Re: [ARSCLIST] Preservation media WAS: Cataloguing still :-)

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One of the big problems the CD created, which ended up hurting the music business by dilluting the 
quality of product, was the longer playing time. In the rock world, bands seemed to feel obligated 
to fill the 74 minutes even though most of them didn't have nearly that much quality to put out. 
Subsequent albums were even worse because most bands only have so many great musical minutes in them 
and forcing them to "stretch out" time after time just ends up stretched so thing there's no there 
there. In the reissue world, at least with jazz, the extra time was used putting endless out-takes 
and alternate takes (none of which were approved for the original album and many of which were 
musically or technically flawed which is why they were kept in the can at the time of original 
release). The only place the longer time was a boon was the classical world, where you could fit 
nearly 2 LPs worth of material on 1 CD. Now, the question of how many people would actually sit for 
74 minutes went round and round but Big Music seemed determined to "add value" to excuse their 
collusive (not my opinion -- they were prosecuted and pled guilty to antitrust and collusion charges 
for price-fixing CD's) goals to raise CD prices. And they wondered why Napster sprang up and took 
off!

The other big beneficiary of 74-minute and then 80-minute media was the box set producer. You could 
truly throw in the kitchen sink, along with an endless tome of a booklet. Of course, the best (both 
in sales and artistic content) box sets didn't go that way but went for what amounted to beautiful 
stand-alone blocks of 80-minute playlists.

Producer Don Was, for a while at least, advised clients to keep an album to 45 minutes and to put it 
together like a 2-sided LP because "that's what the people want and are used to." Bob Dylan, for 
one, took the advise and put out a couple of great albums in the 90s. Bands like REM and Pearl Jam, 
for instance, could have left a much better bodies of work if they had followed Was's advice and 
concentrated on 45 great minutes instead of albums larded up with throw-out tunes and "studio 
chatter jams" junk.

Also, the art of sequencing albums was totally lost by the end of the 90's, but that's a whole other 
matter.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lou Judson" <loujudson@xxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2006 6:16 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Preservation media WAS: Cataloguing still :-)


1983: CDs (compact discs, not certificates of deposit) go on sale.
from <http://www.mediahistory.umn.edu/time/1980s.html>
and see <http://www.oneoffcd.com/info/historycd.cfm>

and google for more.

In junior high I did a long report on how records were made - the
technology and the history. I try to keep up still. There are lots of
stories, such as the president of Sony wanted CDs to be big enough for
the longest piece of music - Beethoven's Ninth - which is how they got
to be 74 minutes at first. I never understood why thay didn't make them
as long as cassette tapes, 90 minutes, which would have made so much
more sense!

<L>

Lou Judson • Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689

On Sep 5, 2006, at 1:08 PM, Roger and Allison Kulp wrote:

> Japan.Sony inroduced them,like 1981 or so.
> Roger Kulp
>
> steven c <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Don Cox"
> > How did engineers make the first CDs, when hard drives were not big
> > enough to hold 600 Megs of data?
> Actually, I'm not sure...but one way it COULD have been done is with
> magnetic tape storage, since that was used on mainframe computers at
> least in the early seventies, if not before. When I was working my
> way through university as a security guard for State Farm ('74-'76)
> I recall seeing carts loaded with HUGE reels of data tape...and I
> have no idea what the length v. data capacity algorithm might have
> been (or how many reels of tape, if more than one, would be needed
> to store the digital capacity of a CD...?)
>
> In fact, where WERE CD's introduced commercially?
>
> Steven C. Barr
>
>
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