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Did They Lie To Us?

S

Scooter Lesley

Guest
I was on the air, and spinning vinyl when the Columbia rep walked in, and handed me this circular 5-inch mirror, with a hole in it. He said, There is music on that!

Well,...it's a very long story from there, but the labels claimed a better sound, no surface noise, and these discs will last forever....Archival!

I rode along with them, and still have CD's, but that day I felt that there was something wrong, but I just couldn't put my finger on it or in it???????????????

Years later, when I owned a retail store, that sold used CD's, I discovered pinholes or what the industry is now calling "CD Rot"! This was occuring on discs that were 10-to-15 years old, and some only 6-months.

Archival?

Did They Lie To Us?
 
Maybe we could be charitable and say: "The got too far out in front of known facts.'

In a recent conversation in one of the forums I frequent, someone taught me the proper definition of "lie" and "Liar". You can convey an untruth and not be a liar. I had to go to the dictionary and satisfy myself. How could I live this long and not understand a word I have known since before I started to school.

To say someone lied is to say: "They knew they were deceiving us but told us things that they knew were not true because they wanted to deceive us."

In the 1980s I was running a big honking computer machine. My employer was selling things to a major U.S. company and their sales person wanted to make a presentation to us: They had this technology from the days of microfilm and now they were putting images of documents on these little shiny disks like music was being delivered... to those daring enough to gamble on adopting new technology. My employer wasn't interested in "bleeding edge technology" for the office but didn't want to offend a good customer so I dusted off one of my business cards that said: "Director of Information Systems" and I sat down and "howdied" with the sales folks.

All I can tell you is that big names like Kodak and 3M were drinking the same Kool-Aid. Our business records could live permanently on these little 5 inch disks.

By the way: The price in the 1980s for a "CD Burner"..... $6,500.00

Did they and the music industry LIE? No, they just didn't know that they didn't know, so they told us what they thought they knew.
 
Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
Maybe we could be charitable and say: "The got too far out in front of known facts.'

In a recent conversation in one of the forums I frequent, someone taught me the proper definition of "lie" and "Liar". You can convey an untruth and not be a liar. I had to go to the dictionary and satisfy myself. How could I live this long and not understand a word I have known since before I started to school.

To say someone lied is to say: "They knew they were deceiving us but told us things that they knew were not true because they wanted to deceive us."

In the 1980s I was running a big honking computer machine. My employer was selling things to a major U.S. company and their sales person wanted to make a presentation to us: They had this technology from the days of microfilm and now they were putting images of documents on these little shiny disks like music was being delivered... to those daring enough to gamble on adopting new technology. My employer wasn't interested in "bleeding edge technology" for the office but didn't want to offend a good customer so I dusted off one of my business cards that said: "Director of Information Systems" and I sat down and "howdied" with the sales folks.

All I can tell you is that big names like Kodak and 3M were drinking the same Kool-Aid. Our business records could live permanently on these little 5 inch disks.

By the way: The price in the 1980s for a "CD Burner"..... $6,500.00

Did they and the music industry LIE? No, they just didn't know that they didn't know, so they told us what they thought they knew.
Click to expand...

Does this fall under the "plausible deniability" clause?
 
Sony developed the CD, so they knew all the stats. They may not have known just how long the thin layer of foil would last. How could they, but speculate. It is my understanding that they went with 75-to-100 years, and at that point, the data encoded may no longer matter. Also, I believe that Sony had detailed, outlined, documentation of exactly how the discs were to be manufactured,....and that tollerance might have strayed.
 
I assume that the expected life for data integrity of a CD "pressed" on the production line the way audio recordings are would be different than the expected life for the data integrity of a CD "burned" the way we do with data we put on CD using desktop computers.

If I go to the trouble to put my family genealogy documentation on a CD, I would sleep better at night if I had reason to believe that the data might still have integrity 75 or 100 years later. In my personal example about business records, nobody is going to get excited about a list of people who bought new Chevrolet cars at a given dealership back in 1988.

But my ancestors will still remain the same 100 years from now as they appear to be today. In theory, 500 years from now, the story of who my ancestors were and what boat brought them into port in New Orleans in the 1800s will remain unchanged. And the trail of who arrived in 1620 on the Mayflower and the trail of how the descendants of those people traveled about the country and ended up in non-prestigious status in rural Texas. That data will still be valid 100 years from now and 500 years from now. It would be nice if the data we store today will stand the test of time.

FOOTNOTE: I am still considering dis-inheriting a family member who recently cracked... You mean the "Poor White Trash Ancestors in our family might get me admitted to membership in the D.A.R.!" Whatever.
 
I fully agree with the last post, as there is reason for concern!

Here's a case from my files:
Fellow Record Collector, and licensed Beatleologist, Mike Sullivan, is a Completeist.
If it relates to The Beatles, he wants to own a copy.

This fell very serious, in the latter 90's, when Capitol, and the holdings of Apple, got everthing ironed-out in the courtroom, and began a huge CD issue/reissue Tooo-Sooo-Mommie-Jammie. This included the entire Apple Badfinger catalog.

A promo sampler, featuring 6-cuts, packaged in an cardboad Apple, caught Mike's attention at a Record Show.

So, what do you think happened here? I'll answer that in my next post.
 
Scooter Lesley said:
Also, I believe that Sony had detailed, outlined, documentation of exactly how the discs were to be manufactured,....and that tollerance might have strayed.
Click to expand...

Phillips owns the patent on the CD. If you call something a compact disc, it must conform to the standards to the manufacturing standards of Phillips AG, a German company. Not Sony.
 
Well,...your "A"-ness, we all appresssssss the Google look-up on exactly who owns the current Patent on the "Compact Disc". However, I, in an earlier post, had simply refered to SONY, as they were....the company that developed it from the beginning, and the tollerances documented then, by them, the Inventors!

Mike Sullivan Part 2:
To me, I know of only two other cases of this form of CD Rot. Since purchase the CD was kept in a living room enviroment, with other CD's. Yet, since purchase the bottom began to show signs of marbling...the foil holding two different patterns, or shades of color.

Every 30-days, Mike could see these tiny, pencil-point drops of what he discribed as sticky pancake syrup. When cleaned more pinholes were revealed. If the foil is absent, then so is the data...that was once there.
 
Scooter Lesley said:
Well,...your "A"-ness, we all appresssssss the Google look-up on exactly who owns the current Patent on the "Compact Disc". However, I, in an earlier post, had simply refered to SONY, as they were....the company that developed it from the beginning, and the tollerances documented then, by them, the Inventors!
Click to expand...

If you actually look it up, you'll see that BOTH companies developed it together. Not one or the other. But the tolerances (that is how you spell it) were set by agreement between the two companies. This happened before Sony bought American record labels, and was strictly an electronics manufacturer.
 
Scooter Lesley said:
Well,...your "A"-ness, we all appresssssss the Google look-up on exactly who owns the current Patent on the "Compact Disc". However, I, in an earlier post, had simply refered to SONY, as they were....the company that developed it from the beginning, and the tollerances documented then, by them, the Inventors!
Click to expand...

Sony did not invent the CD. The CD was invented by James T. Russell.

http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/russell.html

R
 
Robert Bass said:
Sony did not invent the CD. The CD was invented by James T. Russell.
R
Click to expand...

BigA already clarifited that the CD "developed" and not "invented" by Sony. Sony found practical applications for the invention.

Scooter's post was just wrong.
 
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DavidEduardo said:


BigA already clarifited that the CD "developed" and not "invented" by Sony. Sony found practical applications for the invention.

Scooter's post was just wrong.
Click to expand...

David,

My post was in response to Scooter, not BigA. BigA's post wasn't yet posted as I was posting mine.

R
 
Well,...well,...well,....(one more)...well,...Mr. Bass, I can only assume that we all, the collective readers here, appreciate your link to some wirey little man's claim on what we know today as a CD.

A few years ago, one such or maybe it was a group of three that claimed that their relatives took flight, a year or two, before Kitty Hawk, North Carolina's Wright Brothers.

Mr. Bass, by 1985, the CD was being sold to the rich for $29.99 each, so that they could brag about owning the latest thing. In Radio, I saw the first one around April of 1982.

Whether true or not, six of one, and a half-dozen of the other,...SONY is cedited for the whole idea, warts,...and all.

Whether you like it,...or....whether you don't like it....makes no Diff!
 
Scooter Lesley said:
Mr. Bass, by 1985, the CD was being sold to the rich for $29.99 each, so that they could brag about owning the latest thing. In Radio, I saw the first one around April of 1982.
Click to expand...

The rich??? Hogwash! I got my first CD as a teenager back then, and I was by no means "rich".

R
 
Robert Bass said:
David,

My post was in response to Scooter, not BigA. BigA's post wasn't yet posted as I was posting mine.

R
Click to expand...

Gotcha! I must have been posting a different reply when they came in, and did not notice the time stamp. But your point to Scooter remains correct... Sony did not invent the CD.
 
Scooter Lesley said:
Whether true or not, six of one, and a half-dozen of the other,...SONY is cedited for the whole idea, warts,...and all.

Whether you like it,...or....whether you don't like it....makes no Diff!
Click to expand...

Sony and Phillips, working together, developed the commercial hardware... much of the manufacturing process and standards to make it viable and economical was done in a joint effort. Between the two they created the fabrication systems and the reproduction hardware models that the rest of the industries (music and audio) licensed, along with the patents that Mr Russell possessed.

In fact, the working Russell prototypes were independently viewed by Sony and Phillips several times prior to 1975! They eventually licensed the patents to combine with their own earlier LaserDisk products in development to create the working CD of today. Phillips contributed the CompactDisc name, in line with the CompactCassette that they had earlier developed. While Russell showed working prototypes as early as 1972, neither Sony not Phillips would have one for about half a decade.

The key to making Sony and Phillips' products work was in part the Russell patents. He was the inventor of the theory of the CD, while Phillips was the more important of the two later developers. right down to the CD logo we know.
 
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As per reply #14, congrats Mr. Bass...on using "Hogwash" in a sentence; the Southern American rural version of Europe's "Poppicock".

Now, back to the subect, at hand.
The case of Metallica "Black":
Owning a retail store for some years, I could buy used copies of such for $3-to-$4, and turn them rather quickly for $9. I bought every used copy of that CD, unless it looked like Tonya Harding had ran a test pattern. I noticed that one copy was missing foil, from around the edge, so I kept it near my pencil box. A week or so later, I notice that it continued to erode. Two months later, it was almost clear....certainly clear enough to see through. Now, I ask, who's falt is it, and is anyone responsible for replacement??
 
Scooter Lesley said:
As per reply #14, congrats Mr. Bass...on using "Hogwash" in a sentence; the Southern American rural version of Europe's "Poppicock".
Click to expand...

You have an unhealthy fixation on things I say, don't you?

R
 
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