I hear you, and re my posts here, I provided age range for the current Hipsters (who happen to now noticeably inhabit my old Williamsburg, Brooklyn stomping grounds).
I have one of the old “sounds of slashdot” CDs that has a bootable debian installer on it. I think it can be mounted by MACos (pre-OSX) macs, too.
I’ve never found any toolset that could trivially copy that CD.
This sounds suspicious. Certainly they were aware of this compression (RIAA standard) and had the appropriate decompressor turned on?
I would love to give it a shot. 
Okay, found all of the data at the Internet Archive and downloaded it. It’s full of all the files it would take to reproduce the CD including the .cue file. It should be as easy as feeding that to your favorite CD burner program and hitting ‘burn’. Looks like it was read with something like CDRDAO–which got renamed to wodim, IIRC.
Enjoy!
Edited to add: @Medievalist, the one thing you would need to make sure of when burning it is that you start by burning a data CD with the debian image, but don’t finalize it. Then you could burn a second session with the audio tracks. Hmm, there might be an easier way…
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I tried it a couple times, using cdparanoia and cdrdao probably. But somehow the duplicates were never the same as the original; either they wouldn’t mount on one of my OSes, or they wouldn’t install debian.
The music always came out OK though! It’s in my giant FLAC collection even now.
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You’d think that, wouldn’t you? If only. Those were uncertain times and some labels/production facilities were still learning the intricacies of CD production. Also, some were looking to save a buck at all costs… there were some really shitty CD’s (from a quality perspective) in the early days.
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Heh. It’s now 18 years ago that I wrote an article on locked grooves (and other vinyl trickery) for a Swedish music magazine. Considering the lack of Wikipedia at the time, it did involve a fair bit of internet searching and even a trip to the library, as I remember it.
For those of you that read Swedish:
Det kallas locked grooves
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Whenever the record was released, some time in the mid-sixties.
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I don’t remember the details, but a friend of mine who worked at the research labs for RCA was telling a story about a record that had 8 interleaved grooves on it. It was a sort of random number generator as depending on when you dropped the needle, you would get a different track. I wish I could remember more details. Supposedly, there were more crazy things like that, but I don’t know if any of them ever got outside of the lab.
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I don’t understand how it sounds better, with that hiss and pop.
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One of the first records I ever bought! Thanks for reminding me.
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How about an LP with 500 lock grooves?
It’s an infinite listening experience. . . multiplied by 500!
(Oh, I see @strmberg cites this in his link. Full disclosure, I am on this LP.)
Somewhere I have a DJ battle wax record with a bonus disc of one side all looped drumbeats on lock-grooves, kind of an ingenious idea, the beat plays forever while you scratch on the other turntable.
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Really neat thanks for sharing
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Because vinyl won’t handle the kind of abuse that CDs and other digital files can take.
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The loudness war also, if you dig deep enough, shows just how ridiculous 24-bit digital audio is for listening purposes (it is useful for recording, though, since it provides extra headroom, making recording levels less critical). I make archival recordings of a choral group I belong to, and my experience is that most consumer audio gear can’t really handle even 16 bits worth of dynamic range (about 96 dB) at original performance volume. An uncompressed* recording, played at concert volume, will have all sorts of audible clipping during a phrase at fortissimo unless you have a heroic amplifier that can actually deliver the necessary power, and speakers or headphones that can handle it. Applying at least some compression is a necessity to make it playable on anything less, and that’s before considering that it might get played in a car with lots of background noise.
This problem is less noticeable with rock (where the music tends to have less dynamic range even in live performance), but a live rock concert recording is still very noticeably different than a squashed-to-hell loudness war studio victim.
* Referring to dynamic range compression as opposed to data compression
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I know there is an uncompressed recording of the 1812 Overture somewhere, which is infamous for it’s speaker destroying capabilities. People played it, thought it was too quiet and turned it up, then later on found out that they had used real cannons for the performance.
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That’s probably the Telarc recording of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which even features a warning on the cover. Yes, I have a physical copy of it, and I’ve always been very careful when playing it.
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You can see the cannons on the LP by looking at the grooves.
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