Mastodawn

artemist Aug 1, 2023

Hot take:
The Compact Disc is still the most futuristic audio format. Forget streaming, files, or the vinyl resurgence, CDs output music at near the top of the quality a human can hear by shooting LASERS at a mirror spinning 8 times per second. This somehow just works and you can read a $0.10 disc with a $20 drive.

When I buy music, I prefer to have it on a CD. I can rip it into my computer easily and if I ever lose that copy I can just rip it again, bit perfect every time. There's no subscription and no DRM that can take it away from me, I have a physical thing.

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Magnus Ahltorp

@artemist For such a complicated sounding system, it’s actually somewhat easy to read. Detection of the depressions is just checking if it’s dispersed or reflected, tracking can be done by just watching the character of the dispersed light, and variable speed can be handled with simple buffer length monitoring. More complicated than a record player, but still much easier than e.g. flash storage.