mkb@cmu-ri-rover.ARPA (Mike Blackwell) (03/25/85)
Just some miscellaneous ramblings on some CD's... Somebody asked about Beatles albums on CD. Well, besides "Abbey Road", I just saw a Polydor disc called "Beatles First". I only saw it briefly (at the Tower Records in Berkeley), and didn't get the number (sorry), but it did not look like the Beatles first album. Rather, it appeared to be a large (i.e. more than an LP worth) collection of early Beatles songs. Maybe someone else can tell us more. There are apparently two different versions of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" on CD. One is CBS CK33453, which has a yellow cover, with the picture of two men on a street shaking hands (one burning). The other is Harvest (EMI) CD46035, with a black cover, and the illustration of a robot hand type thing. (Note that the CBS version was pulled from the shelves a few months ago because of a lawsuit between PF and CBS concerning who has rights to the CD). I suspect that the two discs are different, and the CBS disc is not just a rerelease of the Japanese disc, because the track numbering schemes on the two discs are different. On the CBS disc, there are two tracks corresponding to the two sides of the LP, with the individual cuts denoted by indexing, and on the Harvest disc the tracks are numbered "normally". Anyway, I was wondering if anybody has listened to both discs to compare them (I only own the CBS disc, and don't feel like buying the other just for novelty's sake). I would think that it's possible that the two are produced from different masters, and one might be superior to the other... When I was visiting my dad, he showed my a very strange error on a CD that I couldn't totally explain. The disc was Kitaro's "Silk Roads I" (Canyon P3001), and the player a Sony CDP200. When the disc is played, in the middle of track 5, at 2:54 (these numbers might not be right), it suddenly skips on to the start of track 6. This always happens, and if you fast-reverse back from track 6, it goes back to the end of track 5 at 2:54. It looks just like the disc was produced with the last part of track 5 missing. (I hope this is not intentional on the disc, but it doesn't sound like it is!) Unfortunately, because all of the writing on the CD is in Japanese, I don't know how long track 5 ought to really be. My only explanation is that some how the directory track at the start of the CD is corrupted, so the player thinks track 5 is shorter than it really is, and then the player tries to be "smart" while playing (as opposed to just playing the disc sequentially), but this doesn't sound quite right... Anybody have any ideas on what's going on? I didn't get a chance to try the disc on any other player, to see if it behaves differently. cheers, -m- (mkb@cmu-ri-rover.arpa)