Tag: compact disc players

Why can’t CD’s be recorded onto other CD’s?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

Why can’t CD’s be recorded onto other CD’s?

Most of the CD’s you encounter are prerecorded. These CD’s were mass-produced from a master, using plastic molding techniques, followed by metal deposition and painting. Recordable CD’s, which are used now in CD-ROM applications, are written by an intense laser beam, which alters the reflectivity of the CD spot by spot to create a disk that behaves just like a prerecorded CD. However, once a CD has been “written”, it cannot be cleaned for rewriting. At present, recordable CD’s can only be written once. There are some new optical and magneto-optical techniques around that allow erasure, but I don’t think these techniques have appeared in CD’s yet.

Why can’t I record songs directly onto CD’s, like I can onto a tape?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

Why can’t I record songs directly onto CD’s, like I can onto a tape?

To record CD’s, you need a much more powerful laser and a blank recordable CD. Both of these items cost lots of money. Reading a CD does not alter the CD but writing it does. You need more laser power and a special CD disk. If you tried to record a normal CD, you would not be able to restructure its aluminum layer. You would not “erase” the old material on it and would not “write” new material onto it.

Why do CD’s skip?

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

Why do CD’s skip?

CD players must position their optical system very precisely, relative to the spinning disk itself. It uses very sophisticated electromechanical devices to keep it in place. But if you jar a player violently enough, it will lose its position and the audio may suffer. Most modern CD players save a short amount of information so that they are reading ahead of where they are playing. Even if they lose the track for a few hundredths of a second, they have enough music saved up that they can keep playing continuously. But if the upset is severe enough, they will run out of saved music and will go silent for a moment or two.

Why do some CD players sound better than others even if the CD is seriously scra…

Lou Bloomfield Leave a comment

Why do some CD players sound better than others even if the CD is seriously scratched on the bottom half?

At this point, there should be very little difference between CD players that are playing perfect CD’s. They all create almost distortionless reproductions of the original sound. However, different players use different tracking techniques and optical systems and thus have different abilities to recover from imperfections in the CD.