The Format Wars in retrospect.

[bluepilot]

Originally Posted by dave walsh

The Quadrophonic Debacle that Serge mentioned [p8*] was even more baffling to the general public and once again it was the same confusing aim with different technologys. As with Blu Ray, maybe, it was seen as selling the same product twice at a greatly increased cost. The hardware was very expensive and you were being induced to buy the same LP again only with 4 channels. The Quad LP's that did appear were not cheap either. Many people couldn't see the point!

Another problem with CD4 was commercial, the necessity of double inventorying everything. Eventually RCA decided that as CD4 was compatible with stereo they would standardize on CD4 releases and sell them as stereo if necessary. A CD4 record was noticeably quieter than stereo so they increased the modulation on the CD4 records to make them as loud as the stereo ones. Otherwise people would have had to turn up the volume a bit (shocked gasp). The problem with that was that according to the CD4 standard the difference signals were frequency modulated, 30kHz +/- 15kHz. Below 15kHz was normal audio, above 15kHz difference signal. The difference signals needed to be boosted in line with the stereo-compatible sum signals and that meant increasing the modulation bandwidth. So now the frequency band of the difference signals extended down into the frequency range of the normal audio signals. That reduced the quality of the decoding significantly and certainly didn't help CD4 acceptance. The Japanese stuck to the CD4 standard and supposedly Japanese pressings are much better quality than the RCA ones.

[Ted Kendall]

More to the point, any playing of a CD-4 disc on a pickup not specifically designed for the purpose would damage the quad content or wipe it off altogether, harder vinyl notwithstanding. All the quad systems were half-baked in some degree, and they failed because they didn't offer anything worthwhile for the outlay.

[greg_simons]

As an ex Sony camera engineer perhaps I could throw in 'micro dv' cassettes which were considerably smaller than the standard 'mini dv' cassettes everyone else used, the movieshaker video capture and editing software was horrible and totally incompatible with everything else but the cameras were superbly engineered, I still have quite a selection, souvenirs from work!.
Greg.

[Sergeauckland]

Originally Posted by Ted Kendall

More to the point, any playing of a CD-4 disc on a pickup not specifically designed for the purpose would damage the quad content or wipe it off altogether, harder vinyl notwithstanding. All the quad systems were half-baked in some degree, and they failed because they didn't offer anything worthwhile for the outlay.

Agreed. I think also, and perhaps more important, the three competing and incompatible systems served both to confuse and anger the public, who had to choose which system and that determined which artists they could listen to in Quad. EMI-CBS supported SQ, RCA-Decca supported CD-4 and Pye and a few others supported QS, also called RM for Regular Matrix. This last one was the only one that didn't levy a license on the record companies, but equally wasn't as well developed.

I don't think UD-4 ever came to Europe although active in Asia, and the BBC came late to the party with Matrix-H but by then, Quadraphonics had pretty much gone away. Nimbus continued with Ambisonics for many years, even into the CD era.

S.

[Welsh Anorak]

Of course there was Laserdisc and CED. Incompatible, but neither really caught on other than Laserdisc for interactive purposes in places like the Science Museum.

At the time people wanted to record which has become a thing of the past for both audio and video thanks to streaming.

[G6Tanuki]

Someone mentioned DAT upthread. I remember when it first appeared, thinking about possibly arranging a DAT player in my car, but then realised that it was a niche format and nothing was likely to be released on it by any of the big music providers, so I got one of the six-disc boot mount CD players in my next car.

Does anyone know whether DAT had any major music releases on the format?

Another oddity was the mini-CDs you sometimes came across. Playable on an ordinary CD player but only half sized! Often used for software distribution, I could have seen them as a novel way to release the equivalent of a cassingle or a 45RPM single, but it never caught on.

Equally niche and now dead was the Super Audio CD format, you needed a special player in order to access the SA part, though they usually were hybrids and had the same content in normal-CD format. I gather that some DVD players also support SA-CD but I have never felt the need...

[Ted Kendall]

Depends on what you mean by "dead". SACDs are still being released in the classical market, although players are unavailable new, as far as I know.

Chandos put some stuff out on DAT, but the format was doomed for widespread domestic use by its own complexity, both in manufacture and maintenance.

[Chrispy57]

Any fans of the Zip Drive format who regret its purchase or demise?

[bluepilot]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Someone mentioned DAT upthread.

I think the problem with DAT was that it used a different sampling frequency to CDs. If it had been possible to simply copy a CD it would have probably been more successful but of course making the frequency different was deliberate to prevent copying. When burnable CDs came out it would have been ridiculous to make CDs incompatible with CDs so they had to accept that CDs were going to be copied. Then DAT was no longer necessary as you could use a CD.

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Equally niche and now dead was the Super Audio CD format, you needed a special player in order to access the SA part, though they usually were hybrids and had the same content in normal-CD format. I gather that some DVD players also support SA-CD but I have never felt the need...

I think the problem with SACD was that it is a Sony proprietary format and Sony wouldn't let anyone get hold of the decoder chips, at least unless they paid a lot of money. Sony DVD players can handle SACD and with a bit of hack some of them can even be used to rip them but generally if you don't want Sony, forget SACD.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by bluepilot

I think the problem with DAT was that it used a different sampling frequency to CDs. If it had been possible to simply copy a CD it would have probably been more successful but of course making the frequency different was deliberate to prevent copying. When burnable CDs came out it would have been ridiculous to make CDs incompatible with CDs so they had to accept that CDs were going to be copied. Then DAT was no longer necessary as you could use a CD.

Though I wouldn't have been wanting to go through the hassle to rip CDs to DAT, I would have been wanting to buy new content natively on DAT.

So the ability to record cross-platform to DAT was never a big deal for me. I have always been someone who bought music, listened to it a few times, then moved on to the next band on the block.

As you say, SA-CD seems to have come with the Sony-tax and platform lock-in. Looking at the spec - frequency range up to 50KHz - fine for those who keep Bats - but totally wasted on normal people.

It seems to persist in audiophile and old-music niches but there's nothing there for me.

[emeritus]

Originally Posted by Chrispy57

Any fans of the Zip Drive format who regret its purchase or demise?

When I bought my first PC in 1999, a Zip 100 drive was one of the optional extras that I added. Some of our work PCs had them, and Zip seemed to be the way ahead for transferring large files to and from my home computer. I later found that I could transfer files just as easily using my digital camera, by creating a new folder on its CF card. This did not interfere with the camera's use, other than temporarily reducing its memory. A few years later when my son was studying Music Technology at university, he needed a Zip drive for his course work, so I got him an external USB Zip drive.

I still have my old computer and the external Zip drive, and both do work. However the only use that has been made of them since, was when my wife was teaching IT. The external drive was used as an example of how the technology had developed, along with some 5 and 7 hole paper tape, 80 column cards, 5 1/4", 3 1/2" and 3" floppy discs, USB external drives and SD cards, and an old solid-state memory from around 1970, salvaged from the scrap bin at Plessey, built on an A5-sized printed circuit card using system 74 TTL D-type flip-flops, with a capacity of just 27 Bits.
.

[jamesperrett]

Originally Posted by bluepilot

When burnable CDs came out it would have been ridiculous to make CDs incompatible with CDs so they had to accept that CDs were going to be copied. Then DAT was no longer necessary as you could use a CD.

They tried very hard to make money from people copying from CD to CD by making domestic audio CD writers compatible with only music CD-Rs which were subject to a copyright levy. Of course, anyone seriously into copying CDs could just use a computer CD writer or a professional audio writer which would work with standard blank CDs.

[ParcGwyn]

The alternative to Zip was the Superdisc LS120, I had a couple of used drives in the 1990's that I purchased cheap from a computer fair.

Dave
GW7ONS

[jamesperrett]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Another oddity was the mini-CDs you sometimes came across. Playable on an ordinary CD player but only half sized! Often used for software distribution, I could have seen them as a novel way to release the equivalent of a cassingle or a 45RPM single, but it never caught on.

I have one or two CD singles in that size but I always felt that they were just too small and easily lost. I'm not sure how much cheaper they were to produce either.

I see that you can actually still buy 3" diameter blank CD-Rs if you search for them.

[Dave Moll]

Originally Posted by Chrispy57

Any fans of the Zip Drive format who regret its purchase or demise?

Yes, I found Zip discs useful as a higher-capacity (all of 250MB) removable storage device than floppies ... until memory sticks rather overtook them for this purpose.

[Richard_FM]

The rules on sharing satellite dishes much have changed as the flats where I used to like only had one dish which fed into a distribution system.

[Catkins]

Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak

Of course there was Laserdisc and CED. Incompatible, but neither really caught on other than Laserdisc for interactive purposes in places like the Science Museum..

The BBC Domesday Project used Laserdisc and BBC Master computers to create a modern version of the original Domesday Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project).

Unfortunately, as mentioned by the Observer newspaper, by 2002 due to obsolescence it was unreadable (https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/mar/03/research.elearning).

Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak

At the time people wanted to record which has become a thing of the past for both audio and video thanks to streaming.

Yes, being read-only the (lack of) content available on Laserdisc certainly didn't help the format.

I used Laserdiscs back in 1990-1992 as a source of video for experiments in transmitting video across networks and recording to hard-disk. This was because VHS was too low quality, and produced too much frame tearing when digitised.

Unfortunately I only had two Laserdiscs, Abba's Greatest Hits and brain dissection, and brain dissection wasn't too popular with visitors

[Catkins]

Originally Posted by Chrispy57

Any fans of the Zip Drive format who regret its purchase or demise?

Iomega introduced the 8-Inch Bernoulli Disk in 1982, 13 years before the Zip drive (https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2018/09/05/history-1982-8-inch-bernoulli-disk/).

That article links to the "Museum of Obsolete Media" which I previously didn't know about (http://www.obsoletemedia.org/).

[radioman]

How about the SyQuest SparQ discs ?
These 1Gb drives with removable media were the main reason that this company went bankrupt !
https://obsoletemedia.org/syquest-sparq/
We had them where I worked and they were a bit like a hard disc platter but with exposed heads......
The drive would fail and damage the disc - if that disc was then inserted into another (working) drive it would damage that drive as well....

Andy

[Maarten]

Originally Posted by Chrispy57

Any fans of the Zip Drive format who regret its purchase or demise?

I wanted to standardise on it around the time the 250MB Zip format was introduced because it would make swapping software with friends a bit easier and bought an internal drive for my next computer, but soon learned from experience and reviews by others that the Zip and Jaz formats were quite unreliable. In the end I only used an external Zip drive for a short while for on premise installs at customers (the same way we would now use a USB stick). One or two years earlier I also bought one of the first CD writers and that was the clear winner of the format war for most use cases. When the Jaz drive used by a customer for their backups broke down within warranty, we offered them a year free online backups (not as common as it it now).

So in my eyes, Zip was useful but I was very glad that I only entered the ecosystem when it was already on the decline and more reliable solutions were emerging.