In 1994/95 after I graduated from college, I worked for a little company called Codim in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and they produced CD-i software. We worked with and for Philips a lot and one of the things we did was create the CD's for Philips Background Music (BGM) Services. And as it happens, I was closely involved with BGM in the time that I worked there. It's still one of my most favorite subjects related to CD-i. The way I understand it, someone at Philips BGM would record a bunch of music onto a 4 track reel-to-reel recorder from whatever source they had, in mono. Most (if not all) of the music was owned by Philips' record companies such as Polygram: That way they wouldn't have to pay someone else for the copyright licenses. They would record the tapes in mono, one track at a time. Then they would copy the reel-to-reel tapes to a DAT tape, in stereo: the left and right track would each have separate music. At Codim, we would receive a box (or was it two boxes?) of 10 DAT tapes every month, with usually the most boring music you could think of. There were exceptions: every 3 months or so there would be a production with light pop music but unfortunately those were always 4-hour discs instead of the usual 8 hours. We had a Compaq Deskpro PC with (if I remember correctly) a 486 processor at 33 or 40 MHz (one of the fastest PCs of the late 1980s), that was dedicated to producing BGM CD's. It had an ISA plugin card by Sony that made it possible to record music to a very big (1GB? 2GB?) SCSI hard disk that was in the machine, formatted in ADPCM. My predecessor had written some software under MS-DOS to go through the steps of transferring two DAT tapes (in real time, so that took 4 hours for 2 tapes of 120 minutes each), split up the files between the left and right channels, merge 8 mono files together again into one giant (600MB+) file, and play the files to verify (and if necessary, make corrections to) the timing information that we got on a floppy disk. Most of this could happen unattended but verifying the timing information was tedious. We then used our usual CD-i formatting software by MicroWare to combine the music files, the text file with timing information and the CD-i application (also written by my predecessor) into a disc image. It took about a day to produce a single BGM disc, a week for the entire production run for the month. We would put the image file of each disc on an Exabyte backup tape which we would send off to Germany to press a couple hundred CD's from each of them, according to what Philips BGM had ordered. They kept the production cost low by not printing anything on the CD's and packaging the CD's in envelopes instead of jewel cases. The boxes of CDs and DAT tapes (and the floppy disk with information) went back to Philips BGM who would take care of distributing the discs to their customers and reusing the DAT tapes for the productions of the next month. Sometimes we at Codim would also burn our own disc if there was something that we might want to hear on days when there was nothing on the radio. We had plenty of CD-i players of course but we also had one of those BMS3000 players like you have. They were made by the parent company of Plextor, if I remember correctly. By the way that BGM player is not a stripped CD-i player like you kind of imply in the video; it's just a CD reader that understands "mode 2 form 2" sectors and decodes ADPCM as well as PCM (audio CD), and has a microcontroller that knows the BGM CD format. That, by the way is in a supplement of the Green Book, not in the Green Book itself. I've been searching for that supplement online in places like the Internet Archives but I haven't found it. It describes where a BGM player can find the files (audio as well as the text file with timing information). The specification says there must be a CD-i application on the disc but the application is ignored by the BGM player. Some discs have a very simply early CD-i application with just a Play and Stop button on the screen; the application that we included in the time that I worked on BGM showed a screen with all the songs and you could choose which one you wanted to play. BGM CD's are very rare, not only because they weren't for sale, only for rent, but also because Philips made them without labels so whenever someone runs into a big stack of them, they would probably not be recognized by many people, and if you put them in an audio CD player or a CD-ROM drive, they won't play because they use the CD-i format, not CD-ROM or Red Book Audio. Nevertheless, I think the HomeComputer Museum in Helmond, the Netherlands, may have some, because they have a big archive of artifacts that came from the Codim company. If you ever get your hands one more of them, I think you can use ISOBuster to rip them. And it shouldn't be too hard to reverse-engineer the format and make your own; you just have to put the various files in the exact right location in the disc image because otherwise the BGM player won't find them. I intended to do that while I was working there but I never got around to it...
This is an amazing comment sir, I’m not able to read it fully and digest at the moment but thank you for taking the time to share that. Looking forward to reading that properly when I have a moment. ~Andy
Fantastic insider info ... using DAT is quite interesting, seeing as that ran at the wrong sample rate (48 instead of 44.1kHz), supposedly to make copying to/from CD harder and lower quality?! But then if you're downsampling to 37.8 anyway it probably doesn't matter. Or would they have recorded onto the DATs at slightly higher than real speed so then all your software would have to do is slurp the raw bits (at 48) and ADPCMify them, with the speed adjustment happening transparently when played back in the machine? 🤔 The 4-hour discs sound interesting, I wonder what the deal with them was ... as you mention "light pop music" I suspect that might be what the bar I worked at in the very early 2000s used. That music couldn't have been on an 8-hour loop unless the manager was an arse and deliberately programmed the machine to loop early. It being in stereo seems unlikely given the use case (I've seen lecture / seminar rooms with 100v's wired in stereo for use with the projector screen, but you wouldn't bother for a wider area PA), so maybe a less severe compression type (A-law/mu-law perhaps, or even straight 8-bit PCM)? Or did they simply only fill the disc halfway?
@@tahrey The DAT tapes were recorded at 44.1 kHz, not 48 kHz. Not that it matters because they were recorded from an analog source and transferred to the PC via analog cables. Nowadays we would do this all differently but in the early 1990s, sound cards for PCs were uncommon, and cards that could record digitally were almost non-existent, so "slurping up the bits" was simply not an option. I'm guessing the only reason to use DAT was so that we at Codim wouldn't need a reel-to-reel tape recorder and we wouldn't need to deal with the reel-to-reel tapes. And we already probably saved oceans of time by using the very expensive ADPCM encoder card that would put the music on the hard disk in the correct format without requiring another step to encode the audio from PCM to ADPCM. As for the shorter BGM discs: The CD-i format depended heavily on "Real-Time Files" because they didn't have a lot of memory for buffering, and the optical drive ran at the exact same speed as an audio CD drive. A real-time-file was a file that contained multiple interleaved streams of data, and the hardware was capable of de-interleaving and processing the data in real-time. That was done for audio as well as video. For BGM CD's, the ADPCM audio was stored in Mode 2 Form 2 sectors that were interleaved 8 to 1. So the disc would spin at normal speed and the hardware would process one sector out of every 8 sectors, and skip the other 7 sectors. ADPCM-B uses (roughly) 1/8th of the total bandwidth of a 1x speed optical drive, so by running the ADPCM decoder in lock-step with the optical drive and processing only 1 out of every 8 sectors, the audio would get played in real-time. By playing the same real-time-file 8 times and selecting a different sector from the interleaved stream, you would get 8 hours of music, because the real-time file was 8 tracks of 1 hour each. The shorter discs just had a shorter real-time file, usually half an hour times 8 tracks. In theory it would have been possible to get almost 8 x 74 minutes on a disc but that would caused practical problems during production (remember DAT tapes were 120 minutes and reel-to-reel tapes also have limitations to their length; not to mention it would have taken a lot more hard disk space and processing time on that computer to process everything). Anyway, the point is: shorter BGM discs would still use ADPCM, because that was the only format that was allowed by the BGM CD format.
@@robustreviews I was able to read that all in one go, maybe loose a place or two. But the way he talked about the specs, and yet, at that time 2 Gigabytes/2.24 Gigabits was the highest it could reach...And my goodness it took them a day/week to get this processed and done, that's probably why they were so patient making these was to absolutely make sure they were done on time and done perfectly, because one tiny mess up can screw the whole disc and have to be burned from scratch or probably use a different disc altogether....Gosh, I can't imagine how these individuals working on Philips own internal proprietary software would do this back in the 1990s.
@@JacGoudsmit This is fascinating @JacGouldSmit and some technical details I couldn't find. I'd love to include them in a follow up video. Would you be happy to drop me an email to hello@robust.reviews as I'd love to clarify a few bits and ask a few more questions to check my understanding! Thanks so, so much for leaving these messages!
He's probably more interested in the analogue types, but I'm interested to see this one if only because of having direct experience with its horrors in my working life, and messing around with XA format audio extraction from PSX games (and, oddly, some PC ones) back in the day...
Hi did briefly show a picture of one of these, in his latest Philips tape BMS video at the start, I did mention it in a bit that got cut, mostly because… I’ll stick in the next one, you’ll see why! ~Andy
I worked on that system. Mastering, programming, duplicating, the lot. We developed our own Mastering Suite, with Philips help. Ran on MS-DOS. Still got the Hard Drive & a copy of every disc I ever worked on. Customers still had it up till about 2006
Wow, that’s absolutely wild! I’d love to find out more, could you drop me an email at hello@robust.reviews if you get a moment? I’d love to ask some more questions for a follow up video! ~Andy
The Frank Zappa joke was f--ing hilarious! I love your presentation here. Keep the jokes and the video wipes. No complaints, this clip was very entertaining.
Ah cheers @thomosburn8740 - Yeah I'm surprised more people didn't notice that. I do like some of Zappa's stuff so it was only teasing. I wouldn't own it if I didn't like him! Thanks for the positive comment mate ~Andy
Haha, I am a gosh-darn helmet. No it wasn’t intentional, but if it made you chuckle mate more’s the good. Annoyingly I even transcribed the subtitles and didn’t notice that! Thank you for the comment ~Andy
I am going to try and speak more clearly! Initially most of my videos were for a UK audience, I do transcribe the subtitles properly too if you do need a hand to work out what I’m going on about. Can’t wait to see you too @ronny332, thanks for the comment!
Great video, and, WOW, thanks for the plug!!!! I'm usually part of the 50% who celebrates when they turn it off. But not always. I have some hearing loss and terrible tinnitus because someone blew out my eardrum in my left ear, but I can still clearly hear the difference between 16 and 4 bits. But I challenge anyone to notice the difference as background music in a store.
I can definitely hear it in headphones (my first foray into digital music was getting tracks from my early CD singles to fit onto 1.44MB floppies, using mono ADPCM and some rather low sample rates... I can still tell you the exact usable size of a PC floppy, 1423.5KB, as a result), but playing this through my smartTV? If I shut my eyes I wouldn't be able to tell you the points at which they switched back and forth. It's sort of cassette hiss level, which befits it having been developed for voice recording and transmission as a way to double up the capacity of 8-bit PCM phone lines. You likely wouldn't hear tape noise in those environments either, but clearly pick it up with cans on. In fact replaying that bit on laptop, the only real giveaway is the stereo/mono switch. There's maybe a little extra crispiness in the ADPCM version, IDK, may be imagining it. One advantage of keeping a near-CD sample rate is that ADPCM noise is very much biased towards the top of the frequency range, so it's, eh, just about tolerable on a phone, and really rather noticable if you're bitcrushing things at like 14-18kHz sample rate as I did for the floppies, but pushed nearly out of most people's hearing range at 38kHz and certainly into a less sensitive area. The often limited frequency range of PA speakers and the absorbent nature of everything that'll be in the retail / hospitality space should take care of the rest, and if you're really bothered you can turn down the Treble control... The analogue or broadcast alternatives wouldn't often have had more than 15kHz of bandwidth anyway.
Also, I was thinking, when you fix that CD player you could do another A/B comparison, but this time make the full CD sound mono so that a direct comparison can be made. It's amazing how good that 4-bit audio sounded and I got the impression that the differences were subtle. I didn't think it was possible to be this good with just 16 levels and would be interested in the technical details of how they did it.
Absolutely mate, in part 2 I’ll put up a long video of various samples. There’s also a couple of other comparisons that could be make like to mp3 and the 8-bit ADPCM. Thanks ~Andy
I used to fit up to 15 hours of stereo music on CD-R discs for the car back in the early 2000s by encoding them with the LAME MP3 encoder in VBR at -V6. They played back fine on my Alpine head unit and gave a 17kHz bandwidth. Nowhere near CD quality obviously, but still far better than the previous cassette player I had in the car. Each disc was the equivalent of up to ten C90 cassettes, so they were a lot easier to store in the car too.
Oof... I envy the tolerance. I couldn't ever stand worse than V3, unless deliberately lowpassing them. The treble just got too artefacty. Having to upgrade to V2 a lot of the time too (preferring about a 19kHz bandwidth, just a little more than the MDLP and good quality tapes I used beforehand). Sort of bemoaned not being able to have finer control over the VBR levels, a 2.5 would have been perfect (manage that now with the Nero AAC encoder, it supposedly aiming for about 145kbit / v0.45ish seems equivalent overall). CDRs were cheap and stacked easily (and I made enough CDDA ones before I had an MP3 compatible headunit) so getting "only" like 8-10 hours per disc was fine... Real pain that USB based ones now seem to be less reliable. Got everything that I care about on a single stick but the car won't recognise the damn thing most of the time so I just end up bluetoothing the phone (also a bit unreliable but not as much) or plugging a Sansa in using the 3.5mm...
Ha, I had a very old diesel Fiesta (52bhp of mayhem) - sonic excellence would have made no difference to me over the din of agricultural old Ford diesel clattering around!
Interesting subject, but you should really cut down on the "whoosh cuts" and number of asides - especially as you say you're not going to waffle at the beginning.
I agree with that comment! Just cut back a bit on some of the humerous chitchat and one-liners that don't give any information or facts relevant to the topic being discussed, which is why we, the viewers, are watching. A bit less rambling would result in a much better experience, in my opinion. (not that I could research, record, and edit the videos like you can - but it's much easier to be a keyboard critic 🤣😂🤣)
@ It’s fair, I was teasing a few things in this video - but I am new to this and still learning. I’ll take these things on board, I can’t make “dry” videos as they are not my style and the last thing I want is to make videos for the dreaded “everybody” but I’ve taken these fair points on board. Keep an eye out, more coming, maybe a touch less hyperactive in the edits! But I’m leaning, quite happy to take on board reasonable feedback! It’s my first video in this sphere! ~Andy
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I was going to say this, but I'm a bit indefinite about it, because I was in the mood for a silly video which doesn't take itself seriously :) But yeah, maybe reduce it a little bit. :)
Fun little thing! I suspected at the top it was going to be compressed audio, but I was expecting Musicam aka MP2, not ADPCM! Looking forward to upcoming videos about Video 2000 et al. I've seen that one described as third place in a two-horse war. Interesting format, though!
Yep, it’s quite a neat little thing though - I don’t think it’s quite as offensive to listened to as I imagined but it has its limitations! Thanks for getting involved and can’t wait to show you some video gear! ~Andy
Yeah, I was wondering whether it was going to be ADPCM or maybe 8-bit with halved sample rate. XA was in the back of my mind but the reveal was still an "oh, really?". 1988/89 seems rather early for CD-i stuff. Maybe they were still developing it at the time and Greenbook was the first thing to be cemented and put into use? (Hence someone else's mention that the actual interactive video elements are a supplement to the main document?)
CD-i was developed at the same time as MPEG; that's why the Full Motion Video feature was supplied by a cartridge: It wasn't ready yet when Sony and Philips finalized the Green Book standard. The FMV cartridge could decode MPEG video and MP1 (not MP2 if I recall correctly). Philips developed the Digital Compact Cassette around the same time. DCC was released in 1992 using PASC compression, which was essentially the same as MPEG 1 layer 1 (also known as MP1). ADPCM can be regarded as the predecessor of MP1 and MP2, and MP1 and PASC are a simplified version of MP2.
Instant sub. Good info, great humour, and top notch production quality :) Also they were still using these things into the 2000s (a couple years before you were at Woolies from the sound of it), bar I worked at had one, and ONLY ONE DISC. ...In fact I'm not convinced it wasn't a knockoff that only ran for four hours (or maybe only 2x the length of a normal CD by using each channel separately?) because it definitely played each song more than once a shift... I still can't listen to "Warning" or the other songs that were on it without feeling irrationally annoyed. I guess Sony and Philips must have still been bessie mates when the Playstation came along then seeing as they were more than happy to put a XA format decoder into the console. BTW I think the reason for the funky sample rate is that it gets 2x the play time of regular CD when encoded as 12-bit PCM stereo or something? So it's simpler to decode but can still save space on the disc whilst sounding basically identical though typical crappy TV speakers (likewise, ADPCM does have some noticeable noise in quieter sections, but it's no worse than cassette and won't ever be noticeable over a shop or bar PA or on an early 90s telly where it'll be drowned out by line noise and 15.6kHz transformer whistle anyway). ...or was it that it's what you get when using CDROM style sectors rather than CDDA ones, so audio can be played back from a PSX format data disc running at 1x speed? Erm. I get 38.4kHz when doing that conversion, but maybe I got it wrong (2048 x 44.1/37.8 doesn't work right either, so maybe it doesn't quite use regular CD sector size?)... Used to know how it works. Tried to google and the answers look like they'd need way too much digging for an offhand youtube comment. In any case I think it also got used alongside some primitive not-quite-MPEG VCD-ish video compression for the Playstation's ratty FMV, half the bits going to video and half to audio at 2x speed, or 3:1 if they used mono sound instead (50/50 at 1x... etc), making the maths and demuxing simpler (maybe using actual ADPCM would have put too much overall load on the machine to maintain even the usual 12.5/15fps, without giving a meaningful uplift to bitrate over what was already achieved... there were still the options of halving the sample rate and/or using 8-bit after all and that seems to be the route that pre-MPEG PC game FMV went down)
Sorry mate I’m mobile but great points, can’t give a detailed answer now but the sectors are very much “non-standard”. Will reply properly later once I’m at my desk! ~Andy
You get a like and a sub for the intro alone :) The rest can't be bad after that! _edit_: Great script, brilliant! And your taste is exquisit. More, you cheeky brit, more! The ADPCM version sounded much better than I expected. I thought a 22Khz mono 8 bit signal, a la .mod samples (but long ;), and some "undocumented" magic for it in the player.
Haha I’ll go more in to the nuts and bolts in the next video. There’s some clever trickery in the encoding that’s for sure. Thanks for the positive comment @computer_toucher
Likewise. Though I think the copyright would be an issue. Still, a _tracklist_ would be useful. I recognise / already have some of those tunes but not all the ones demoed. Also I wonder even what the use case for that particular disc was, other than maybe as a demo? Trendy clothing shop? Yuppie bar on the nights when there was no DJ in? BTW I fancy the machine doesn't have a shuffle mode... that would be too kind to the minimum wage employees after all.
Simply put - well done. Fast, Funny and to the point. Keep up the great pacing. Looking for that CDI? Hit the RetroCollective / RMC-The Cave museum at Belvedere Mill in Chalford. (Although i have a feeling you've already visited. Also good place for getting repair hints on your existing BGM unit.) -73
Worn as it should be sir, and thank you for the positive comments mate ~Andy
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ADPCM is a cool little history piece. In the 90s many PC games used it as a dead simple codec to store good quality music, which not needed much CPU power to decode in realtime. You can still find it in some modernish hybrid codecs, eg. WavPack Lossy is using it, of course extending it with all sorts of additional stuff. But yeah, 4bit ADPCM, especially with noise shaping can sound really good.
Great comment mate - I’m covering the noise shaping in Part II, I suspect there may be some over sampling on this machine but until I get the scope on it and unpack it I can’t say. Thanks mate ~Andy
@@thomosburn8740 In 1989? They were still developing MP2 (for use with VideoCDs / CDi) at that point, and even that took a hell of a lot of encoding power vs ADPCM. Nevermind DVD didn't exist, and if you're going to use that, why not just 48kHz PCM on a DVDR (or professionally pressed DVD, as the equivalent to this)? Or higher rate MP2 with a blank video track, which will be far more compatible. If you're going to do it now ... cheap mp3 player, 3.5mm aux or 3.5mm to twin phono cable, plug it into an regular amp or hifi you have around, job done.
Good teaser video. If that was the Thomson Sky+HD box at the end. I still think with the height capacity modified power supply. They were more relatable than the Amstrad boxes that replaced them.
I *think* that was an Amstrad one (it was recycled afterwards, even I’ve got about 5 sky boxes laying around, they seem to multiply and I’ve never even subscribed to Sky) - but a good spot! I’ll say it was “illustrative” 😂 thank you for the comment @djsarahjones ~Andy
My comment will probably get buried, but I don't care so here it is anyway! 😄 I have a 1997 Technics RS-AZ7 cassette deck in my component system purchased as an ex-display refurb from Panasonic UK in 2017. It looks so much like yours, I thought it was the same model at first. I also have a 2002 Philips CDR-778 dual-well audio-CD recorder in my system, but because it needs those "CD-R Digital Audio" or "For Music" discs to record on, it's far more useful as a double CD player. Anyway, I was genuinely surprised to see that your player was made in Japan. I've only known Philips to make things in Holland, Germany or China. My CD recorder was made in Holland. The cassette deck was made in Japan, as is our 1997 MiniDisc deck from Pioneer. Our 2020 Yamaha amplifier and 2007 Denon CD player are made somewhere in Asia - I think are made in Malaysia. I've never seen any of your videos before but, after this one, I'm subscribed! Not strictly because of the topic, but just the way you've presented this video suits my tastes perfectly. So even if part two takes months to arrive, I don't care, I think I will be suitably entertained and informed. Finally, I've always had an interest in VCD ever since I first heard of it in 1995. But nobody on TH-cam has attempted to tell the story behind the format. Everyone just says "It's sub-VHS quality, it was big in Asia for a while" and then they move on.
Hi mate, no reason for it to be buried - I forgot about those CD-R audio systems, I can well imagine it is of limited utility now! Yes it’s Japanese almost entirely, and herein lies another tale which I shall cover in the next one. Thanks for the positive comments! ~Andy
The stuff I love to watch on here would be classed a waste of time by most people.... for me, it's essential daily viewing!! Very happy and proud to have subscribed to you, and look forward to your next "waste of time" - which will be very much appreciated by all of us like minded subscribers! :)
Isn’t that the point of a hobby, to waste time ? LOL I love my time wasting hobbies (model cars, record collecting, stereo upgrades, 25 year old cars, drawing and painting)
Interesting to see the player. I had heard of this but assumed it used a standard CD-I player which you plugged into your existing store PA system. I wonder if a CD-I player could play the disc. Fun fact about Redifusion. A few years ago the company name was up for sale with a legal/publicity agency webpage saying how you could buy one of the most trusted and fondly remembered names in British consumer electronics. Look at how much Argos paid for the Bush and Alba names to see why someone would think that.
Yes CD-I players could play them, they’re not strictly CD-I discs in the very strictest interpretation but a CD-i player will play them - although they physical data layout isn’t quite the same as CD-i. Ha. That’s very interesting. It’s always a shame when great names end up getting attached to “crap”. I think Argos own Wharfdale as a name too. Thanks for the comment mate ~Andy
I have a lot of them, and they are brilliant. I’m making a documentary about the format war which will be out one day. Cheers for the comment mate 🙏 ~Andy
Hi mate, I took a raw disc imagine (bin/cue) then loaded it to a PlayStation 1 audio extraction tool. I can’t recall the name of the tools and I’m not near my PC until later in the week but remind me if I don’t reply with more detail by the weekend!
Well, that's why they never made any actual 4-channel discs. But this isn't really intended for sitting-at-home Hifi listening. You could just get a multidisc changer for that. It's meant as a more robust alternative to the old Muzak tapes or wired music service over phone / cable TV lines...
Yep, it’s very much more in that mould. In time I’m sure a better compression system could have been developed but this is well before CD burners, or even music files as we know them today. Still 8 hours of acceptable audio I think was smart for something designed in the mid 1980s!
You can’t compare the apple of individual 16 bit samples with the orange of a 4 bit adaptive sample. The 16 bit are there to encode any level, hence why it needs a large value. With adaptive you just need the difference with the previous sample, and as every normal sound is a kind of wave, you don’t need a huge amount of bits to find a fitting value that maintains quality well enough.
Hmm i wonder why they dud 't just stick aac files on a cd and have dine with it, as it was going to be used in a dedicated player anyway an extra chip on the mp fir the decider wouldn'tbe that much hassele amd then the would probably get 8-10 h on on disc without the . Or dies thus devuce pre date aac and the like
It does predate AAC - my guess is that they just used the XA-ADPCM decoder chip they had already designed for CD-i and ran with that because they already had the silicon and this was a low-volume product.
In 1994/95 after I graduated from college, I worked for a little company called Codim in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and they produced CD-i software. We worked with and for Philips a lot and one of the things we did was create the CD's for Philips Background Music (BGM) Services. And as it happens, I was closely involved with BGM in the time that I worked there. It's still one of my most favorite subjects related to CD-i.
The way I understand it, someone at Philips BGM would record a bunch of music onto a 4 track reel-to-reel recorder from whatever source they had, in mono. Most (if not all) of the music was owned by Philips' record companies such as Polygram: That way they wouldn't have to pay someone else for the copyright licenses. They would record the tapes in mono, one track at a time. Then they would copy the reel-to-reel tapes to a DAT tape, in stereo: the left and right track would each have separate music.
At Codim, we would receive a box (or was it two boxes?) of 10 DAT tapes every month, with usually the most boring music you could think of. There were exceptions: every 3 months or so there would be a production with light pop music but unfortunately those were always 4-hour discs instead of the usual 8 hours.
We had a Compaq Deskpro PC with (if I remember correctly) a 486 processor at 33 or 40 MHz (one of the fastest PCs of the late 1980s), that was dedicated to producing BGM CD's. It had an ISA plugin card by Sony that made it possible to record music to a very big (1GB? 2GB?) SCSI hard disk that was in the machine, formatted in ADPCM. My predecessor had written some software under MS-DOS to go through the steps of transferring two DAT tapes (in real time, so that took 4 hours for 2 tapes of 120 minutes each), split up the files between the left and right channels, merge 8 mono files together again into one giant (600MB+) file, and play the files to verify (and if necessary, make corrections to) the timing information that we got on a floppy disk. Most of this could happen unattended but verifying the timing information was tedious.
We then used our usual CD-i formatting software by MicroWare to combine the music files, the text file with timing information and the CD-i application (also written by my predecessor) into a disc image. It took about a day to produce a single BGM disc, a week for the entire production run for the month. We would put the image file of each disc on an Exabyte backup tape which we would send off to Germany to press a couple hundred CD's from each of them, according to what Philips BGM had ordered. They kept the production cost low by not printing anything on the CD's and packaging the CD's in envelopes instead of jewel cases.
The boxes of CDs and DAT tapes (and the floppy disk with information) went back to Philips BGM who would take care of distributing the discs to their customers and reusing the DAT tapes for the productions of the next month. Sometimes we at Codim would also burn our own disc if there was something that we might want to hear on days when there was nothing on the radio. We had plenty of CD-i players of course but we also had one of those BMS3000 players like you have. They were made by the parent company of Plextor, if I remember correctly.
By the way that BGM player is not a stripped CD-i player like you kind of imply in the video; it's just a CD reader that understands "mode 2 form 2" sectors and decodes ADPCM as well as PCM (audio CD), and has a microcontroller that knows the BGM CD format. That, by the way is in a supplement of the Green Book, not in the Green Book itself. I've been searching for that supplement online in places like the Internet Archives but I haven't found it. It describes where a BGM player can find the files (audio as well as the text file with timing information). The specification says there must be a CD-i application on the disc but the application is ignored by the BGM player. Some discs have a very simply early CD-i application with just a Play and Stop button on the screen; the application that we included in the time that I worked on BGM showed a screen with all the songs and you could choose which one you wanted to play.
BGM CD's are very rare, not only because they weren't for sale, only for rent, but also because Philips made them without labels so whenever someone runs into a big stack of them, they would probably not be recognized by many people, and if you put them in an audio CD player or a CD-ROM drive, they won't play because they use the CD-i format, not CD-ROM or Red Book Audio. Nevertheless, I think the HomeComputer Museum in Helmond, the Netherlands, may have some, because they have a big archive of artifacts that came from the Codim company. If you ever get your hands one more of them, I think you can use ISOBuster to rip them. And it shouldn't be too hard to reverse-engineer the format and make your own; you just have to put the various files in the exact right location in the disc image because otherwise the BGM player won't find them. I intended to do that while I was working there but I never got around to it...
This is an amazing comment sir, I’m not able to read it fully and digest at the moment but thank you for taking the time to share that. Looking forward to reading that properly when I have a moment. ~Andy
Fantastic insider info ... using DAT is quite interesting, seeing as that ran at the wrong sample rate (48 instead of 44.1kHz), supposedly to make copying to/from CD harder and lower quality?! But then if you're downsampling to 37.8 anyway it probably doesn't matter. Or would they have recorded onto the DATs at slightly higher than real speed so then all your software would have to do is slurp the raw bits (at 48) and ADPCMify them, with the speed adjustment happening transparently when played back in the machine? 🤔
The 4-hour discs sound interesting, I wonder what the deal with them was ... as you mention "light pop music" I suspect that might be what the bar I worked at in the very early 2000s used. That music couldn't have been on an 8-hour loop unless the manager was an arse and deliberately programmed the machine to loop early. It being in stereo seems unlikely given the use case (I've seen lecture / seminar rooms with 100v's wired in stereo for use with the projector screen, but you wouldn't bother for a wider area PA), so maybe a less severe compression type (A-law/mu-law perhaps, or even straight 8-bit PCM)? Or did they simply only fill the disc halfway?
@@tahrey The DAT tapes were recorded at 44.1 kHz, not 48 kHz. Not that it matters because they were recorded from an analog source and transferred to the PC via analog cables. Nowadays we would do this all differently but in the early 1990s, sound cards for PCs were uncommon, and cards that could record digitally were almost non-existent, so "slurping up the bits" was simply not an option. I'm guessing the only reason to use DAT was so that we at Codim wouldn't need a reel-to-reel tape recorder and we wouldn't need to deal with the reel-to-reel tapes. And we already probably saved oceans of time by using the very expensive ADPCM encoder card that would put the music on the hard disk in the correct format without requiring another step to encode the audio from PCM to ADPCM.
As for the shorter BGM discs: The CD-i format depended heavily on "Real-Time Files" because they didn't have a lot of memory for buffering, and the optical drive ran at the exact same speed as an audio CD drive. A real-time-file was a file that contained multiple interleaved streams of data, and the hardware was capable of de-interleaving and processing the data in real-time. That was done for audio as well as video. For BGM CD's, the ADPCM audio was stored in Mode 2 Form 2 sectors that were interleaved 8 to 1. So the disc would spin at normal speed and the hardware would process one sector out of every 8 sectors, and skip the other 7 sectors. ADPCM-B uses (roughly) 1/8th of the total bandwidth of a 1x speed optical drive, so by running the ADPCM decoder in lock-step with the optical drive and processing only 1 out of every 8 sectors, the audio would get played in real-time. By playing the same real-time-file 8 times and selecting a different sector from the interleaved stream, you would get 8 hours of music, because the real-time file was 8 tracks of 1 hour each. The shorter discs just had a shorter real-time file, usually half an hour times 8 tracks. In theory it would have been possible to get almost 8 x 74 minutes on a disc but that would caused practical problems during production (remember DAT tapes were 120 minutes and reel-to-reel tapes also have limitations to their length; not to mention it would have taken a lot more hard disk space and processing time on that computer to process everything). Anyway, the point is: shorter BGM discs would still use ADPCM, because that was the only format that was allowed by the BGM CD format.
@@robustreviews I was able to read that all in one go, maybe loose a place or two. But the way he talked about the specs, and yet, at that time 2 Gigabytes/2.24 Gigabits was the highest it could reach...And my goodness it took them a day/week to get this processed and done, that's probably why they were so patient making these was to absolutely make sure they were done on time and done perfectly, because one tiny mess up can screw the whole disc and have to be burned from scratch or probably use a different disc altogether....Gosh, I can't imagine how these individuals working on Philips own internal proprietary software would do this back in the 1990s.
@@JacGoudsmit This is fascinating @JacGouldSmit and some technical details I couldn't find. I'd love to include them in a follow up video. Would you be happy to drop me an email to hello@robust.reviews as I'd love to clarify a few bits and ask a few more questions to check my understanding!
Thanks so, so much for leaving these messages!
A background music format that Techmoan has missed? Great find!
He's probably more interested in the analogue types, but I'm interested to see this one if only because of having direct experience with its horrors in my working life, and messing around with XA format audio extraction from PSX games (and, oddly, some PC ones) back in the day...
Exactly what I was thinking 😁
Hi did briefly show a picture of one of these, in his latest Philips tape BMS video at the start, I did mention it in a bit that got cut, mostly because… I’ll stick in the next one, you’ll see why! ~Andy
Mat at Techmoan is aware of this format but I think he just hasn't found a player and/or discs.
Not any longer, i emailed him this vid
I worked on that system. Mastering, programming, duplicating, the lot. We developed our own Mastering Suite, with Philips help. Ran on MS-DOS. Still got the Hard Drive & a copy of every disc I ever worked on. Customers still had it up till about 2006
Wow, that’s absolutely wild! I’d love to find out more, could you drop me an email at hello@robust.reviews if you get a moment? I’d love to ask some more questions for a follow up video! ~Andy
6:40 The comparison made my day. Subscribed!
Glad it made your day! Thought it worth licensing and using something decent! Thanks for the sub @xmctmariabille511 ~Andy
I've just discovered your channel and omg I love your humour! Subbed.😃 Looking forward to the follow-up video.
Welcome aboard @JonSoe-zi3mh ! Thank you for the positive comment! ~Andy
Anyone with a TV-am mug is okay by me :) I'm glad to have found the channel.
Ha! I’m surprised nobody has mentioned that before! Thanks @betamax80 ~Andy
Glad your video came across my feed. Hilarious! Hope your channel grows exponentially.
That’s really kind of you to say! Glad you enjoyed it! Lots more nonsense coming! ~Andy
Imagine working in Woolies listening to 90s house!!! Lol. BTW... ANOTHER GREAT AND ENTERTAINING VIDEO. Thank you.
Cheers sir!
😊 thanks for sharing the nerdy fun electronics!
I have so many cool things to share mate. Thanks for the positive comment -Andy
The Frank Zappa joke was f--ing hilarious!
I love your presentation here. Keep the jokes and the video wipes. No complaints, this clip was very entertaining.
Ah cheers @thomosburn8740 - Yeah I'm surprised more people didn't notice that. I do like some of Zappa's stuff so it was only teasing. I wouldn't own it if I didn't like him! Thanks for the positive comment mate ~Andy
Glad i found your channel, funny stuff.
12:27 “in all good consciousnesses” made me laugh out loud, until I wondered whether it might not have been intentional?
Haha, I am a gosh-darn helmet. No it wasn’t intentional, but if it made you chuckle mate more’s the good. Annoyingly I even transcribed the subtitles and didn’t notice that! Thank you for the comment ~Andy
I'd follow for the turns of phrases alone!
You should hear some of the nonsense I edit out! Thanks for the comment @transagenda ~Andy
I'm keeping "two cheeks of the same arse" for certain
Great topic, nice video! 🙂bit hard to understand for my US-English trained German ears. But I Got It!!! 🙂See you next time!
I am going to try and speak more clearly! Initially most of my videos were for a UK audience, I do transcribe the subtitles properly too if you do need a hand to work out what I’m going on about. Can’t wait to see you too @ronny332, thanks for the comment!
@@robustreviews nah, no need to change anything 🙂it's practice for my brain and ears.
"be as you are, don't try to be somebody else"
Great video, and, WOW, thanks for the plug!!!! I'm usually part of the 50% who celebrates when they turn it off. But not always. I have some hearing loss and terrible tinnitus because someone blew out my eardrum in my left ear, but I can still clearly hear the difference between 16 and 4 bits. But I challenge anyone to notice the difference as background music in a store.
Mate you are most welcome, you showed me tremendous support when I started, always willing to help sir 🙏 ~Andy
I can definitely hear it in headphones (my first foray into digital music was getting tracks from my early CD singles to fit onto 1.44MB floppies, using mono ADPCM and some rather low sample rates... I can still tell you the exact usable size of a PC floppy, 1423.5KB, as a result), but playing this through my smartTV? If I shut my eyes I wouldn't be able to tell you the points at which they switched back and forth. It's sort of cassette hiss level, which befits it having been developed for voice recording and transmission as a way to double up the capacity of 8-bit PCM phone lines. You likely wouldn't hear tape noise in those environments either, but clearly pick it up with cans on.
In fact replaying that bit on laptop, the only real giveaway is the stereo/mono switch. There's maybe a little extra crispiness in the ADPCM version, IDK, may be imagining it. One advantage of keeping a near-CD sample rate is that ADPCM noise is very much biased towards the top of the frequency range, so it's, eh, just about tolerable on a phone, and really rather noticable if you're bitcrushing things at like 14-18kHz sample rate as I did for the floppies, but pushed nearly out of most people's hearing range at 38kHz and certainly into a less sensitive area. The often limited frequency range of PA speakers and the absorbent nature of everything that'll be in the retail / hospitality space should take care of the rest, and if you're really bothered you can turn down the Treble control... The analogue or broadcast alternatives wouldn't often have had more than 15kHz of bandwidth anyway.
Also, I was thinking, when you fix that CD player you could do another A/B comparison, but this time make the full CD sound mono so that a direct comparison can be made. It's amazing how good that 4-bit audio sounded and I got the impression that the differences were subtle. I didn't think it was possible to be this good with just 16 levels and would be interested in the technical details of how they did it.
Absolutely mate, in part 2 I’ll put up a long video of various samples. There’s also a couple of other comparisons that could be make like to mp3 and the 8-bit ADPCM. Thanks ~Andy
I used to fit up to 15 hours of stereo music on CD-R discs for the car back in the early 2000s by encoding them with the LAME MP3 encoder in VBR at -V6. They played back fine on my Alpine head unit and gave a 17kHz bandwidth. Nowhere near CD quality obviously, but still far better than the previous cassette player I had in the car. Each disc was the equivalent of up to ten C90 cassettes, so they were a lot easier to store in the car too.
Oof... I envy the tolerance. I couldn't ever stand worse than V3, unless deliberately lowpassing them. The treble just got too artefacty. Having to upgrade to V2 a lot of the time too (preferring about a 19kHz bandwidth, just a little more than the MDLP and good quality tapes I used beforehand). Sort of bemoaned not being able to have finer control over the VBR levels, a 2.5 would have been perfect (manage that now with the Nero AAC encoder, it supposedly aiming for about 145kbit / v0.45ish seems equivalent overall). CDRs were cheap and stacked easily (and I made enough CDDA ones before I had an MP3 compatible headunit) so getting "only" like 8-10 hours per disc was fine...
Real pain that USB based ones now seem to be less reliable. Got everything that I care about on a single stick but the car won't recognise the damn thing most of the time so I just end up bluetoothing the phone (also a bit unreliable but not as much) or plugging a Sansa in using the 3.5mm...
Ha, I had a very old diesel Fiesta (52bhp of mayhem) - sonic excellence would have made no difference to me over the din of agricultural old Ford diesel clattering around!
@@robustreviews haha, makes sense then :D
Though the non-Zetec petrols were about as loud...
@ Yep with the clattery old OHV engines, had many of those too! 😂
Interesting subject, but you should really cut down on the "whoosh cuts" and number of asides - especially as you say you're not going to waffle at the beginning.
Fair. I’m finding my style, remember I’m still a novice at this stuff but noted. Sorry you didn’t enjoy it. ~Andy
I agree with that comment! Just cut back a bit on some of the humerous chitchat and one-liners that don't give any information or facts relevant to the topic being discussed, which is why we, the viewers, are watching.
A bit less rambling would result in a much better experience, in my opinion.
(not that I could research, record, and edit the videos like you can - but it's much easier to be a keyboard critic 🤣😂🤣)
@ It’s fair, I was teasing a few things in this video - but I am new to this and still learning. I’ll take these things on board, I can’t make “dry” videos as they are not my style and the last thing I want is to make videos for the dreaded “everybody” but I’ve taken these fair points on board.
Keep an eye out, more coming, maybe a touch less hyperactive in the edits!
But I’m leaning, quite happy to take on board reasonable feedback! It’s my first video in this sphere! ~Andy
I was going to say this, but I'm a bit indefinite about it, because I was in the mood for a silly video which doesn't take itself seriously :) But yeah, maybe reduce it a little bit. :)
Fair enough, it’s an early video mate. It can only improve eh? ~Andy
Fun little thing! I suspected at the top it was going to be compressed audio, but I was expecting Musicam aka MP2, not ADPCM!
Looking forward to upcoming videos about Video 2000 et al. I've seen that one described as third place in a two-horse war. Interesting format, though!
Yep, it’s quite a neat little thing though - I don’t think it’s quite as offensive to listened to as I imagined but it has its limitations! Thanks for getting involved and can’t wait to show you some video gear! ~Andy
Yeah, I was wondering whether it was going to be ADPCM or maybe 8-bit with halved sample rate. XA was in the back of my mind but the reveal was still an "oh, really?". 1988/89 seems rather early for CD-i stuff. Maybe they were still developing it at the time and Greenbook was the first thing to be cemented and put into use? (Hence someone else's mention that the actual interactive video elements are a supplement to the main document?)
CD-i was developed at the same time as MPEG; that's why the Full Motion Video feature was supplied by a cartridge: It wasn't ready yet when Sony and Philips finalized the Green Book standard. The FMV cartridge could decode MPEG video and MP1 (not MP2 if I recall correctly).
Philips developed the Digital Compact Cassette around the same time. DCC was released in 1992 using PASC compression, which was essentially the same as MPEG 1 layer 1 (also known as MP1). ADPCM can be regarded as the predecessor of MP1 and MP2, and MP1 and PASC are a simplified version of MP2.
@@JacGoudsmit Nice infodump, 10/10 :)
Instant sub. Good info, great humour, and top notch production quality :)
Also they were still using these things into the 2000s (a couple years before you were at Woolies from the sound of it), bar I worked at had one, and ONLY ONE DISC.
...In fact I'm not convinced it wasn't a knockoff that only ran for four hours (or maybe only 2x the length of a normal CD by using each channel separately?) because it definitely played each song more than once a shift... I still can't listen to "Warning" or the other songs that were on it without feeling irrationally annoyed.
I guess Sony and Philips must have still been bessie mates when the Playstation came along then seeing as they were more than happy to put a XA format decoder into the console. BTW I think the reason for the funky sample rate is that it gets 2x the play time of regular CD when encoded as 12-bit PCM stereo or something? So it's simpler to decode but can still save space on the disc whilst sounding basically identical though typical crappy TV speakers (likewise, ADPCM does have some noticeable noise in quieter sections, but it's no worse than cassette and won't ever be noticeable over a shop or bar PA or on an early 90s telly where it'll be drowned out by line noise and 15.6kHz transformer whistle anyway).
...or was it that it's what you get when using CDROM style sectors rather than CDDA ones, so audio can be played back from a PSX format data disc running at 1x speed? Erm. I get 38.4kHz when doing that conversion, but maybe I got it wrong (2048 x 44.1/37.8 doesn't work right either, so maybe it doesn't quite use regular CD sector size?)... Used to know how it works. Tried to google and the answers look like they'd need way too much digging for an offhand youtube comment.
In any case I think it also got used alongside some primitive not-quite-MPEG VCD-ish video compression for the Playstation's ratty FMV, half the bits going to video and half to audio at 2x speed, or 3:1 if they used mono sound instead (50/50 at 1x... etc), making the maths and demuxing simpler (maybe using actual ADPCM would have put too much overall load on the machine to maintain even the usual 12.5/15fps, without giving a meaningful uplift to bitrate over what was already achieved... there were still the options of halving the sample rate and/or using 8-bit after all and that seems to be the route that pre-MPEG PC game FMV went down)
Sorry mate I’m mobile but great points, can’t give a detailed answer now but the sectors are very much “non-standard”. Will reply properly later once I’m at my desk! ~Andy
You get a like and a sub for the intro alone :) The rest can't be bad after that! _edit_: Great script, brilliant! And your taste is exquisit. More, you cheeky brit, more! The ADPCM version sounded much better than I expected. I thought a 22Khz mono 8 bit signal, a la .mod samples (but long ;), and some "undocumented" magic for it in the player.
Haha I’ll go more in to the nuts and bolts in the next video. There’s some clever trickery in the encoding that’s for sure. Thanks for the positive comment @computer_toucher
Would it be possible to get a .bin/.cue image of this disc? 8 hours of vintage house sounds absolutely like my jam.
I did create one as first pass with the new disc so I’ll put it up in (the usual place) when I get a moment and report back @elphive42 ~Andy
Likewise. Though I think the copyright would be an issue. Still, a _tracklist_ would be useful. I recognise / already have some of those tunes but not all the ones demoed.
Also I wonder even what the use case for that particular disc was, other than maybe as a demo? Trendy clothing shop? Yuppie bar on the nights when there was no DJ in?
BTW I fancy the machine doesn't have a shuffle mode... that would be too kind to the minimum wage employees after all.
Simply put - well done. Fast, Funny and to the point. Keep up the great pacing.
Looking for that CDI? Hit the RetroCollective / RMC-The Cave museum at Belvedere Mill in Chalford. (Although i have a feeling you've already visited. Also good place for getting repair hints on your existing BGM unit.)
-73
I need to get over there mate, not been but sounds right up my street!
Thanks for the kind words mate,
-73
Great to see a TH-camr wearing a poppy 👏 good video too.
Hermes , uugh the worst delivery company.
And the fu and furb song nod made my day!
Worn as it should be sir, and thank you for the positive comments mate ~Andy
ADPCM is a cool little history piece. In the 90s many PC games used it as a dead simple codec to store good quality music, which not needed much CPU power to decode in realtime. You can still find it in some modernish hybrid codecs, eg. WavPack Lossy is using it, of course extending it with all sorts of additional stuff. But yeah, 4bit ADPCM, especially with noise shaping can sound really good.
Great comment mate - I’m covering the noise shaping in Part II, I suspect there may be some over sampling on this machine but until I get the scope on it and unpack it I can’t say. Thanks mate ~Andy
It sounds about the same as background music at most of the places i have been too
Neat find, now you can turn your house into a department store
That’s an idea to be fair!! Cheers @MDPToaster ~Andy
Question is, how easy or not is it to make new compatible discs? And is it worth the effort vs just plugging an MP3 into the mic jack?
DVD player, mono 160kbps MP3 rips on a CD-R, there’s your high quality 7 hour disc!
@@thomosburn8740 In 1989? They were still developing MP2 (for use with VideoCDs / CDi) at that point, and even that took a hell of a lot of encoding power vs ADPCM. Nevermind DVD didn't exist, and if you're going to use that, why not just 48kHz PCM on a DVDR (or professionally pressed DVD, as the equivalent to this)? Or higher rate MP2 with a blank video track, which will be far more compatible.
If you're going to do it now ... cheap mp3 player, 3.5mm aux or 3.5mm to twin phono cable, plug it into an regular amp or hifi you have around, job done.
Mit dem MP 3 Format hatten wir eine 12 Stunden CD in akzeptaber Qualität gehabt.
Good teaser video.
If that was the Thomson Sky+HD box at the end. I still think with the height capacity modified power supply. They were more relatable than the Amstrad boxes that replaced them.
I *think* that was an Amstrad one (it was recycled afterwards, even I’ve got about 5 sky boxes laying around, they seem to multiply and I’ve never even subscribed to Sky) - but a good spot! I’ll say it was “illustrative” 😂 thank you for the comment @djsarahjones ~Andy
My comment will probably get buried, but I don't care so here it is anyway! 😄 I have a 1997 Technics RS-AZ7 cassette deck in my component system purchased as an ex-display refurb from Panasonic UK in 2017. It looks so much like yours, I thought it was the same model at first. I also have a 2002 Philips CDR-778 dual-well audio-CD recorder in my system, but because it needs those "CD-R Digital Audio" or "For Music" discs to record on, it's far more useful as a double CD player.
Anyway, I was genuinely surprised to see that your player was made in Japan. I've only known Philips to make things in Holland, Germany or China. My CD recorder was made in Holland. The cassette deck was made in Japan, as is our 1997 MiniDisc deck from Pioneer. Our 2020 Yamaha amplifier and 2007 Denon CD player are made somewhere in Asia - I think are made in Malaysia.
I've never seen any of your videos before but, after this one, I'm subscribed! Not strictly because of the topic, but just the way you've presented this video suits my tastes perfectly. So even if part two takes months to arrive, I don't care, I think I will be suitably entertained and informed. Finally, I've always had an interest in VCD ever since I first heard of it in 1995. But nobody on TH-cam has attempted to tell the story behind the format. Everyone just says "It's sub-VHS quality, it was big in Asia for a while" and then they move on.
Hi mate, no reason for it to be buried - I forgot about those CD-R audio systems, I can well imagine it is of limited utility now!
Yes it’s Japanese almost entirely, and herein lies another tale which I shall cover in the next one. Thanks for the positive comments! ~Andy
Brilliant Andy 👍
Thanks @waynesharp1690 - great message to wake up to! ~Andy
In the day I had a CD207 top loader, total science fiction for me at the time 😅
Cool-as sir, cool-as! ~Andy
The stuff I love to watch on here would be classed a waste of time by most people.... for me, it's essential daily viewing!! Very happy and proud to have subscribed to you, and look forward to your next "waste of time" - which will be very much appreciated by all of us like minded subscribers! :)
Isn’t that the point of a hobby, to waste time ? LOL I love my time wasting hobbies (model cars, record collecting, stereo upgrades, 25 year old cars, drawing and painting)
Interesting to see the player. I had heard of this but assumed it used a standard CD-I player which you plugged into your existing store PA system. I wonder if a CD-I player could play the disc.
Fun fact about Redifusion. A few years ago the company name was up for sale with a legal/publicity agency webpage saying how you could buy one of the most trusted and fondly remembered names in British consumer electronics. Look at how much Argos paid for the Bush and Alba names to see why someone would think that.
Yes CD-I players could play them, they’re not strictly CD-I discs in the very strictest interpretation but a CD-i player will play them - although they physical data layout isn’t quite the same as CD-i.
Ha. That’s very interesting. It’s always a shame when great names end up getting attached to “crap”. I think Argos own Wharfdale as a name too.
Thanks for the comment mate ~Andy
Philips is my second favorite brand.
V2000 my favourite video recorder.
I have a lot of them, and they are brilliant. I’m making a documentary about the format war which will be out one day. Cheers for the comment mate 🙏 ~Andy
What is the trick to pulling the data from these discs? None of my computers recognize them!
Hi mate, I took a raw disc imagine (bin/cue) then loaded it to a PlayStation 1 audio extraction tool. I can’t recall the name of the tools and I’m not near my PC until later in the week but remind me if I don’t reply with more detail by the weekend!
I loved woolies 😎🤟
An 8 hour CD sure sounds great on paper but in reality there's a significant difference in sound quality between 4 bits and 16 bits.
Well, that's why they never made any actual 4-channel discs. But this isn't really intended for sitting-at-home Hifi listening. You could just get a multidisc changer for that. It's meant as a more robust alternative to the old Muzak tapes or wired music service over phone / cable TV lines...
Yep, it’s very much more in that mould. In time I’m sure a better compression system could have been developed but this is well before CD burners, or even music files as we know them today.
Still 8 hours of acceptable audio I think was smart for something designed in the mid 1980s!
@@tahrey Yup, or the old Seeburg vinyl records that Techmoan covered ages ago. (Though those had already died out sometime in the '80s.)
You can’t compare the apple of individual 16 bit samples with the orange of a 4 bit adaptive sample. The 16 bit are there to encode any level, hence why it needs a large value. With adaptive you just need the difference with the previous sample, and as every normal sound is a kind of wave, you don’t need a huge amount of bits to find a fitting value that maintains quality well enough.
if they waited until the later 90s or early 2000s they could have had more advanced compression techniques but this is quite old
Hmm i wonder why they dud 't just stick aac files on a cd and have dine with it, as it was going to be used in a dedicated player anyway an extra chip on the mp fir the decider wouldn'tbe that much hassele amd then the would probably get 8-10 h on on disc without the . Or dies thus devuce pre date aac and the like
I'm guessing it was a long while ago if they had to use ADPCM rather than one of those MPEG codecs, let alone AAC.
flac wasnt made til like 2001. this shit predates mp3
AAC was only "released" in 1997.
It does predate AAC - my guess is that they just used the XA-ADPCM decoder chip they had already designed for CD-i and ran with that because they already had the silicon and this was a low-volume product.
This is a CDi, which dates from 1990, a good few years before AAC was invented.
ADPCM? Or MP2?
Ha, it’s ADPCM as you probably realised - good knowledge to ask that question though ~Andy
Philips also used ADPCM in there computer hardware for MSX (music module)
@@emesde Ah that's cool, I didn't know that! Every day is a school day! ~Andy
Subbed at 1.07k subs.
Welcome to the cool kid’s party! Cheers for the sub ~Andy
Got a sub from me
Watched this for the comedy bits and wasn't disappointed
You are an interest, but please leave the ''Comedy'' to the likes of Stephen Fry.
You won’t like my other videos then!, Sorry buddy. I’m sure there are other channels out there more to your taste? ~Andy
Very interesting topic but please work on your editing skills :)
Sorry you didn’t enjoy it ~Andy
@robustreviews do not get me wrong - I enjoyed it :) - but for my personal taste just too much cuts.
Moist
Queen Madonna in 1985
Good call mate. Must admit Belinda is The Queen in my opinion, but still, good shout! ~Andy
@@robustreviewsrunaway horses forever
Very irritating presentation, takes 5m to get going.
Cheers @usvale 💋
@@robustreviewsyet he continued to watch🤷♂️
This video was technically an 8 hour edging session