Study: Compact Disc Rocks On
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Digital music is ramping up, but Jupiter Research reports that the venerable CD will remain the best-selling format throughout the remainder of the decade.
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Using a novel new approach, scientists at the Imperial College in London are on the path to optical storage that dwarfs the capacities of current DVD&#39;s and even upcoming, blue laser-based discs.
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The CD will remain the most popular music format till the end of the decade, according to a new survey. The report also states that Europe will buy over Â£570m worth of digital downloads in 2009, but technology
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(InfoWorld) - It's an interesting contrast: consumers are fast ditching videotape for DVDs and hard disks, but the people who make TV shows are sticking to tape for some cutting edge applications. When it comes to recording broadcast-quality HDTV, today's optical disc systems just can't spin fast enough to keep up with the video -- but that may be about to change. Current optical disc systems are speed-capped at about 10,000 rpm (revolutions per minute.) Spin them any faster and there's a danger the discs will physically disintegrate in the drive leaving nothing but a pile of sharp plastic splinters and data that is gone forever. And even if they don't break apart the disc can begin to wobble making reliable recording a problem. Engineers at the Science and Technical Research Laboratories (STRL) of Japan's public broadcaster, NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai), are working on an optical disc recording system based on consumer Blu-ray Disc technology that can spin as fast as 15,000 rpm without these problems and demonstrated it last week. It's needed because broadcast quality HDTV signals of the type NHK records stream at 250MbpsÂ making a fast-spinning optical disc a necessity. A 1X Blu-ray Disc records at 36Mbps so the new system is equivalent to 7X speed. NHK has gotten around the stress problem by making a flexible disc that is just 0.1 millimeters thick. The disc, which was co-developed with Ricoh, is essentially the recording layer from a Blu-ray Disc without the 1.1 millimeter plastic substrate that is used to give the disc rigidity. It won't break apart at higher speeds but is not rigid enough to be useful in a drive at any speed. To solve this second problem a thick stabilizing plate has been added into the drive. When spun, the disc is kept steady by the stabilizer and can be used up to 15,000 rpm, said Daiichi Koide, an engineer at NHK STRL. The set-up is similar to Hitachi Maxell's Stacked Volumetric Optical Disc (SVOD) that wasÂ introduced in prototype formÂ at last year's Ceatec exhibition in Japan and shown again at Cebit in Germany this year. SVOD packs several 0.1 millimeter thick optical discs into a cartridge and holds them against a stabilizer in the drive to keep them steady while in use. However there is a key difference between the two, said Koide. In the NHK drive the stabilizer doesn't rotate. If it did it would be susceptible to the same stresses that as the discs. The result is that NHK can spin the disc up to 15,000 rpm without any mechanical problems. The system is still under development and there's no word on when it will literally be ready for prime time. NHK envisages cartridges stuffed with a number of the thin discs that can replace videotapes. Â
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New disc could ease the transition to the next-gen DVD standard, company says.
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The Internet may have forever changed the music business, but online downloads will keep playing second fiddle to compact discs for at least the next five years.
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Engineers at Japanese broadcaster NHK have developed an optical disc that spins 5,000 rpm faster than current technology, which will rival videotape when it comes to recording broadcast-quality HDTV recordings.
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As storage gets cheaper and download speeds faster, digital music files are moving closer to CD quality.
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Flashy new discs and that old cozy sound have got the iPod generation giving LPs a spin
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Recording companies looking to wring more profits out of music sales are hoping to sell retailers on a new hybrid disc. On one side is standard CD audio; on the other, the enhanced sound, video and other media capabilities of a DVD.
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A new hybrid CD format that offers standard CD audio on one side and the enhanced media capabilities of a DVD on the other made its nationwide debut this week.
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Miniature hard drive will feature a Compact Flash card form factor.
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Compact speakers for personal music players have been around since the original Walkman. Now that mini-hard drive music machines can hold your entire collection, the product category is back with a vengeance...
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An early analysis of data on the Prestige spinal disk shows it works at least as well as spinal fusion and has similar risks.
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The big news in digital audio recently was Sony&#39;s NW-HD3, the company&#39;s first hard-drive-based digital audio player to support the MP3 format right out of the box.
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Recording companies looking to wring more profits out of music sales are hoping to sell retailers on a new hybrid disc. On one side is standard CD audio; on the other, the enhanced sound, video and other media capabilities of a DVD...
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If stereos were Stetsons, this would be a ten gallon hat Review Of late, the compact Hi-Fi system has struggled to find a place in the affections of consumers keener on more sophisticated home cinema audio rigs. However, the technology that looked like it was about to drive the last nail into the compact Hi-Fi coffin is set to breath new life into the format as products like the Gigajuke deliver the playback quality of a Hi-Fi combined with the storage capacity of a hard drive.â¦