Alternative digital

[MTARR@EAGLE.WESLEYAN.EDU]

Hi!
 
This talk of musical media of the future prompts me to point you
all to the latest issue of Discover magazine again, even the same
page as the Peter Gabriel tidbit I mentioned last week.
 
The winner of the 1992 Discover Award for Technological
Innovation, Sound Division, is Katsuaki Tsuruchima of Sony for
the recordable compact disc.  (Tod Machover of the MIT Media Lab
got honorable mention for his work with "Hyperinstruments" such
as the percussion systems tested by Peter Gabriel.) The discs
(MDs) look like 3.5'' computer diskettes, except they're thicker.
To make them recordable some output fidelity had to be
sacrificed, but they say only someone with a *very* finicky ear
could pick it up.  They compressed the data stored on the disc by
getting rid of all unnecessary sound components, i.e. when a tuba
and a triangle play at the same time you can only hear the tuba,
so they omit the triangle and you never miss it.  To make them recordable they
are made out of a cobalt alloy instead of aluminum, and the laser heats up
the layer instead of popping
holes into the aluminum.  The laser still reads the spots, but
they were created in a different way.
 
All thoughts of oxidization and deterioration aside, this sounds
like a pretty good deal, even though the system now starts at $800 (ouch).
 
(On a KaTe-related note, the backwards line mentioned recently
can't belong to "Sat In Your Lap", because there isn't one in
that song.  You must be talking about the "We let the weirdness
in" at the end of "Leave It Open".)
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Meredith Tarr		                               m.tarr1@genie.geis.com
America can't survive another four years...  fight the idiocy on November 3rd
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