First, I’d like to say that you guys rock and have helped me out with questions that have always bothered me. I try not to ask frivolous questions.
Okay, so on to the question at hand…
I have the opportunity to pick up a music CD that’s almost impossible to find in the U.S. without spending a small fortune.
However, it’s a Japanese pressing complete w/liner notes and songs in that wacky-and-yet-intimidating language.
I know that Japanese video-game cartridges/video-game cds/DVDs contain special lock-out codes or other devices to make them incomptable with North American systems…
Are there any compatibility problems with Japanese/North American music CDs?
I second ranma’s thoughts. Took my own little portable CD player with me to Japan and all Japanese CD’s that I bought/rented/was given worked just fine!
CDs are standard, being a simple digital representation (no compression) of sound information etched or pressed onto a metal disk. It is this simplicity that allows CD players to be so small and simple electronically. All you need is a laser, a photodiode (A diode that changes resistance based on presence/absense of light. Selenium works.), and something to convert digital input to an analog output stream for headphones/speakers. That there, plus some small circuitry to determine track lengths, is your basic CD player.
Derleth, while that is (very loosely) true it is also immaterial. DVDs are intentionally marked by world zones to avoid them being shipped from one to another. CDs could have similar technology easily. They just don’t have it. And I am sure people will find a way around DVD codes rendering them obsolete.
I also say very loosely true because as a technical explanation it is way inaccurate. Ones and zeroes are not recoerded directly like that on the CD. There are several layers between your file bits and your CD track (including encoding that adds some redundancy to help with errors in reading). it is way more complex than you make it appear.
I have accumulated a fair amount of CDs I bought in Japan, and they are absolutely the same as US CDs. The players and CDs in the US and Japan are identical.
There is a cool new format called SACD, Super Audio CD. Twice the sound resolution of CDs plus 5 channels of surround sound at that quality! This is just starting out in the market, its recorded on DVD media so it wouldn’t be surprising if they used the DVD country codes to lock out international use.