Secret messages on compact discs

Back in the 1970’s & 80’s it was a real hoot to spin records backwards to find the “subliminal” messages imbedded on them that were supposed to influence us to worship Satan, take drugs, etc… Now that everything is on CD, this can’t be done. My question is, does anyone know of any groups putting backward masking on new releases, and if so, how the heck does one find them? My cd player won’t play backward.

Old reel-to-reel recorders can be had at Internet auction sites for $20 to $25. It’s possible to use a cassette tape, too. I did it once, years ago. As I recall, I snipped out a section of the magnetic tape, turned it upside-down, and spliced it with scotch tape. Although it didn’t do any damage to my equipment, I take no responsibility for damage to your cassette tape player if you try this. Although it shouldn’t be too hard to play digital files (like MP3) backwards, I have found no software that would allow you to do this. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

You could probably find a winamp plugin to do that at http://www.winamp.com

I know of at least one CD that has a pseudo-hidden message on it, but damned if I can remember what CD it was. The last track was titled “300-8N1”. My friend demonstrated: set your modem to 300 bps, 8 data bits, no parity bit, one stop bit. Plug a telephone into the ‘wall’ port of your modem, set the modem off-hook, and hold the receiver up to the stereo speaker as the track plays. Slowly a story types itself in your terminal window…

Anyone actually remember what CD this was from?

say what? you have to be joking

If you want to run through your CD’s looking for backward masked messages, it’s easy enough to do. Rip the audio data off the CD into a .WAV (or .snd, for the Mac) file, and reverse it in any sound editor. For the PC, you can do the CD rip with CDex, and invert the .WAV with CoolEdit. I’m not sure what you’d use with a Mac, but I’m sure it’s do-able.

Goldwave works for this. And you don’t need to bother with decompressing the files to .wav. Goldwave works directly with mp3 files. You can reverse an mp3 with the touch of the button. Lots of other nifty audio features too, and it’s uncrippled shareware.