>Correct me if I am wrong here, but I think that LDs predate the CD.
>And yes, audio was analogue. I don't think the quality was very high,
>though. All analogue audio LDs I own had a noise reduction encoding scheme
>in them; I think it was called "CX". And the analogue tracks always sounded
>unspectacular to me.
LD does indeed predate CD. Magnavox introduced its "DiscoVision" LD player in 1977 or
78 and Pioneer quickly followed
with the VP1000 (which I still have). The audio tracks were FM analog, similar to VHS
hifi, hence the noise floor was, in
large part, determined by flutter, caused by LD track eccetricity. LD did indeed have
CX noise reduction, just as VHS hifi
uses a scheme similar to dbx. I think the audio quality had more to do with the
source material than the medium. I have a
few very early LD with reasonalby good soundtracks, but most are lackluster due to the
source material. This was due to
the fact that video masters were usually on quad format tapes or U-matic format tapes;
neither format had audio or video
quality even close to LD's potential. (Remember, when these came out, TV network
sound had just started making the
transition from the mono 3500Hz landline to mono 15KHz satellite, public TV only at
that point; movies theater sound
systems were generally fairly bad, as a rule.) Suffice it to say that LD's 15KHz
stereo sound was overwhelmingly better
than normal TV or movie sound of the day! We've come a long way in the past 25 years
with audio quality potential in
consumer products. Granted, LD's analog audio does not compete with today's DVD, but
it was incredible for its time.
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