The Future of Digital Music in Your Car Audio
A few years ago, my brother and I made a trip to the beautiful State of Indiana to visit my grandparents. While not a complete, all-out road trip, Evansville is close enough to reach in a matter of a few hours and just far enough away to actually feel like you’re ‘out of town’.
Like any family visit, we generally have traditions we look forward to upon every trip, and this venture was no exception. Loading up fishing poles, some tackle, and one nasty bag of chicken livers, we climbed into my Grandpa’s Crème-colored Oldsmobile 88.
Crusty, Old 8-Track DeviceA lethargic tank by both appearance and performance, this would be our transportation to some of the best cat-fish ponds in Southern Indiana. Although considerable time has passed between now and then, one thing stuck in my mind about that car.
It had an 8-Track player in the dash! I remembered when I was a little kid that my dad had a few old 8-Tracks laying around the garage, but this was my first experience in seeing one actually mounted in-vehicle. We still poke fun at him about it; he couldn’t figure out why a cassette tape wouldn’t play when he shoved one in there.
Now, I’m a bit of a music lover by nature. From blues to jazz, from country to rock, I pretty much like it all. Ask me what I have in my CD player on any given day, and chances are, it will be completely the opposite as the day before. But given the experience in recording technology mentioned above, I would like to digress into the advances we have seen in portable music over the years.
I hope I’m not speaking to a deaf audience when I make the assumption that everyone has at least owned a cassette tape. Working on a thin strip of plastic tape spooled inside a compact plastic case, this was the primary media for buying, recording, and listening to your favorite band at your leisure.
And of course, car manufactures followed suit by producing in-dash cassette players. Cassette TapeThis of course, was all the rage since you could now listen to your choice of music quickly and easily as opposed to limited-range FM radio or static-filled AM talk radio. Of course, like any new advent in such technology, it came with inherent flaws.
For one, you couldn’t listen to the songs you wanted immediately since they were all “spooled together”. I remember quite clearly guessing when to hit the stop button during the rewind process, only to be met with the middle or ending of the song previous to the one I wanted to listen to. The other problem was reliability; simply put, the tape was subject to wear and didn’t last long exposed to direct sunlight or debris entering the cassette itself. These problems were solved with the advent of the Compact disc… and Now digital player.
The advent of the Compact Disc, otherwise known as the CD. I would have to go as far to say maybe 99% of all people living in the United States is at least familiar with the CD. Perhaps a few technology laggards (in the most extreme sense of the word) has not seen a CD, but pretty much everyone is familiar that flat, shiny little masterpiece.
This was our first real venture into the realm of portable, digital music. Although cassette tapes dominated the recordable media industry for much of the 80's and early 90's, the CD was actually introduced in 1982, with the specific purpose of recording and playing back digital audio.
First introduced in Asia , it was highly received and wildly successful and was soon introduced to other markets. Considered the 'Big Bang' of audio recording, the CD offered several advantages over the audio tape discussed in last week's blog. The biggest advantage, being ease of playback.
The audio CD user could now 'scroll through' the songs they liked the most, repeat the song they liked indefinitely, shuffle songs for random playback, even program a play-list of specific songs they wished to hear exclusively. But the convenience didn't stop there; eventually multiple disk changers were released that offered the option to scroll through 6, 8, even 10 disks and sometimes more.
Although, this incredible technology did not come without it's problems either. For one, the CD is just as prone to damage as the cassette was, if not more so. Left out in the hostile environment of a vehicle, Compact Discs were subject to damage from direct sunlight, liquid spills and more importantly, scratches. A deep scratch across the disk's surface or a series of smaller ones usually spelled death for reliable and accurate playback.
Leading into next week's blog, I'll attempt to give some layman's terms on just how a CD works. A compact disk is about 1.2mm thick and is constructed from polycarbonate plastic. The actual data that is stored on the CD is not embedded in the plastic, rather, it is etched in Super Pure Aluminum and although rarely used, gold.
When I say 'etched', I'm referring to very, very small pits written in the aluminum which contain data. A CD player has an optical eye which casts a laser into these pits, which in turn, reads the data. After the player's software has interpreted the material, it will then play the music written on the CD! A bit complicated, I know. But the take-away here is that the data read is digital code as opposed the magnetic resonance we saw on the Cassette Tape.
Here's a fun fact: When designing the original compact disc, engineers set a goal of 74 minutes for a reason; They wanted a single CD to be able to contain a complete rendition of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.