DVD: Tomorrow's VHS, or Betamax?

[SanibelMan]

Will DVD bevome the new standard for home movies, like VHS is now, or will it just be another new technology that's now quite rare, like Betamax (only used by TV professionals) or MiniDisc (I keep seeing ads for it on TV, but I know absolutely no one that actually has seen a MiniDisc or a MD Player). I would guess that it becomes relatively standard, because it has many more features than VHS (for example, easy searching with chapters, subtitles, behind-the-scenes stories, etc). I'll hopefully be renting a DVD player sometime this week, along with The Matrix, so I'll find out soon.

And also, does anyone know of plans for a DVD-RAM Camcorder? You know, record movies and play them back at home, with no conversion - if they could do that, DVD would replace VHS in 5 years.

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"I like Florida; everything is in the eighties. The temperatures, the ages, and the IQs."
-- George Carlin

[Markxxx]

I don't know anything about DVD but unless you can record on it, it won't replace VHS.

[Omniscient]

Yes, it looks like DVD is going to replace VHS and not be some Betamax. The comparison sucks however. VHS and Beta were two competing formats of the same medium. DVD is a whole new medium, and there is no other option available which can do the same things.

The only other posibility that could be created now is using solid state memory simlar to a Hard Drive, or flash cards like in digital cameras. This could happen someday, but the materials are costly (DVD/CD's are very cheap) and they are big and heavy. One competitor now is a solid state digital video recorder. Its basically a VRC type machine that saves TV programs like a VCR does, but uses a hard drive like your computer. There is a limited space, and you can't remove the stored programs, save them externally and view on another machine. When all TVs are linked to the internet and you can download from one machine to another this may become an option, but any external drive to save to is going to use some version of an optical disk and therefore use the indusrty standard (ala DVD).

The main reason DVD is working, and MD is moving slow, is because there is a greater need for DVD. DVD is a huge improvement over magnetic tapes. CD's were a huge improvement over magnetic tape. The evolution of DVD and players is going to parallel CD's, not VHS. MD on the other hand isn't replacing a greatly flawed system. The only problem is that CD's aren't recordable (soon to be a non factor for more people), they skip (not a concern for many), their size (this will help) and their durability (the biggest factor). While the MD improves these factors, there isn't much that forces CD owners to update. Chances are that CD and MD will exist together, and ther few who need a skip free, recordable, durable sound system will buy one, and copy their CDs to MD as they need them. There is no insentive for people to completly replace CD's. Cassette tapes were perishable, CD's last forever, the big difference.

As for the next Betamax, that was DIVX, and it has already folded. It was a different format on the same medium. The buyers spoke and the winner has been crowned, start shopping for a DVD, it'll be as useful as your CD players and your CD-Rom.

[Omniscient]

A few more things. DVD-RAM is a misnomer, there can be no such thing. DVD just describes the type of medium used. You mean digital RAM, yes it exists in your computer, and in several digital camcorders.

About recording. DVD recorders will likely be common in the future. Back to the CD-cassette/DVD-VHS comparison. You will notice that cassette recorders are still common, and included in many cars, and almost all portable stereos and bookshelf systems. So it really not fair to say CD replaced cassettes. Now with CD burners becoming common and affordable cassette will soon disappear. DVD will live along side of VHS for a while, DVD being choice for new buyers and renters, but everyone keeping a VCR to tape shows, and make bootleg copies. When DVD becomes cheaply rewritable like CD is now VHS will finally die.

[SanibelMan]

When I said DVD-RAM, I was just commenting on something I saw as an option for a computer - ie, you could get the standard CD-ROM, a DVD-ROM, or a DVD-RAM - which I assumed was a ReWritable DVD drive. I don't know why it was called a DVD-RAM, and I agree that it doesn't make any sense.

[Satan]

{quote]I don't know anything about DVD but unless you can record on it, it won't replace VHS.[/quote]

That's what they said about CDs too...

My opinion is that this is the real deal. A format's acceptance in these matters is all about the availability of software. One of the things that did in the Beta, in spite of its advantages over VHS, was that the Japs thought that a technically superior product would be enough, whereas Americans asked, "But what can I play on it?"

Turned out that VHS becamse the format that movie companies and distributors wound up using, making Beta a $300 paperweight within a couple of years.

Whereas DVD (well, the companies) are making movies available, and most companies seem to be offering new and catalog titles in the format, often with bonuses like extra footage - kinda like how when CDs came out, they offered "bonus tracks" that were not on cassette and vinyl.

Combine this with the fact that it has been heavilly involved with the computer industry - it just ain't practical to drag your VCR onto a plane to watch a movie - and this portability (also an advantage CDs had over vinyl) adds to the allure.

DVD is here. Get used to it, as it ain't goiong anywhere for a while (probably)...

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Yer pal,
Satan

[bantmof]

DVD-RAM is a misnomer, there can be no such thing.
Why not?
DVD just describes the type of medium used. You mean digital RAM, yes it exists in your computer, and in several digital camcorders.
Actually I would guess the reference he saw really was talking about DVD-RAM, not solid state RAM. DVD-RAM is available today, and there are official international standards for it and everything, although I'm not sure why somebody would buy it since the recorded media (as far as I understand) are not compatible with normal DVD drives.

DVD-R and DVD-RW seem like more interesting formats to me, since the resulting recorded media can be played in normal DVD-ROM drives. They'll start out expensive, as CD-R was, but get cheaper over time, as CD-R also did, I wager.

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peas on earth

[dwtno]

I must point out, contrary to the OP's message, Betamax is NOT used by TV professionals. The Beta in common use at television stations and production companies is only tangentially related to the Betamax gathering dust in your closet. They use a similar internal transport system, and the tape cases themselves are nearly identical, but the formats are NOT interchangeable. The professional Beta (originally known as High Speed Beta, but now refereed to as BetaSP) records a much higher quality and higher resolution image than the standard Betamax. The tape runs much faster through the professional machine, also. A standard small format BetaSP tape runs for 30 minutes. The same length of tape packed into a Betamax case recorded at the standard Beta II setting would last for two hours.

This is a common misconception, BTW. Tom Clancy, who takes great pride in his novel's technical accuracy's, has a reporter take a BetaSP tape home to play in his Betamax machine. Couldn't happen! If you want to watch that BetaSP tape, you need the same $20,000 playpack machine that I have to use.

And back to the question at hand... I agree that the proper model for comparison is CD vs. audio cassette tape, not VHS vs Betamax. There are no format wars with DVD, just as there were none with CD. DVD and VHS will co-exist for a time, with most consummers seeing and using advantages in both.

[tanstaafl]

There are no format wars with DVD

Well, not since DIVX died a deserved death.

Someone upthread asked about MD and someone else mentioned it in their answer but didn't explain what it was. MD is "MiniDisk". It's a recordable mini-CD. The disks come in small square cartridges 1-2 inches on a side. The disk stays inside the cartridge. (Think of a floppy disk; the magnetic disk stays inside the plastic housing.)

MiniDisks are recordable. The recorder/player looks like any other piece of stereo equipment. There are also walkman type players.

Sony is trying to position MiniDisk as a replacement for compact cassettes.

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"You can't run away forever; but there's nothing wrong with getting a good head start." --- Jim Steinman

Dennis Matheson --- Dennis@mountaindiver.com
Hike, Dive, Ski, Climb --- www.mountaindiver.com (http://www.mountaindiver.com)

[RealityChuck]

DVD is essentially nothing more than a small laser disk. They didn't catch on particularly well. And the ability to record is still a major advantage for VHS tapes.

Of course, there may be other factors at work. Vinyl records went kaplooey not because of better quality from CDs (though that was a factor) but because it cost manufacturers less to make a CD and they could charge more -- in other words, higher profits. I don't know the price structure for DVDs, but I suspect they cost less to produce than tapes.

Still, the ability to record is a big selling point for tapes and until DVDs can do that, there will be plenty of people who will want the recording capability enough to pass up DVD players. Once they can record, then tapes will phase out. (There could be a middle ground, where VCRs are used only for recording and DVDs only for playing movies).

And, of course, something will come around in another ten years to make DVDs obsolete, too.

[Earl Snake-Hips Tucker]

Not to divert the topic--but does anyone remember RCA's CED disks????

[Satan]

Vinyl records went kaplooey not because of better quality from CDs (though that was a factor)

Actually, it has been proven that CDs did NOT and DO NOT offer better sound than vinyl. This has been proven by audiophiles the world over by simply playing CD and vinyl back-to-back of the same material.

On even a cheap stereo, vinyl offers richer lows and better highs. CDs might be better for midrange, however, but again the seperation was far better when 12 inches was the medium.

You are correct that the manufactuers and labels helped usher CDs along.

Also, vinyl degrades a lot easier and as anyone who has ever listened to old records can attest, this degradation results in popping, hissing and other audio anomalies which also gave CDs the perception of sounding better.

[dwtno]

Durability is the point, Satan!

Yes, I know... "vinyl offers richer lows and better highs" but most listeners don't hear these distinctions, and it's only true of virgin albums, anyway. The only vinyl that EVER sounded better than a CD was straight out of the wrapper plyed with a new stylus. Run that diamond through the groove a few times, and subject it to normal handling and you loose that edge. And playing new vinyl side-by-side with a CD is meaningless because the difference is so slight as to be only noticable on comparison.

Where CD really shines is its permanence and durability. No scratches, pops or hiss. That's worth the bucks right there as far as I'm concerned. And yes, CD's can go bad too, but they last much longer than vinyl and sound better over the length of that lifetime.

The same goes for LaserDisc and DVD. I suppose eventually the aluminum recording surface will fall away from the plastic bonding, but those discs will outlast any given VHS cassette, will survive extreme conditions better and will give a nicer image throughout it all.

Well, goddam, so now all my VHS tapes and my new VCR are going to the junkpile in a few years? Sonofabitch.

I am still ticked off at how the music industry ripped us all off by saying, "oh, all your albums ands cassettes are now obsolete--you have to junk everything and buy CDs. Hahahahah!" Bastards. I still haven't bought a CD player, because I know the second I do, they'll come up with some new piece of crap to make THEM obsolete.

I just give UP.

[pldennison]

Recordable DVD machines will be marketed next year. I'm sure they'll be expensive initially, but you will see huge price drops.

DVD software sales are beginning to match and in some markets surpass VHS sales each month. I bought my player in January, and the visual and sonic advantages over VHS are so obvious from the get-go, I can't imagine going back.

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"I love God! He's so deliciously evil!" - Stewie Griffin, Family Guy

[Mojo]

There are no format wars with DVD

This may be true with commercially available movies and DVD players but it is not true with DVD-R. There are several different formats and, unfortunately, if you record with one brand/format, it will most likely not be playable in other brands/formats. Do a search and you'll find that the storage capacity for recordable DVD media varies (all typically around 4 GIGs though). So if you have a Pioneer DVD Recording drive, you must buy Pioneer (or Pioneer compat.) media, as well as having a Pioneer compat. player.

All of this is somewhat moot as a recorder will set you back about $5,000 and media isn't cheap either.

[Ukulele Ike]

Sound quality, schmound quality.

The nice thing about CDs is you don't have to get up after twenty minutes to flip 'em over. This has done wonders for my sex life.

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Uke

[Keeves]

I'm not enough of a connoisseur to tell the quality difference between vinyl and cd, or between vhs and beta. I even listen to music on AM radio.

To me, the big attraction in DVD is all the extra stuff that it has, like interviews and outtakes and such. My question: If and when DVD finally kills the vhs market, do you think the manufacturers will continue to go to the extra expense of those goodies?

Goodness, Ike, from what I heard tell, a 45 rpm was quite sufficient, she said, digging her spike heel into his foot.

[Sam Stone]

I disagree about vinyl vs CD. Vinyl does not offer richer highs and lows. Some audiophiles claim that there is more 'warmth' in a vinyl recording, but I think it's snobbery.

In almost every measure possible, CD's outperform vinyl. A biggie is dynamic range, which is much, much better on CD. CD's typically have a flatter frequency response, and it goes higher and lower than vinyl. But the frequency response of either is typically better than the speakers in the system anyway.

[Ukulele Ike]

[index finger raised, crushing retort on the tip of the tongue]

[swallow; deep breath; quiet glower]

Ahem. Spending our capital at a rapid clip, are we not, Miss McFlimsey?

I'm sorry, dear, but you really do give me the most irresistible straight lines . . .

[Ukulele Ike]

Say goodnight, Gracie... :)

Omigod, did I really do a little smiley face?

[eggo]

my main plus for cd's is that i have had the same 5-disk changer for 10 years now and it still works like the day i bought it---no replasment stylus here...

eggo

[Narile]

The interesting thing is that while recordable DVD players are positioned to be released Spring of 2000, a new digital VHS standard will also be available around fall of 2000 I believe. This one will be able to do something that DVD-RW/RAM can not do....record and playback full length HDTV quality films. DVD-RW/RAM doesn't have the storage space to record 2 hours of HDTV level image and sound. DVD disks bought at the store can, becuase they can be layered, but DVD-RW/RAM can't record layers. This information is about four months old, so things might have changed, I doubt it though.


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>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry....unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<

---The dragon observes

[sunbear]

So far we have one DVD player/drive in the house.Came with the last computer. I have yet to see a DVD-ROM disc like an encyclopedia or a game.

[HeadlessCow]

The Complete National Geographic Encyclopedia is a 4 DVD or 31 CD set. Riven is now offered on 1 DVD as opposed to the 6ish it took before.

[Whammo]

if my memory serves me right... not saying it does... wasnt Beta a higher quality image and recording originaly over VHS???? I thought that why VHS was chosen over Beta was that Sony "who I believed owned beta" copywrited and wouldnt let anyonw record in its format while VHS format allowed anyone and HENSE MOST companies to use VHS and be seen. I.E. just like the minidisk..... only sony owned companies can record on minidisk.... am I wrong????? I dont think so.. but let me know if I am!!!

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"Boy, wouldja get a load of the cloaca on that one"? -Cecil Adams "october 8 1999"

[Sake Samurai]

Made my sex life better too, although I like flipin 'em over every twenty minutes!

[Omniscient]

I've got Riven on DVD.

[sunbear]

Satan: in 20 more years, will the CDs still play? Do we even know if there's a limit?

Somebody else brought up different DVD standards. For movies there are 3 different markets, regions. The cheaper players will only play US versions. It was the same with VHS.

[NeedAHobby]

Yaarghh...too many things to comment on!

(1) DVD has already displaced most of the LaserDisc market and part of the VHS market. This is because DVD has a higher quality (arguable vs. LaserDisc) and more reliable quality than VHS--a boon for the rental industry. (Most people use their VCR's exclusively for movie rentals anyway.) Also, you can put more DVD's on display at once than either VHS or LaserDisc in much the same way you can display more CD's than albums.

(2) CD's have a larger dynamic range, a wider frequency response, and are more durable than records, but records have a more accurate high frequency response. Even well played records hold up reasonably well--the recording is essentially intact although surface damage tends to be very disruptive to most people (ala pops & scratches).

(3) Hopefully DVD audio will displace CD audio. I believe the accepted DVD standard is 24 bits/channel (absurdly large IMHO) at 96K-samples/second (acceptable but low IMHO)...sadly they didn't go with the mega-sample PCM which apparently had a very clean sound. My biggest beef with CD audio is the lack of accurate high frequency response--I think it's sad that all the digitally recorded music will sound like crap next to DVD audio.

(4) For only about US$900, you can pick up the ReplayTV (http://www.replaytv.com/home/) device which records up to 14 hours of programming on a hard disk. If the price continues to drop (which it definitely will) and they add a DVD-R drive...who would need a VCR anymore? Plus, if you could download your digital video from your camcorder via FireWire/IEEE-1394 to one of these boxes, edit it, then dump it to DVD-R...oops...I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the end, VHS will probably be rendered to the back burner like cassettes or magnetic computer tape in light of DVD.

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Hey, aren't you supposed to be at work?

[BurnMeUp]

I love my DVD player, DVD is thriving and will continue to do so for a few reasons:

It's catalog is growing much faster than that of the older LD's

Large scale rental outlets (Hollywood/BBV) Have embraced it, letting people rent rather than buy DVD's

Many film companies are releaseing DVD's for sale prior to the VHS version. For example, The Opposite of Sex came out for rental and DVD for sale the same day, if you wanted it on VHS you had to pay the "rental copy" price of 95 bucks.

And as mentioned before DVD's have lots of extras.

I think they will continue with the extras mainly because all the cool features prompt renters into buying a disc. Also the films take up much less space on a DVD and it helps them to use up the space. Space will be even less of a concern when more dual layer disks come out. a double sided dual layer disk will store up to 17 gigs of info.

As for computer items, the delux encarts from MS that has an encyclopedia, thesaurus and a bunch of other refence books is available on DVD. The dvd version is on one disk instead of three, offers more video and sound files and has a better picture quality then the other versions.



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Just add water, it makes it's own sauce!

[Chef Troy]

A long way upstream, realitychuck said:
DVD is essentially nothing more than a small laser disk. They didn't catch on particularly well. And the ability to record is still a major advantage for VHS tapes.

This is not true. There are fundamental differences between laserdiscs and DVDs. First of all, laser disc is an analog format (the audio is digital tho). Obviously the storage capacity is amazingly different (despite being less than half the size, DVD is capable of holding an entire movie on one side, while laser discs almost always require two or more). Also, although both formats feature digital audio, laser disc audio is plain ol' dolby surround, while DVD is full-blown Dolby Digital.


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Live a Lush Life
Da Chef

[bantmof]

Actually, it has been proven that CDs did NOT and DO NOT offer better sound than vinyl. This has been proven by audiophiles...
Audiophiles, and audiophile magazines, are generally about one half step above faith healers and snake oil salesmen as a source for accurate information. One should take things they "prove" with a huge grain of salt.

I used to read a number of "audiophile" magazines - the folks writing these articles by and large have no clue. I must have read hundreds of their comparison tests of various sorts of audio equipment. I don't recall more than a handful that used anything remotely close to proper experimental protocol. They didn't seem to understand double blind tests properly normalized for other variables, perhaps because if they did them that way, they couldn't claim that $50 RCA cables sound better than $5 RCA cables.

One facinating study done back in, hmm... I'm thinking the 80's?, played the exact same signal through the exact same audio equipment, twice, but one case listening audiophiles were lead to believe by the experimenters they were hearing an expensive high-end amplifier, and in the 2nd, a cheap consumer one. They tended to lavishly praise the "high end" amp and gave a luke-warm reception to the more inexpensive one. Yet there was no difference - they were hearing the very same stuff, twice in a row. People hear what they expect to hear, and for this reason when looking at things like this, the only way to learn anything is to use proper experimental protocol.

Anyway, there is, apparently, a small camp of people who prefer the sound of records to CD's. But this is due to some combination of the less accurate reproduction of records, and nostalgia (which is not to be underestimated). CD's are in almost every measurable sense a more accurate reproduction of the original music. Whether that is good or bad, is a matter of opinion, but I would note that a more accurate signal can always be degraded into a less accurate one if this results in a more pleasing sound (as well it might), but the reverse is not true.
...the world over by simply playing CD and vinyl back-to-back of the same material.
This would be a good example of how not to test two different audio components.

--
peas on earth

[Harmonious Discord]

I won't buy a vhs tape after watching dvd. I get so much more from a dvd than a vhs tape. The dvd is great with a surround system and you have all the bonus materials. Some dvd's include extras for the computer and internet even. The vhs tapes I do have are going bad. I'll be dead before my dvd's wear out.

A side note: Thanks to all the teaming millions that helped kill off divix. Who wants to pay every single time you pop the disk into the player?

[bantmof]

CD's have a larger dynamic range, a wider frequency response, and are more durable than records...
Granted... often by large margins.
... but records have a more accurate high frequency response.
This I _seriously_ doubt, at least outside of some theoretical manner that never occurs in real life.

Even the best phono carts roll of steeply above 20 KHz, and about 99.9% of all commercially produced records were filtered to remove signal above about 16 KHz to reduce wear and tear in the manufacturing process. In contrast, CD's are remarkably flat from DC up to over 20 KHz. It's theoretically possible for a record to reproduce signal above 22 KHz that a CD could not, but this is the sort of play-once-test-record-under-lab-conditions situation that doesn't happen in the real world, and it's useless at any rate since you can't hear those frequencies.
I believe the accepted DVD standard is 24 bits/channel (absurdly large IMHO) at 96K-samples/second
24 bits is indeed absurdly large, vastly exceeding the theoretical thermal noise floor at room temperature. Even 20 bits is generally only valuable in the mastering and mixing stages to give some breathing room to avoid digital clipping in the master - if you did this with a 16 bit master, you might only be using 13-14 bits. But when sampled down for the end product from a 20 bit master, 16 bit audio is perfectly adequate - often times overkill. The noise floor limit at 16 bits/sample is about -96 db.

And 96K samples per second is also absurd, unless you're making recordings for dogs. The Nyquist limit there would be 48 KHz, whereas few adult humans can even hear to 20 KHz, and 12-16 is much more common. This sort of stuff is a marketing gimmick, and a device to sell people new stuff, but there is no other reason for it. Today's 16-bit, 44K sample/sec technology is virtually never the limiting factor in the quality of audio recordings.
My biggest beef with CD audio is the lack of accurate high frequency response
If you are an adult, and even in all likelyhood if you are a child, CDs can accurately reproduce frequencies higher than you can hear. There are a few sources of error near the Nyquist limit, but these are well understood and generally only of significance to people designing filters. If you back off just a little from the Nyquist limit, the filter problems tend to go away, and with CD's this still leaves you with a higher freq than most humans can hear.

--
peas on earth

[NeedAHobby]

Ahh, bantmof...my infamous trap. True, a CD player can generate a sine wave at 20KHz with remarkable accuracy, however, it can only produce a sine wave at that frequency. This is what I meant by accurate frequency reproduction (I admit I was leading people to a trap by not explaining better, but here goes...all in the name of stamping out ignorance.)

There's several ways to explain how these errors occur.

First is my simple-minded explanation. Consider an 11KHz sine wave sampled at 44KHz. For each full wave, you take four samples--let's assume the normalized samples are +1, 0, -1, 0. When played back with the appropriate filtering, you reproduce the sine wave accurately. Now consider an 11KHz triangle wave sampled at 44KHz. Again, for each full wave you get four (normalized) samples of +1, 0, -1, 0. When played back, you get an incorrect sine wave.

Second, Fourier demonstrated that to reproduce an accurate waveform, you always need harmonics higher than the waveform base frequency (I don't know much more than the basics of Fourier analysis). That triangle wave at 11KHz needs quite a harmonic at "infinity Hz" to perfectly reproduce the sharp corner at each peak.

Third, you can consider slew rates. A sinusoidal wave requires a sinusoidal slope, and at no point does that slope (i.e. slew rate) exceed the amplitude of the original wave. With any other wave, the slew rate needs to be higher than the rate to produce the maximum desirable frequency.

Records have the capacity to reproduce waveforms at frequencies up to 20KHz or so because they can reproduce sine waves up to much higher frequencies (I don't know exactly, but 40KHz is entirely possible, albeit at much lower levels because the response rolls off). CD's can reproduce sine waves at frequencies up to 22KHz, but waveforms accurately up to about 4KHz or so (10 samples per wave I think is okay).

If you listen carefully to CD's, you'll notice that cymbal hits, "s" sounds, and "sh" sounds are remarkably similar on a CD but sound more natural on a record. For me, it's this harsh distortion that irritates my ears when listening at clubs and such--much more than when I listen to live music.

___
Does this belong in another topic yet? :)

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Hey, aren't you supposed to be at work?

[Moonshine]

CD sound is pretty excellent, and I can rest my beer on one and it doesn't mind, nuff said. I own a recordable MD player; the sound quality is excellent, especially seeing as that I use it mainly when I am travelling. It will never replace the CD IMHO, the big advantage it had from me, apart from being a shiny new toy, was that I could record stuff from CDs with no loss of sound quality. Ergo when I travel I can take one tiny, shock resistant MD player and 3-4 MDs, rather than a clunky CD player with 10-12 CDs.

What is a "theoretical thermal noise floor" anyway?

[bantmof]

Ahh, bantmof...my infamous trap. True, a CD player can generate a sine wave at 20KHz with remarkable accuracy, however, it can only produce a sine wave at that frequency.
Well... read on. Your trap needs oiling. :-)
(I admit I was leading people to a trap by not explaining better, but here goes...all in the name of stamping out ignorance.)
I know what you were doing - I've been down this road many times before. I believe there are some things you are misunderstanding on a fundamental level here. I shall try to explain.
Second, Fourier demonstrated that to reproduce an accurate waveform, you always need harmonics higher than the waveform base frequency (I don't know much more than the basics of Fourier analysis).
Well, it turns out that I do know more than the basics :-). (I had to take two semesters of this stuff in college; I've forgotten a lot, but a lot is still there - and BTW, this stuff makes for really boring classes, trust me :-). Your statement here is perfectly correct, but it doesn't lead to the conclusion you think it does. I'll try to explain why.

Let's start with the 30,000 ft view in this post - we can go as much lower as you want, within reason (I might have to brush up on some long disused calculus if we go into too much detail). This might be slightly awkward in ASCII, so bear with me here.

1. First, an arbitrary input signal can be represented as a linear superposition of sine waves at various frequencies. Specifically, an arbitrary time domain signal f(t) can be represented as f(t)= sum(j, Fj*exp(-iwjt)), where w is our base frequency. (Recall that a complex exponential can be written as cos-i*sin, so this exponental is really a sinusoidal summation).

2. The array of coefficients Fj is the discrete Fourier transform of our input signal f(t). This transformation is reversable; that is, given an input signal, we can construct a (potentially infinite) array Fj, and given this infinite array Fj, we can reconstruct the original input signal with perfect accuracy. That is, we basically have a way to decompose an input signal into it's component frequencies.

3. Now, I'm going to gloss over some math - we can go into it if you want. But certain types of input signals have a value Fj=0 for all j>i. This means that these signals have no higher order frequency content. We can take our Fourier coefficients, run them through a low pass filter by discarding j>i, and still perfectly reconstruct the input signal with no error.

4. Other types of input signals, such as your triangle wave example, or a square wave, or an impulse function, require an infinite frequency summation to reproduce. (I'll just ask you trust me on the math for the time being). That is, if we run a low-pass filter on the Fourier coefficients, we _cannot_ perfectly reconstruct this signal from the result.

Now, the conclusion you drew from this in your post is that this is a problem with CD reproduction of recorded sound. But this is a mistaken conclusion.

Let's look at your triangle wave with a period of 20,000 Hz. If you examine the DFT of such a wave, you'll see that there are frequencies in the Fourier array Fj that extend far (actually infinitely far) beyond 20,000 Hz. So it's definately true that with a bandwidth limited device, we cannot perfectly reconstruct this triangle wave. We can approximate it to better and better degrees as our bandwidth goes up, but for any arbitrary bandwidth limit, our reproduction will necessarily be imperfect.

So what does this mean for our CD player and our record player? It means that _neither_ of these devices can perfectly reproduce this signal. The CD and the record player represent waveforms in different ways, one digital and one analog. But that's not the real issue here. The real issue is that both of these devices are bandwidth limited (as are analog audio tape and all other audio recording technologies). The CD is bandwidth limited by the Niquist limit imposed by the sampling rate of the device. In physical terms, a phono cart cannot track a perfectly triangular groove. It has inertia, there are electronics issues in the conversion to an electrical signal, and so on. It just can't do it. The analog tape suffers from similar physical issues that limit its bandwidth.

So neither the CD nor the record can accurately reproduce this 20,000 Hz triangle wave.

Fourier transform theory tells us that the device that can reproduce it the most accurately is the device that can reproduce a sine wave at the highest frequency. The one follows directly from the other. If the record player was able to reproduce this triangle wave more accurately than the CD player, then it could also reproduce a sine wave at a much higher freq than the CD player can. But in practical applications, it's limiting frequency is lower than the CD player, and both can be measured accurately. Not only that, but your EAR is a bandwidth limited device, being itself a physical thing with parts that can only move so fast. If you could accurately hear the difference between a triangle wave at 20 KHz and something that was not quite a triangle wave, then you could also hear a sine wave at a much higher frequency, and it could be said that you could hear to, say, 40 KHz instead of 18 KHz. But your ears just don't have that sort of bandwidth. So the CD's bandwidth is not the limiting factor.

In many applications, this sort of signal accuracy is measured using square waves at somewhat lower frequencies than the bandwidth limit of the device. By comparing the post-reproduction (no longer quite) square wave with the "perfect" square wave, you can see how much distortion has been introduced by your recording technology. And when you do this for records and CDs, CD's win, at both high and low frequencies.

but here goes...all in the name of stamping out ignorance
With all due respect, I don't think it's my ignorance that needs to be stamped out here :-)

I can go as deep into this as you want - I know a lot more of the math than I've put into this post. But I wonder if there might not be a better place for it - maybe Great Debates?

signed,
bantmof the engineer-nerd

--
peas on earth

[Sam Stone]

I'd point out that the reason many people hear distortion on CD reproductions of things like female vocals and cymbol crashes has more to do with the increased dynamic range of the CD coupled with poor electronics and speakers. A CD puts some heavy demands on the other components in a system, which may not be up to it. In the case of a cymbol crash, the slew rates required of the amplifiers to accurately reproduce it are very high, and you may just wind up with clipping instead, leading to the distorted sound. Likewise, when you have a dynamic range of greater than 90 DB, not many people realize that even normal volume levels can require peak power above the rated power of the amp, resulting in more clipping.

Also, there seems to be a tendency on new recordings to record at near-saturation levels. Listen to Alanis Morrissette's 'Jagged Little Pill'. I'm tempted to call the album a faulty mix because it doesn't seem much compression was done, leaving a very wide dynamic range. It gives it a unique sound, but makes it very hard to reproduce without driving equipment into clipping.

[tracer]

Chef Troy wrote:

laser disc audio is plain ol' dolby surround, while DVD is full-blown Dolby Digital.

In 1995, the first Dolby Digital laserdiscs started coming out. (It was called AC-3 at the time, but it's the same thing.) They accomplished this by usurping one of the 2 old analog audio channels (!) that've been part of the laserdisc format since its inception.

The remaining analog channel is used either for a mono mix-down of the stereo channels so that really old laserdisc players without digital audio can still play it, or for a "running commentary" by the director or producer as part of a "special edition" release.

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Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.

[bantmof]

Moonshine ponders thusly:
What is a "theoretical thermal noise floor" anyway?
Audio devices, such as say, an amplifier, or the electronics inside a CD player, are not perfect devices. There is a certain limiting ratio between the strongest and the weakest signals they can represent. If a signal is too weak, it just will get lost in the internal noise of the device. Think of it like whispering to somebody 50 feet away when there's a jackhammer running right next to them - your signal (the whisper) has been lost in the noise (the jackhammer). If you raise your signal level, say by shouting, then you might be heard.

Similarly, there is only so much signal to noise ratio available in audio electronics. Even under perfect conditions, if you eliminate all stray RF noise, there is some noise left, from random electron electron fluctuations in electronic components, and this is a function of temperature. It's called thermal noise.

Given how much noise is present from this source, one can predict how many bits are necessary to quantize a signal to this accuracy or better at that temperature. This is around 18-20 bits for good quality electronics. Sampling with, say, 32 bits, is massive overkill if you are limited in other parts of the system to a much lesser S/N ratio.

--
peas on earth

[Omniscient]

bantmof, thanks for the lesson. I knew all the physics you discussed, and most of the technobabble about audio, but never really pieced the two together. I learned something bringing me closer to living up to my username. I'm gonna try and ask a couple of more questions.

[Omniscient]

What exactly do the bit/channel rating mean. I assume its not comparable to a bit when discussing computer infomation.

Is there a number rating for the equipment which describes the accuracy of the sound reproduction that you have so nicely explained.

We've got Watts/channel, bits, bits/channel, ohms, Nx's oversampling, samples/second.

Weave thses puppies together for us.

[Sam Stone]

CD players use pulse-code modulation to convert analog data as digital. Basically, what happens is that a sample of the input signal is taken, and then instantaneous voltage level is converted to a binary number and stored. Then another sample is taken, and that value is stored, etc.

The number of bits in the sample determined how many discrete levels you can distinguish. If you use 8 bits, you can only have 256 different levels. If you only had 2 bits, you could have four different levels. So the fewer the number of bits, the less accuracy. You wind up with quantization error.

Here's a diagram to ilustrate the digitization of a wave using PCM:
<center>
<img src="http://www.rasip.fer.hr/research/compress/algorithms/fund/pcm/pcm_1.gif" border=0>
</center>

Here's the wave that can be re-created from the quantized data:

<center>
<img src="http://www.rasip.fer.hr/research/compress/algorithms/fund/pcm/pcm_2.gif" border=0>
</center>

Okay, notice that the slope of the original signal changed between time 1 and 2. Since there was no sample taken between those two points, that information is lost. If you look at the bottom image, the curve is uniform between 1 and 2. That's because the sampling rate was too low.

Now look at sample #6. Because this signal is encoded with only 4 bits, any signal levels that don't match the level represented by one of the bits has to be rounded up or down. In this case, it's rounded down, so the output wave has a lower amplitude at that peak.

If we used only 2 bits to encode the signal, we could only represent four different levels. If you look at the diagram and imagine having to round up or down all the values that fall on 1,3,5, you can see that the output wave would look a LOT different than the input.

Now I hope all my HTML comes out correctly.

[Omniscient]

I think I see.

First let me point out what seems to be an error. If 2 bits has 4 levels (22), and 8 bits has 256 levels (28), wouldn't the diagram show a 3 bit system? (Granted I've never seen a bit count thats not a multiple of 4) 23=8?

If this presumption is correct, and the chart shows a time interval in seconds. Then the graph shows a 3 bits/channel at 1 sample per second.

Am I close?

PS I knew how a signal is digitized, but I'm just trying to decipher the crap written n the side of the CD/DVD players box.

[Sam Stone]

Yeah, it's a 3-bit system. Sorry about that.

[NeedAHobby]

Your understanding of Fourier stuff is much beyond what I know, bantmof, but I did manage to follow. :)

I keep thinking something is wrong with what you say, mostly because I think I'm right. This, of course, is a really stupid way to defend a theory, but here goes...

Fourier transform theory tells us that the device that can reproduce it the most accurately is the device that can reproduce a sine wave at the highest frequency.

I agree with this statement, however, I think there's more to it: not only does a device have to be able to produce the sine wave at the highest frequency, but also be able to produce sine waves at all frequencies below that frequency. This is the crux of my argument (at least in this post).

The extreme case being, say a signal generator with a variable amplitude that can create a 30KHz sine wave--this does not imply it can more accurately reproduce waveforms than an 8-track tape player which rolls off around 8KHz.

Likewise, if you had 100 or 1,000 signal generators, each of which generated a particular frequency sine wave (I'm assuming they're evenly spaced across the 20Hz-20KHz range) you could produce most waveforms pretty accurately, but there would be acoustical losses you could hear that you couldn't see on an oscilloscope.

Both CD's and record players are limited to about the same lower limit of 15Hz or so. They're tied there.

Aside from mechanical and electrical harmonics in a record player, I think you'll agree it can reproduce any sine wave accurately between 20Hz and, say 15KHz (i.e. record a sine wave on a record then play it back). Above 15KHz, the response rolls off at some odd curve (that is, not a pretty 3dB/octave or something like that), and it would probably be impossible to reproduce any measurable wave above about 40KHz (which is another argument altogether--CD players have a hard limit of 22KHz while record players roll off up to a higher frequency...maybe another day.)

Consider my earlier example about the 11KHz wave ideally sampled at 44K-samples/second--the normalized output was a repeating function {0,1,0,-1}. This works great and reproduces a perfect sine wave.
Now consider an 11,400Hz wave. (I had to cheat and plot it out, below.) Notice how the wave generated from the 44k-samples/second has some additional frequencies in it. These additional frequencies tend to cause noticeable distortion.

<IMG SRC="http://www.servtech.com/~jayce/images/CDwave.gif" WIDTH="400" HEIGHT="270">

The problem here is that the CD player can not generate any arbitrary sine wave between 20Hz and 20KHz. Rather, it is only able to simulate certain frequencies.

My theory is that to generate an arbitrary waveform based on a discrete Fourier Transform, the equipment used to reproduce the waveform must be able to generate any sinusoidal wave up to an arbitrary cutoff frequency. I kind-of showed that a CD player is not able to generate an arbitrary sine wave within its designed frequency range, and kind-of showed the record player is. I conclude that the record player can more accurately reproduce an arbitrary waveform.

Basically what I'm saying is a CD player has more high frequency distortion than what a specifications chart would lead you to believe.

Ok, now go ahead and poke holes in my already not-airtight argument. :)

------------------
Hey, aren't you supposed to be at work?

[bantmof]

not only does a device have to be able to produce the sine wave at the highest frequency, but also be able to produce sine waves at all frequencies below that frequency. This is the crux of my argument (at least in this post).
Yep, that's true - it's possible that some devices can have "holes" in their bandwidth. CD players (to a pretty good approximation) don't however - they have a flatter bandwidth response than records by far.

Both CD's and record players are limited to about the same lower limit of 15Hz or so. They're tied there.
The electronic parts of the CD player (the D/A's, etc) might be limited to 15 Hz, but the digital audio itself on the CD is good down to DC.

Also, record players have a lot of issues to contend with below about 60-80 Hz or so. It doesn't make it impossible for them to reproduce lower freqs, but it makes it trickier.

In the real world, I think CD's win and win big on both the high and low ends of the spectrum. In optimal lab conditions, a record player probably wins at the high end, being able to have some level of reproduction over 22,000 Hz, where a CD has a hard limit there.
The problem here is that the CD player can not generate any arbitrary sine wave between 20Hz and 20KHz. Rather, it is only able to simulate certain frequencies
If I understand the intent of your graphic here, you're talking about the fact that we have discrete samples at regular time intervals, right? It turns out that sampling (by itself) does not result in the loss of information for band-limited signals, as long as you sample at >= 2X the highest frequency present in the signal. Let's first talk about a theoretically perfect world, and then the real world.

In our theoretically perfect world, we sample with perfect precision. I.e, we are not limited to the 16 bits that our CD player is, we have prefect filters, and perfect D/A's. In this case, if we band-limit our input signal to less than 22 KHz, we can perfectly recreate it even though we've sampled it at discrete intervals and "missed" some of the peaks of the waveform where they didn't line up with our sampling points. One way to think about this is that we're going to fit a curve to our samples, not just blindly draw lines between the sample points - because we know the limiting frequency of the original signal, we know how to "fill in" the signal between sample points. We're not going to just "clip off" the tops of curves and so forth as the dotted lines in your graph imply, because we know that would generate higher frequencies than were in the original signal. It's possible to perfectly reproduce, say, a 11561.34663 Hz sine wave, even with discrete sampling. One can prove this mathematically, which is what the Nyquist theorum is all about - I might even be able to do it if you give me a while to dig out some old lecture notes.

Now let's look at the real world. In real life what probably happens is that the D/A does generate something close to your dotted lines, missing the peaks as you show, and we get a signal with high freq components. But then we run this signal through a "brick wall" low pass filter and viola, as if by magic, our peaks come back in the right places, because we've removed the high freqs that were clipping them off like that. We don't have perfect brick wall filters, but overall it works pretty well and what we get out the end much more closely resembles the orange lines than the dotted ones in your graph.

Ther are other sources of error though. Not only don't we have perfect low-pass filters, we don't have perfectly linear D/A's, and we quantize at 16 bits, thus incurring amplitude error. I.e, maybe the value we measured as a discrete amplitude of 15621 was really supposed to be 15621.49. Obviously the magnitude of this error as a percentage of the signal increases as the signal gets weaker.

One can then ask what percentage of the reconstructed signal is error. Leaving aside some techniques like dithering, the maximum ratio at 16 bits is about 98 dB, and of course decreases (i.e, the error ratio increases) as the input signal becomes quieter. (I.e, an error of 0.5 out of say 28000 isn't much, percentage wise, but the same error of 0.5 out of 3 is rather a lot!)

Of course, records also suffer from error which limits their S/N ratio, but they fare far, far worse then CDs do. Just from memory, I recall that ratios of 50 to 60 dB were considered good for records. CD's win bigtime when measuring this sort of error. If you reduced your CD down to 9 or 10 bits instead of 16, it would have a more record-like S/N.

So I guess the summary here is: (1) The imperfection in the reproduced signal doesn't result from the discrete sampling, as you imply. There are some gains to be had from oversampling, but at least in theory, and to a good approximation even in practice, increasing the sampling rate does not get you a more accurate reproduction of signals under 1/2 the sampling rate. And, (2) increasing the level of quantization does help both in theory and practice, at least to a point. But even 16 bit quantization is very, very good, and is almost never a limiting factor. And also, (3) it's quite possible for a record to sound much better than a CD, but in all likelyhood this isn't because the record is reproducing the signal more accurately. It's much more likely because of some feature of the signal itself (perhaps the way it was processed beforehand), or perhaps because some types of errors induced by the record are pleasing to the ear (this can happen!) There are a zillion other potential factors that might make some particular record sound better than some particular CD.

Ok, now go ahead and poke holes in my already not-airtight argument :-)
Always glad to oblige :-)
--
peas on earth

[NeedAHobby]

Hopefully this is as amusing to everyone else as it is to us. I am a bit wearied, but I contend that the above-8KHz data sounds better on a record than on a CD, and by gum, I'm going to figure out why! :)

Realize, of course, that I am only nitpicking on the high frequency reproduction of CD's vs. records. CD's win in basically all other ways (durability, S/N ratio, dynamic range, low frequency reproduction, ability to be duplicated, etc.)

Ok, on to the meat...you concede that:


In optimal lab conditions, a record player probably wins at the high end, being able to have some level of reproduction over
22,000 Hz, where a CD has a hard limit there.


I'd wager that this is also true in non-optimal non-lab conditions. What is important here is that even though the frequency response of a record rolls off over 20KHz (and probably starts at around 12KHz to 15KHz for records after they've been played a few times), it can indeed reproduce frequencies above 20KHz. CD's, however, must be limited to 22KHz, both because Nyquist guarantees it and it sounds like crap if you don't do very steep filtering (thank you DSP and your glorious 20dB+/octave rolloff).

This is important because an arbitrary waveform with a base frequency of less than 20KHz has, in all likelyhood, components (ala DFT) far higher than 20KHz. When the hard limit is imposed in a CD, these components are lost. A record player however, can reproduce them--not perfectly or with the amplitude of the original signal, but at least in part.

Likewise, the human ear with its little bones and stuff tends to have a frequency response which rolls off around 20KHz (usually lower) but nonetheless can pass the higher frequency data to the inner ear.

Don't believe me? Listen to a signal generator. Listen to, say a 15KHz or 16KHz wave and change the waveform. Even at those frequencies you can distinctly hear the difference--hence the mention of "s," "sh," and cymbal hits sounding alike on CD's.

Now, I have to disagree with you on the magic of filters restoring the waveform I plotted. First I thought, "dang, you've got a point there," then I realized that the signal presented is a 11,400Hz waveform (carefully chosen by educated guesses and trial-and-error to best demonstrate the distortion). A 22KHz brick wall filter would not affect the 11,400Hz waveform very much.
Even the slope around the 0.2ms mark represents a component of less than 22KHz, except maybe for the sharp turn at the sample right after 0.2ms. Nonetheless, the CD player would reproduce the signal similar to the dotted line. What I was getting at was that frequencies whose harmonics are near the sampling frequency are more distorted than others. I haven't tried it (signal generator + computer with sound recording...) but I bet you could record a signal around 11KHz which would noticeably warble when recorded digitally.

In the end, the point is kind of moot. From about 1984 on, almost all music passed through some digital phase, and now, almost every band records directly onto DAT (48K-samples/second for some reason). When this stuff is rendered onto record, the record accurately reproduces all the digitally-induced high frequency distortion. :)

My A-B tests for friends are limited to older stuff, and often it's a duel between Paul Simon's Graceland on CD and record. I still say the record wins--except for minor things like hiss, pops, rumble, skips, fragility, dynamic range, sensitivity to physical vibration, ...


------------------
Hey, aren't you supposed to be at work?

[bantmof]

Now, I have to disagree with you on the magic of filters restoring the waveform I plotted.
Well... it does. Given arbitrary quantization and lowpass filters on both ends, you can reproduce the signal perfectly. This is something that you can prove mathematically, as any engineering major (myself included) has had to do to pass his digital signals classes :-). It's not really a matter of opinion. The real world is imperfect of course, but you seem to be denying some very basic DSP theory - stuff which is well understood in the engineering world.
A 22KHz brick wall filter would not affect the 11,400Hz waveform very much.
It does affect the reconstructed result from the sampled data, because _that_ waveform has many higher frequency components. When you remove them, you get the original signal back.

Would it help if I posted the proof? I can't do it off the top of my head any more (too many beers since college :-), but I can probably re-learn it in just a few minutes if I can find some old lecture notes. It's a proof that shows you can perfectly reconstruct your 14400 Hz sine wave (or any arbitrary bandlimited signal) perfectly even with time-discrete sample points. You'll need to know convolution operators and a little calculus to follow it.
I'd wager that this is also true in non-optimal non-lab conditions. What is important here is that even though the frequency response of a record rolls off over 20KHz (and probably starts at around 12KHz to 15KHz for records after they've been played a few times), it can indeed reproduce frequencies above 20KHz. CD's, however, must be limited to 22KHz, both because Nyquist guarantees it and it sounds like crap if you don't do very steep filtering (thank you DSP and your glorious 20dB+/octave rolloff).[quote]
Most records were created with a signal band-filtered to about 15 KHz before production, to save wear and tear on the cutting head, so for the most part these higher frequencies were lost before they ever got to the vinyl. And at high frequencies you _can_ hear, over 10 or 12 KHz but under 20, records have truely frightening levels of distortion at any sort of signal level at all. There are a lot of physical reasons for this, but that's probably left for another thread. But the point is it's been measured, and CD's reproduce high frequencies _more_ accurately than records, not less.

Another useful thing to note is that a few years ago, some company (JVC maybe?) did a test where they recorded 16-bit CD quality digital audio from a high speed reel-2-reel master of a concert. In double blind tests, people could not tell the difference between the 16 bit audio and the analog master.

I guess maybe what you are doing here is hearing some records that sounds better than the same music on some CD, and looking for reasons to explain the CD's "inferiority". But the technical reasons you're coming up with don't hold water. I've been _way_ deep into this stuff (like we're at 30,000 ft and once upon a time I understood it to about 5 feet) and what you're claiming about sampling just ain't so.

But here's the thing! Look at it this way - there might be _other_ perfectly plausable reasons why you might like a bunch of recordings better on records than on CD. There's nothing wrong with that! We don't need to invent invalid reasons, when there are enough valid ones to go around. I'll even help you think of some :-)
[quote]Hopefully this is as amusing to everyone else as it is to us
Oh, if anybody else was reading I suspect we bored them into a coma by now :-). Anyway, I've enjoyed the debate; hope you have too.
--
peas on earth

[bantmof]

Aw crap, I sort of blew the quotes there. Anyway, most of the stuff in that huge quote block was my text, not quoted.

Also, here's a web page I found with a nice, non-technical (i.e, no math whatsoever) description of this issue:
http://www.bores.com/courses/intro/basics/1_antia.htm
Two relavent quotes from this page:
Although Nyquist showed that provide we sample at least twice the highest signal frequency we have all the information needed to reconstruct the signal, the sampling theorem does not say the samples will look like the signal.
And,
The answer lies in the fact that the sampling theorem says there is enough information to reconstruct the signal - and the correct reconstruction is not just to draw straight lines between samples.
The signal is properly reconstructed from the samples by low pass filtering: the low pass filter should be the same as the original antialias filter.

I think that's addresses the point contained in your graphic.

--
peas on earth

[NeedAHobby]

My only remaining argument is that it's the higher frequency response of records that allows "arbitrary waveforms" to be reconstructed accurately at high frequencies. I don't know anything about how records are made (especially, how the audio data is processed before being applied to the surface). Then again, it could be that I've just got a crappy older CD player which doesn't have a good brick wall filter.

I kick myself many times on your behalf because the plot I made is really stupid. The ouptut from the D-A converter would look more like a stairstep function, and when that signal is filtered, it's more obvious how to get the original waveform back. The plot looks more like:

<IMG SRC="http://www.servtech.com/~jayce/images/CDWave2.gif" HEIGHT=270 WIDTH=400>

Note that I didn't do much correction on this and the digital samples lag the input signal by half the time of one sample.

Regardless, I still think pulse-width modulation would be a better way to record audio...it's simpler, and due to the high frequency of the pulses, you can use cheaper filters to remove the high-frequency data added by the technique. Similarly, higher sampling rates would make me happier too for similar reasons.

I always try to remember that theories may not be applicable in all cases. In the theoretical world, DFT works perfectly. In the real world, it is a useful tool. When it's applied to human perception, the theory may not hold up, or more likely, underlying assumptions leading you to use the theory may be incorrect.

In this case, I disagree with the assumption that human hearing is limited to 20Hz-20KHz. Conscious perception of a tone may be limited to this range, but there are probably other factors at work. The ability to distinguish waveforms near the upper limit of hearing (i.e. 18KHz tones) leads me to believe, based in part on DFT, that human hearing has a higher bandwidth than the commonly accepted 20KHz limit. Oops...I'm starting to make another topic. :)

------------------
Hey, aren't you supposed to be at work?