Gotta Love the CD

Almost everyone knows that the CDs play an essential part in our technology lives, whether we are buying and/or downloading music, or something as simple as saving plain text documents. But many people do not know the good old trouble that the beloved CD goes through.

Many individuals are unaware that the first commercial release of the CD took place in 1982 in Germany and became very useful on a global basis. The very first title that was presented was "The Visitor" by the Swedish group ABBA. It seems that after this title was presented, the CD became very popular among popular and rock music markets-even to this day. The difference is now every genre of music is available in the CD format. Ok, everyone knows that!

In my train of thought, I used to think that when individuals said that he/she is burning a CD, my thought was they placed a match underneath the CD and "burn" the information. How silly was that! Since I have been using CDs in recording music and saving my documents, I have always been very curious about the process in which these wonderful wheels endure. Just for curious minds, that data and/or music is stored in a series of little indentation, also known as pits. These tracks, which are spiral-like, are integrated into the top of the polycarbonate layer. The areas that are between pits are referred to as lands. As a result, the information is encoded.

In addition to this encoding, the CD pits are not exactly represented in terms of zeros and ones of binary data. This form of data is interpreted into non-return-to-zero inverted, or NRZI. The NRZI that is encoded is interpreted as the pit to land or from land to pit alternation represents one, whereas there is no alteration, the representation is zero. Therefore, this process becomes rendered by switching the Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation that is used for perfecting the disc, and also switching the Reed-Solomon Coding, which is cross interleaved. This is how our data, whether it is music, movies, and text documents are saved on the disc. I guess that the same method applies to the DVDs. That is my guess.