Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Tuesday 17 February 2009, 5:45 PM
Country vicar 0 - evil technology 1
The electricity company turned up on Boxing Day and dragged 20-odd deceased chargers, power supplies, radios, TVs and computing gizmos away for resurrection or replacement. Among those that did not return from the valley of electro-death were my parents small collection of portable radio/CD players: new ones were provided.
But – misery! First of all, the dual-tape ghettoblaster was replaced by a single tape unit, nothing else being available. As my father is used to copying tapes of music he's made – he was a choral scholar at St John's, Cambridge, and still sings and composes – this was annoying, but not critical. After all, it's easy to lash up a tape-to-tape system.
Today was worse. He now composes, edits and records his hymns and carols directly on the computer, and burns them straight to CD-R. He makes copies of these for various commercial and non-commercial purposes – and he was due to play one at a talk he was giving. For the first time since the Christmas Explosion he popped a disc into one of the CD players prior to going out, just to check everything was all right.
Not a crotchet. He tried lots of disks on all of the replacement CD players. Nothing worked. He contacted the replacement people.
"Oh, that's right." they said. "There's been too much copying, so new CD players won't play recordable CDs"
I can't find any proof for this online, and I can't find lots of people complaining, so whether this is true, a brush-off or an unfortunate coincidence remains to be seen. I've told my father to send the CD players back with a clutch of his CD-Rs, and not to let them off the hook until they've come up with the goods (and they'll get to hear a lot of my father's singing. Heh.).
Meanwhile, I made the mistake of suggesting that he take his laptop to the talk. It could play the audio, but "very quietly – I can hardly hear it", said my father. If you've ever tried to talk anyone over the phone through the miserable morass that is the user interface to Windows audio, you'll know how badly I failed to solve that problem. In the end, he just sang the stuff.
But for an industry that keeps taking decisions 'to protect content creators', it really has a strange way of showing its love.
PreviousComments on this post
I have come across cheaper generic type CD players that won't play CD-Rs, but then again they won't play the originals either!
Seriously though, It is a selling point of todays CD players that they will play recorable CDs. You can even pick some out in the £15 range that will decode data disks and produce sweet music from the speakers.
Personally, I think it's shocking that people who want to make use of technology but may not know much about it, can be fobbed off by other people who know not much about or really care for said technology.
This is not an anti copying measure. A home burnt CD is different to the factory stamped variety. All to do with how the reflecting layer is marked by the laser in a PC burner compared to the actual pits made by a stamp.
Some cheaper models of domestic CD players have trouble resolving the reflections from a CD-R disc.
As Roger says, there are many players that are able to play CD-R discs with no problem. Probably more that do than don't these days. Since your father has a legitimate need to play home burnt CDs in his domestic player, he should insist that the replacements should have that ability.
A case of them pulling a fast one me thinks.
More likely trying to pull a cheap one than I fast one, I suspect. As you said, the other characteristic of CD players that won't play CD-R media is that they are less expensive. So this is likely a case of a company trying to save a few pounds by giving less expensive replacements. This may well work for the majority of customers who never try to play CD-R media. The real problem is that they are apparently trying to cover up their decision with a lame story, rather than just own up to it and give the customer a slightly better replacement when they get a complaint.
Totally off topic, editor, but I just notices your big ZDNET logo says:-
"Where technology means bjsiness"
I had to check bjsiness wasn't a cool acronym. And it wasn't. Haha.
Which logo is this? All my big logos seem fine! Send us a link (right click, properties) to the errant logo and I'll be happy to fix it...
When in this comment location the link is:-
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/gl/log/zdnetuk-tech-means-business-v2.gif
When at the main www.zdnet.co.uk page it is:-
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/gl/log/zdnetuk-tech-means-business-v2.gif
Its the main top left logo for me (a firefox ubuntu user if thats relevant)
