevity but on fast turnaround of profits. If Capitalism is in the process of ruining this planet, while leaving stored data out ... :-) The good side of digital is the ability of data cloning and storing without a loss on several media and media formats. I have CD burners and a DVD burner but still store important data on the large and bulky MO disks. I trust MO more than CD-R/RW and all these phase change concepts like DVD RAM. It is necessary to store important data on different media and formats and store them in different places. You can't do this with Edison's foil. Nirto Karsten Fischer This message has been edited by NKF on 08-24-2001 at 12:48 PM

[Guest]

somebody tell me who is responsible for this line: "Perfect Sound Forever" - not one lie, but two. always one of my favorites. Does anybody remember the Laser Rot scare of the mid 80's re: LaserDisc? this was pretty well documented. Ironically, like most modern media formats, market forces did the format in before nature could return it to dust.

[Frunobulax]

Reminds me of a friend's recent musings. Picture an archaeologist 10,000 years from now: "I don't know what these silver disks are, but look, these black ones have music on 'em!"

[Frunobulax]

Reminds me of a friend's recent musings. Picture an archaeologist 10,000 years from now: "I don't know what these silver disks are, but look, these black ones have music on 'em!"

[soapbox]

Among other things, this is an important reminder to store important archives in more than one location!

[Chip McDonald]

There's probably an inverse relationship of how technical the medium is storing the message versus the longevity of it. Cave dwellers in prehistoric Europe decide to scribble things on a wall in a cave with blood and chalk, and it's still there. Rosetta stone; the pyramids. Vinyl records may last longer than a chemically unstable cd; I've got a couple Warner Brothers cd's from long ago that won't play. All of my records would from well before that. There's a guy named Danny Hillis, who is a brilliant AI researcher that has decided to build - for whatever reason - a gigantic clock out of pseudo-impermeable materials, with the intent of making a human-made artifact that will outlast "anything". The question to all of this is, "what does it really matter in the end"?

[Dan South]

I've got CD's from the mid-80's that sound as good as the day I bought them. Vinyl degrades from the first playback, and I could NEVER learn to tune out the clicks, wow, and flutter. I also own some old 78 RPM records (and a spring-driven, hand crank Victrola to play them). They still "work," but good gravy! The sound quality is abysmal! CD's are IT for me until something significantly better comes along. Danny Hillis and his millenium clock - I heard an interview with him on NPR one night. He said that he got the idea reading about a project to refurbish an old cathedral in Europe. The engineers realized that they needed scores of huge oak trees to provide the lumber for the project. To their surprise, the discovered an oak grove not far away with trees that were just the right age. The original designers of the cathedral had planned ahead to provide the community with what it would need hundreds of years later when the construction materials started to wear out. By contrast, today's society is entirely self-centered and disposable. No one considers the long term consequences of their actions. Use fossil fuels and worry about alternate energy forms when the supply runs out. Global warming? Not MY problem. Let future generations figure it out. Soil erosion? Ozone depletion? Polar ice caps? Super hurricanes? Sorry, it all sounds very interesting, but I have to make sure that we make a profit this quarter. Hillis' project was an attempt at bucking this trend, at starting a project that would have an indeterminate lifespan. How do you arrange to have people take care of it in the future? How do you ensure that the land will be available indefinitely (no development, etc.)? How do you ensure that the future caretakers will have the resources and information they need to continue managing the project after the initial team is gone? The "long term" approach is desirable in many areas, particularly in computing. Long term archiving is a big problem. How will today's data be accessible in the future? If you carve it in stone or write it on paper, it will last hundreds of years, if not longer. If you put it on a Seagate hard drive or a CD-RW, it's doomed. - Let's all be glad that the ancient Greeks and Egyptians did NOT have personal computers. Hillis is attempting to develop a framework for long term data storage, and he's using this clock project as a prototype. As a music fan, I'd like to know that the music of Louis Armstrong and Art Tatum will be preserved for all future generations. Without research like the Hillis clock project, it will not be possible to develop reliable, long term storage solutions for priceless works of art like these.

[surfjunkie]

[quote]Originally posted by Anderton: [b]...I was reading Medialine the other day (BTW great publication for those in the biz) and found an interesting article about a fungus that attacks CDs. [/b][/quote]here's the story [url=http://tierra.rediris.es/pro/CD-fungi/info.html]as told by the scientists themselves[/url] . there are fungus photos, but they're too big to post here.

[KenElevenShadows]

>> The question to all of this is, "what does it really matter in the end"? >> Guess it depends on the person. It'd be nice to be able to archive something more permanently. A concern that a lot of people have, not just with CDs, but with digital multi-tracking is: is this going to be compatible with anything in 5 years? 10 years? There are so many different methods of storing, recording, and multi-tracking digital information... Maybe an archeologist would be interested in hearing music from the Golden Age of CDs and ADATs. But back to the CDs, I too have things from 15 years ago that still play back perfectly fine. It's just a question of whether it will play back really well in another 15. Who knows?

[fantasticsound]

I have to agree with Dansouth and Ken. My cassettes of early stereo and multitrack recording are pretty much toast, and have been for several years. It's only thanks to digital recording that I've recovered some of the gems from behind the hiss and other noise. I'm not totally satisfied with CD, by any means, but the original quality is consistant with what I hear today from 15 and 16 year old CD's. I think the example of tinfoil recordings is flawed. It seems to me that the inventor carefully stored the initial recordings and they've been well kept ever since. You can say audio tape continues to degrade rapidly, even under the best conditions, in relation to this entirely physical medium, but CD's? Despite the fungus concerns, I'd be surprised if we couldn't preserve a CD in a controlled environment almost indefinately. I'm more concerned with the compatability issues. The only sure way for longterm digital storage is the time consuming method of transferring data from old media to new. Fortunately, this SHOULD be possible with little or no degradation in audio quality. Cost of transfer won't be low, however. I remember an interview with Tom Scholz, after the lawsuit between Boston and the record company was finally settled. They pulled the multi-track tapes that had been previously recorded for the 3rd album out of storage, and the layers of tape were completely stuck together! It took painstaking care to separate each turn of the reel, to recover the recordings for more overdubs and production. Of course vinyl melts pretty easily if not kept in a controlled environment! :D So far, my CD's have lasted in many hostile environments that would have precluded the use of vinyl. Most recently, an honest to goodness sandstorm. They don't skip easily, either. A final note; You ever notice how crew members from the later Star Trek tv series can always seem to read old data from antiquated memory modules and computers, usually by placing the module in the viscinity of their test equipment?? Who knows, maybe this will be possible in the future? They had to change several tech. pieces in the prequel show, Enterprise, because the original show's communicators are toys compared with current cell phones, etc. It is possible, but based on current comp. business, I'm don't think it's a priority. A musical instrument manufacturer, who previously employed this poster, had a hell of a time transferring from Win98 to Win2000 while attempting to access their old DOS database. I don't know the details, but we needed access to both old and new systems, and it just wasn't working. Anyone know of others who are pushing for backwards compatability of hardware/software/data?

[Franknputer]

[quote]Originally posted by Dan South: [b] I also own some old 78 RPM records (and a spring-driven, hand crank Victrola to play them). They still "work," but good gravy! The sound quality is abysmal![/b][/quote]That may be true, but it reminds me of a time when I helped a good friend of mine move into his new house - including a massive collection of vinyl & CDs. Thing was, he had not gotten the power turned on yet - but, after the work was done, we spent a very enjoyable afternoon listening to his collection of '78s on his old Victrola. moral - fidelity isn't everything... :D