While no grooves, it is a completely analog format.
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I looked up the areal density of optical media and was slightly disappointed to find that you could maybe fit 1 terabyte on a hypothetical 12" Blu-Ray, and that’s really pushing it (three layers, both sides)
That’s a lot of FLAC though!
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There have been some experimental high density multi-layer blu-rays that double or triple the capacity. I don’t know if they’ve been released or not…
Here’s an article from 2013, and a year later it seems they topped out their numbers at 1TB. As read from an article the following year
“The single-write 300GB discs are set to launch sometime in 2015, and Sonysonic plans to expand the recording capacity from 300GB, to 500GB and eventually 1TB each. At the moment, the discs are doubled-sided with three layers per side. The same laser wavelength as Blu-ray (405nm) will be used”
Edit: Seems that Sony/Panasonic have gotten 3.3TB out of their latest iteration of their archival disks. Here’s the latest article i could find, from last year. And it seems to be geared for 4K content and data centers. If you released a 12" version of the highest density disk i wonder how much memory you could get from it.
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Well aside from the price tag, holographic storage can do better…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc
Disk Union in Shinjuku blew my mind.
Wasn’t laserdisc a analog video format with the ability for either analog audio or digital audio? It definitely could support Dolby Digital…
It really is. Oh, time for side two of Pink Floyd’s Animals.
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Nope. It was 100% analog. Even Dolby Digital was an analog RF stream that required a special demodulator to convert it to digital. Often times this was an external box like the Yamaha APD-1.
There a few high end LD players and AV receivers with built in AC3 RF demodulators available around the end of life for the format but those were all rare.
The wonderful Techmoan YouTube channel has more about this:
(relevant bit is at around 4’42")
Perhaps not for DD, but there were digital PCM tracks on LD I believe.
There was indeed PCM digital 2.0 audio that could be encoded along one of the various bands in the LD (the best comparison I can think of is a digital audio subcarrier over FM radio for HD Radio). It was very much CD like. Something still had to convert that to 1’s and 0’s for the digital output.
LD was a pretty damn clever media given its technological constraints.
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Of note: Sony spent about a zillion dollars, and many years, attempting to bring exactly these properties to digital audio; so they probably don’t see this as such a problem.
Heck, even in the darkest hours of ATRAC they never managed to sell a minidisk player that munged the medium a little bit on every playback.
On the other hand, toughened glass screens stand up to razor blades markedly better, should you feel the need to arrange something powdery and completely licit into little lines.
Laser turntables, aside from being ridiculously expensive, have the downside of “playing” every bit of loose dust – stuff that would have been swept away by an actual stylus, as well as surface scratches that might have been missed by a stylus riding deeper in the groove.
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What about album covers! Actually seeing the artwork? its wonderful!
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you can fend off zombies with [vinyl records].
Well that’s definitely true of playing Foreigner 4, but the collateral damage is enormous.
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Which one? They have so many shops split up by genres
I simply tell my hardware to play music from its library.
However, I am taking notes for my son, so that when he’s in his forties, he’ll be able to spot what wave of nostalgia will come next and cash in on that.
They had books for that Rimmer, big ass books.
It’s not like covers and music are a joint piece of art. For decades records (I put a few kilos of Schellacks in the trash a few months ago) were sold with sleeves and nothing else.
There was also multichannel AC-3 (Dolby Digital after 1995.
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Right. As mentioned before AC3 was RF over the analog channel and needed a special demodulator.
