response 39 of 104:

Aug 21 21:08 UTC 2002

Declan McCullagh and Cnet again.   The RIAA is asking a federal court
to compel Verizon to disclose the identity of a user who the RIAA 
believes was sharing music files.   Verizon has declined to honor
the RIAA's request under the "notice and take down" provisions 
of the DMCA, because (as I've written before) the plain language 
of that law does not cover material resident on the ISP customer's 
machine, only material residing on the ISP's server. 
 
The RIAA believes the DMCA rules should apply, of course, and this
is not such an outrageous stretch that the court would dismiss it
without a second thought; it depends on how literalist the court 
wants to be, given that P2P software -- serving up files from the 
customer's own computer -- wasn't worried about when the DMCA was 
written.

Still, this is another sign that the RIAA has decided to go hunting
for individual file sharing users; they have decided they have to 
endure the probable public backlash.

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-954658.html?tag=cd_mh

response 41 of 104:

Aug 22 03:53 UTC 2002

        Go ahead and blather, it is massive peacefull civil disobedience.  Does
congress want to give me more laws to ignore?

response 43 of 104:

Aug 22 17:25 UTC 2002

http://slashdot.org/articles/02/08/22/1321224.shtml?tid=126

Technology Review has an article 
(http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/prototype10902.asp?p=7) 
about a new CD and DVD copy protection system
(http://www.doc-witness.com/tech.htm) by Doc-Witness 
(http://www.doc-witness.com/), where the disc itself has a smart card on 
it. The card checks if a request is valid, and then returns a key to 
decrypt the contents of the disc. It apparently works with standard 
drives.

response 45 of 104:

Aug 22 19:06 UTC 2002

Offline.

response 47 of 104:

Aug 22 20:48 UTC 2002

If it's an offline thing, it won't be long until people figure out how
to compromise it.  Right off-hand, I'm not sure what would stop people
from simply ripping the tracks once decrypted - and I take it this thing
must come with a software driver to handle the decryption part.

response 49 of 104:

Aug 24 18:15 UTC 2002

re: 46

SACD and DVD-Audio both sound better than conventional CD's. Though, the
increased quality varies, based on what you're actually listening to.

I'm guessing the difference between the SACD and CD versions of the Rolling
Stones disc would be negligible, especially on a $500 "Theater In A Box"
system. Though, I wouldn't put it past Sony to master the SACD version with
a bit more treble and bass, to create the impression of brighter sound and
"punchier" bass on a cheap system.

However, jazz and orchestral music does sound better on advanced audio
formats. I briefly owned a SACD player and noticed a difference on my home
system (Harmon/Kardon amp, Yamaha NS-100XT speakers, etc.) but not to the
extent that I saw the value in keeping a $500 CD player, and paying extra
money for the few SACD's I could find, just to have them not work in my car
or computer.

re: 47 

I wouldn't be too sure of that. First off, even if you do rip the audio (which
would be possible today, if computers had an audio format that could
accomodate a frequency rate that high) where are you going to play the tracks,
other than on your computer?

Also, consider that the watermark is physical, not digital. The Sony
Playstation uses discs with physical copy protection, and nearly seven years
later, the best anyone's come up with is a chip that requres substantial
modification to the system. 

response 51 of 104:

Aug 24 19:15 UTC 2002

If it sounds better to you, great.  The claims made for it seem to
contradict what's known about how the human ear works, though, so I'm
skeptical.  I also know there are a lot of tricks they can do to make it
*seem* to sound better -- one easy one is to make the output level from the
player slightly higher when playing SACDs instead of regular discs.  People
will perceive the slightly louder music as "clearer".  Tinkering with the
mix is, as you mentioned, another option.

response 53 of 104:

Aug 24 19:36 UTC 2002

If I remember right, they're encoded at 24 bits instead of the 16 on a
regular CD, and at a 2.4 MHz sample rate instead of 44.1 kHz.  Note that
44.1 kHz is enough to accurately record any sound up to just under the
Nyquist limit of 22,050 Hz, and the human ear can only hear up to 20,000 Hz. 
Also, 16 bits is thought to have about 3 dB more dynamic range than the
human ear can actually pick out in music.  Hence my skepticism.

Mostly this is being pushed by record companies.  When CDs came out they
were able to sell everyone new copies of all the albums they'd previously
bought on LP -- profit with no expenditure on promotion or finding
new talent.  They're hoping to cash in on that again by getting everyone to
upgrade to SACD.

response 55 of 104:

Aug 24 21:02 UTC 2002

re: 51 / 53

That's something I've been confused by. I distinctly recall CD's being touted
as "perfect", in that they're able to reproduce the entire range of listenable
music. IIRC, the *only* limitation of CD's is the masters they're recorded
from. (Does anyone else remember the AAD/ADD/DDD specifications that used to
be printed on CD's?)

This is the same reason I don't entirely understand how a $2,000 "reference"
CD player can produce notably better sound than a $60 CD-changer. I mean, it's
just a digital stream. You can't really convert it in different ways. Yes,
I understand that the mechanism that turns that stream in to something my
receiver understands can be of varying quality. It's the reason my 200-disc
changer is connected with a fiberoptic cable, instead of two RCA cables. But
there's only so much improvement you can build atop the core technology.
Certainly not $1,940 worth.

In terms of pure technology and understanding of human hearing, I don't see
how it's possible for SACD (or DVD-Audio) to sound better than a CD, except
under very rare circumstances where the music pushes just beyond what a CD
is capable of. But for whatever reason, it does. There is a presence in
non-vocal music on SACD that isn't quite the same on CD. It seems more
lifelike, although I can't figure out how it possibly can be, other than
tinkering with the mastering of the disc.

Although I'm not yet willing to buy in to a Sony/Philips/RIAA consipracy, I've
always believed that mass-produced CD's haven't been mastered to their fullest
potential since the CD format gained complete consumer acceptance. It seems
noticably coincidental to me that an artist's debut album sounds (in terms
of clarity) better than following albums more often than not. Conspiracy?
Probably not. Laziness? Absolutely. Why spend days mastering, and remastering
something that you already know people are going to buy either way?

With SACD's (and formerly, CD's) there was a degree of uncertainty there. They
cost more than other formats, weren't as versatile in terms of being copyable
and/or playable in cars or portable units, and the players cost more money
than most people spend on components.

Writing this made me remember something...so I just tested my theory. Janet
Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" sounds very, VERY crisp and clear, despite the fact
that it's an AAD master from 1989. The same song ("Alright") sounds muddier
(albeit, slightly) on "Design Of A Decade" which was produced in 1995.

In 1989, you were lucky to pick up a component CD player for less than $150.
Portable and integrated CD systems were much more expensive (and prohibitively
so, for the teen audience that record companies target), and there wasn't
exactly a slew of CD's to be bought. In 1995, you could get a nice integrated
portable system, or disc changer for half of that price, and there were tons
of CD's available. Most anyone who wanted a CD player could afford one, and
because of that, there was no real need to convince anyone of the clarity that
CD's provided, because you could sell them on the convenience factor.

Whether the laziness was slowly accepted as cost-effective, or planned all
along is probably unknowable. Or maybe I've just been listening to CD's for
so long, that I associate older discs with how amazingly clear they seemed
to be. I dunno.

re: 52 

Super Audio Compact Disc, IIRC

response 57 of 104:

Aug 25 00:13 UTC 2002

Higher-end CD players tend to have better tracking subsystems, too.  My
1986-vintage Sanyo player, which was probably pretty expensive new, will
play discs that my Discman gives up on, and it skips less often.  This may
have something to do with the fact that the Sanyo splits the laser into
three beams for tracking purposes, while the Discman multiplexes a single
one.

There's also some room for tweaking in the analog filters that have to
follow the D/A converters.

response 59 of 104:

Aug 25 01:41 UTC 2002

What is twinkie doing here?

response 61 of 104:

Aug 26 03:32 UTC 2002

I think that's bordering on pretentious. 

Yes, any D/A conversion is going to have some degree of error, but we're
not comparing something with a 10% error rate to a 1% error rate. We're closer
to 0.73% vs. 0.03%.