Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
You just proved my point: If I were the OP's teacher, I'd want to read about something that had real meaning in history. The CD is not it - made even more painfully obvious by your insisting that the vinyl LP is obsolete when it is not, or that CDs do not degrade when they do, and by commiserating the plight of all those poor, poor video game players ... LOL.
PS - It's video game cartridge.
While it isn't as important as the printing press, it does have some small impacts to society and the music , software, and video game industries. It could make for a fine small paper, or it could just be an teacher assigning an hard project or someone curious about an time period that is before they were born.
The LP is obsolete in the sense that since the 90ies they have only been made for novelty reasons or for audiophiles who prefer it's warmth. There was lots of music released in the 90ies that was never on vinyl. It is like silent film. Can you make silent films today, yes. Does Hollywood only make silent films no but they once did. There are also some differences in what sounds the CD is better at recording vs. vinyl which have impacts to modern music.
While games benefited the most from it, software of all types could get larger. An floppy disk only holds at most 1.44MB of space that is tiny. Larger more functional and easy to use software simply requires more space and in the days before the internet the CD gave it. Multiple floppy disks can be unreliable, get lost and so on. at 1.44MB there is very little you could fit on an disk. Maybe an handful of low quality jpegs. An CD could hold 650MB, an huge increase.
CD's don't wear out in the same way that an record does. The record and cassette lose quality on each and every last play. The CD will sound exactly the same until the disk itself degrades. The data on the disk has to become unreadable before the CD losses quality while the record can sound worn out.
A lot of the music I like had most of its exposure on 45rpm records, and if you wanted to hear the sound and have the experience, you have to have the 45rpm record. Still even now.
The great culture of people getting together and quietly listening to an LP like it was a concert happened in the Seventies. I don't think that there is anyone who does that now. I don't think that there are even that many people who know that it was a big thing in those days.
The first time I heard a CD was the first CD player, in a hi-fi shop. The Sony CDP-101, I think it was called. The happy salesman popped the disc in and proudly waited for my reaction. The sound was so horrifying that I had to leave the room. Honest. Once I was in a sandpaper factory and had to walk into the oven where they dry out all the chemicals. My lungs clutched, my eyes couldn't open, my throat burst into flame. That's what the CD was like.
In the early days there were studies on stress caused by the digital sound of the time. They could have talked to me. I never heard a sound that stressed me like that ever before or since.
They're better now, but the humans involved have gotten worse. The first oldies CDs were mastered in horrible Eighties sound. Some of them have been done over, so there are two layers of CD reissues -- horrible early digital sound and later, better digital sound but newer people who don't understand the music and make it sound lousy anyway.
I did spend an evening listening to high-resolution 24/96 CDs of classical music and acoustic jazz on the appropriate equipment, and it was really good. But that's what it takes, and very few people really care about music that much.
The evolution of formats was always about convenience, not about sound. From cylinders to 78rpm discs to 45rpm discs to cassettes to cds to mp3s. The dominant market driver is how handy the new format is compared with the previous.
I think that the bottom line is that the CD was a convenience item all along. They advertised it as a hi-fi thing, because those were the people that they had to sell it to, but that wasn't the point. It was a convenience thing. Look at the downloads culture now. mp3s are certainly not so hi-fi, but they sure are convenient. And, they have taken the mass market away from CDs.
CD's do have some important impacts. The CD does obsolete vinyl records and once people gain the ability to burn them cassette tapes. It also allowed the easy creation of MP3s when downloadable music became possible(the CD was already digital no need to convert analog to digital first). They also were the first music format that would not degrade over time and allowed the easy selection of each track of music.
For the PC the CD was a desperately needed upgrade and about the 2nd step in obsoleting the floppy drive. I once had an game that took up 13 floppy disks and you needed each and every one of them for the game to install. Others took like 5-10 disks.
For video gaming it would obsolete the video game cartage but it had an disappointing start in the SEGA genesis. The Genesis add on gave the machine the ability to use CDs but the machine itself was a little too under powered to do much with them and had some boring games that were more like an interactive movie than an video game.
Of all the modern versus older devices, CDs are probably not very high on the "importance" list. Life was just the same then, as now. You got up, you went to school or work, you liked to listen to music before you stated you day and you did. So you can play 100 tunes without changing anything, does that make a huge impact on anyone's life? I just think there are so many more interesting comparisons on what life was like before and after than CDS. Unless it was the subject the teacher required I would think of something else; if it was, I would wonder what kind of a teacher and class this is?
I lived not far from the Tower store next to Lincoln Center in NYC. I haunted the place, so when CD's appeared I was very aware of them.
Perhaps I am the only person alive who did not think that the sound of CD's was superior. It was different, better in some respects and lacking in others, but it seemed clear as glass that these discs would replace the vinyl LP. There were too many pluses for them not to. Where music purchases were concerned, I was a total profligate and I began to methodically replace my very large vinyl collection with CD's. I began by replacing the oldest of my favourite versions of classical music, and then moved on to the rest of the collection and to new purchases. I spent far more on CD's than dope, and I certainly did not scrimp on the latter.
I spent a bloody fortune as the first CD's were really pricy, if it had been sex I would have died of testicular atrophy and exhaustion.
The plastic boxes they came in were a PIA, and when I came across vinyl pockets made for storing CD's, I put my entire collection into them. This certainly was a boon when I moved to Europe in 2000 and shipped them all.
...
One of my wife's uncles had at least a dozen post office boxes under different names (this was easily possible in those days) and would sign up for those music clubs like BMG and Colombia House in which one could sign up and get 12 CDs for a penny and then was obligated to buy so many within a year or two at regular price. Point being is he was able to amass a huge collection of music at very little cost. He would then rip them, burn copies and sell them for $5. He sold at school, in town, at flea markets, etc. People would come to him for the newest releases like he was a drug dealer. He told me is was crazy. He said he had boxes of burned CDs in the trunk of his car at all times. It got to the point that he was making several thousand dollars a month. This was in a very small town in the mid to late 90s.....
I lived in Cyprus (the Greek southern half of the island) in the early 2000's. Every music store I went into offered the choice of the original label recording or a locally made copy, the latter being much cheaper. There was no attempt to hide this kind of black marketing, the two would be displayed side by side....or sometimes only the local copy was available.
What was interesting is that I never saw a Greek language CD being sold as a copy and there is an active Greek recording industry. These CD's were only sold in the original legit version. I am reminded of this as last night I was making a playlist for my iPod, and the Bob Marley CD was a copy rip-off that I bought in a small village music shop in Cyprus.
I've never been a fan of buying new tech right out of the gate. I normally wait until it gets mass produced and the price drops. I rode out tapes for a few years and eventually upgraded to cds when things like music clubs arose. That introductory price and some of the follow-up promotions helped me beeg up my collection really fast.
Cds meant being able to go directly to a song instead of fast forwarding through an entire tape and guesstimating when a song began or ended. That was the big selling point for me. I was happy to no longer her the whur of the tape as I pushed past 6 songs to get to the one that I wanted to hear at that moment or play for someone. It meant being able to shuffle and mix up the songs but I didn't use that much. I sort of like knowing what the next song is.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
