Re: Statement by Marantz about CD compatibility

On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 02:05:48PM +0000, Steve Tregidgo wrote:
> Will the market crystallise to a state in which I must buy several 
> players, one for each of the audio disc formats available?  Every time I 
> bought a new album I'd have to consider whether it was compatible with 
> my player, and whether I wanted to buy new hardware to go along with it. 

I think this is unlikely. The last paper I saw on the
copy-protected CDs nonsense (I'll dig it out if you want,
I think it was from Felten's group) suggested that
manufacturers were getting better at building devices
which could cope with substandard CDs.

The latest `dark noise' scheme, described in
    http://www.darknoise.co.uk/technology.htm
looks like an attempt to move away from breaking the Red
Book standard, and instead just corrupts the audio on the
disks. CDs using this technique should be compatible will
all players (but will probably sound crap).


(As an aside, I expect that the `dark noise' scheme will
be quite easy to filter out, though I don't know how much
violence that will do to the music. As another aside, I'd
love to know how much the `dark noise' people made out of
this nonsense, and whether inventing new `copy protection'
technologies is as good a racket as it sounds.)

-- 
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