Формат цифрового аудио на компакт-дисках (CDDA)

Data format used for audio compact discs

Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD DA), also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the Red Book, one of a series of Rainbow Books (named for their binding colors) that contain the technical specifications for all CD formats. CDDA utilises pulse code modulation (PCM) and uses a 44,100 Hz sampling frequency and 16 bit resolution, and stores up to 80 minutes of stereo audio per disc. The first commercially available audio CD player, the Sony CDP 101, was released in October 1982 in Japan. The format gained worldwide acceptance in 1983–84, selling more than a million CD players in those two years, to play 22.5 million discs. In the music industry, audio CDs have been generally sold as either a CD single (now largely dormant), or as full length albums, the latter of which has been more commonplace since the 2000s. Beginning in the 2000s, CDs were increasingly being replaced by other forms of digital storage and distribution, with the result that by 2010 the number of audio CDs being sold in the U. S. had dropped about 50% from their peak; however, they remained one of the primary distribution methods for the music industry. In the 2010s, revenues from digital music services, such as iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube, matched those from physical format sales for the first time. According to the RIAA's midyear report in 2020, phonograph record revenues surpassed those of CDs in the U. S. for the first time since the 1980s, whereas in Japan the CD remains the premier music format and revenues have grown in 2022, and in Germany it outsold other physical formats at least fourfold in 2022.

The optophone, first presented in 1931, was an early device that used light for both recording and playback of sound signals on a transparent photograph. More than thirty years later, American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record digital media on a photosensitive plate. Russell's patent application was filed in 1966, and he was granted a patent in 1970. Following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russell's patents for recording in 1988. It is debatable whether Russell's concepts, patents, and prototypes instigated and in some measure influenced the compact disc's design. The compact disc is an evolution of LaserDisc technology, where a focused laser beam is used that enables the high information density required for high quality digital audio signals. Unlike the prior art by Optophonie and James Russell, the information on the disc is read from a reflective layer using a laser as a light source through a protective substrate. Prototypes were developed by Philips and Sony independently in the late 1970s. Although originally dismissed by Philips Research management as a trivial pursuit, In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the Red Book CD DA standard was published in 1980. After their commercial release in 1982, compact discs and their players were extremely popular. Despite costing up to $1,000, over 400,000 CD players were sold in the United States between 1983 and 1984. By 1988, CD sales in the United States surpassed those of vinyl LPs, and by 1992 CD sales surpassed those of prerecorded music cassette tapes. The success of the compact disc has been credited to the cooperation between Philips and Sony, which together agreed upon and developed compatible hardware. The unified design of the compact disc allowed consumers to purchase any disc or player from any company and allowed the CD to dominate the at home music market unchallenged.

In 1974, Lou Ottens, director of the audio division of Philips, started a small group to develop an analog optical audio disc with a diameter of and a sound quality superior to that of the vinyl record. However, due to the unsatisfactory performance of the analog format, two Philips research engineers recommended a digital format in March 1974. In 1977, Philips then established a laboratory with the mission of creating a digital audio disc. The diameter of Philips's prototype compact disc was set at , the diagonal of an audio cassette. Heitaro Nakajima, who developed an early digital audio recorder within Japan's national public broadcasting organization, NHK, in 1970, became general manager of Sony's audio department in 1971. In 1973, his team developed a digital PCM adaptor that made audio recordings using a Betamax video recorder. After this, in 1974 the leap to storing digital audio on an optical disc was easily made. Sony first publicly demonstrated an optical digital audio disc in September 1976. A year later, in September 1977, Sony showed the press a disc that could play an hour of digital audio (44,100 Hz sampling rate and 16 bit resolution) using modified frequency modulation encoding. In September 1978, the company demonstrated an optical digital audio disc with a 150 minute playing time, 44,056 Hz sampling rate, 16 bit linear resolution, and cross interleaved error correction code—specifications similar to those later settled upon for the standard compact disc format in 1980. Technical details of Sony's digital audio disc were presented during the 62nd AES Convention, held on 13–16 March 1979, in Brussels. Sony's AES technical paper was published on 1 March 1979. A week later, on 8 March, Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called "Philips Introduce Compact Disc" in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Sony executive Norio Ohga, later CEO and chairman of Sony, and Heitaro Nakajima were convinced of the format's commercial potential and pushed further development despite widespread skepticism.

In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. Led by engineers Kees Schouhamer Immink and Toshitada Doi, the research pushed forward laser and optical disc technology. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the task force produced the Red Book CD DA standard. First published in 1980, the standard was formally adopted by the IEC as an international standard in 1987, with various amendments becoming part of the standard in 1996. Philips coined the term compact disc in line with another audio product, the Compact Cassette, and contributed the general manufacturing process, based on video LaserDisc technology. Philips also contributed eight to fourteen modulation (EFM), while Sony contributed the error correction method, CIRC, which offers resilience to defects such as scratches and fingerprints. The Compact Disc Story, though according to Philips, the compact disc was "invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team".

Early CD players employed binary weighted digital to analog converters (DAC), which contained individual electrical components for each bit of the DAC. Even when using high precision components, this approach was prone to decoding errors. while Matsushita (now Panasonic) chose pulse width modulation (PWM), advertising it as MASH, which is an acronym derived from their patented Multi stAge noiSe sHaping PWM topology. In June 1985, the computer readable CD ROM (read only memory) and, in 1990, recordable CD R discs were introduced. Recordable CDs became an alternative to tape for recording and distributing music and could be duplicated without degradation in sound quality. Other newer video formats such as DVD and Blu ray use the same physical geometry as CD, and most DVD and Blu ray players are backward compatible with audio CDs.

CD sales in the United States peaked by 2000. By the early 2000s, the CD player had largely replaced the audio cassette player as standard equipment in new automobiles, with 2010 being the final model year for any car in the United States to have a factory equipped cassette player. Two new formats were marketed in the 2000s designed as successors to the CD: the Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD Audio. However neither of these were adopted partly due to increased relevance of digital (virtual) music and the apparent lack of audible improvements in audio quality to most human ears. These effectively extended the CD's longetivity in the music market.

With the advent and popularity of Internet based distribution of files in lossy compressed audio formats such as MP3, sales of CDs began to decline in the 2000s. For example, between 2000 and 2008, despite overall growth in music sales and one anomalous year of increase, major label CD sales declined overall by 20%. Despite rapidly declining sales year over year, the pervasiveness of the technology lingered for a time, with companies placing CDs in pharmacies, supermarkets, and filling station convenience stores to target buyers less likely to be able to use Internet based distribution. By 2015, only 24% of music in the United States was purchased on physical media, two thirds of this consisting of CDs; however, in the same year in Japan, over 80% of music was bought on CDs and other physical formats. In 2018, U. S. CD sales were 52 million units—less than 6% of the peak sales volume in 2000. In 2018, Best Buy announced plans to decrease their focus on CD sales, however, while continuing to sell records, sales of which are growing during the vinyl revival. During the 2010s, the increasing popularity of solid state media and music streaming services caused automakers to remove automotive CD players in favor of minijack auxiliary inputs, wired connections to USB devices and wireless Bluetooth connections. Automakers viewed CD players as using up valuable space and taking up weight which could be reallocated to more popular features, like large touchscreens. By 2021, only Lexus and General Motors were still including CD players as standard equipment with certain vehicles. The decline in CD sales has slowed in recent years; in 2021, CD sales increased in the US for the first time since 2004, with Axios citing its rise to "young people who are finding they like hard copies of music in the digital age". It came at the same time as both vinyl and cassette reached sales levels not seen in 30 years. The RIAA reported that CD revenue made a dip in 2022, before increasing again in 2023 and overtook downloading for the first time in over a decade. In the US, 33.4 million CD albums were sold in the year 2022. In France in 2023, 10.5 million CDs were sold, almost double that of vinyl, but both of them represented generated 12% each of the French music industry revenues.

Sony and Philips received praise for the development of the compact disc from professional organizations. These awards include:
Technical Grammy Award for Sony and Philips, 1998. IEEE Milestone award, 2009, for Philips alone with the citation: "On 8 March 1979, N. V. Philips' Gloeilampenfabrieken demonstrated for the international press a Compact Disc Audio Player. The demonstration showed that it is possible by using digital optical recording and playback to reproduce audio signals with superb stereo quality. This research at Philips established the technical standard for digital optical recording systems."

The audio contained in a CD DA consists of two channel signed 16 bit LPCM sampled at 44,100 Hz and written as a little endian interleaved stream with left channel coming first. The sampling rate is adapted from that attained when recording digital audio on videotape with a PCM adaptor, an earlier way of storing digital audio. An audio CD can represent frequencies up to 22.05 kHz, the Nyquist frequency of the 44.1 kHz sample rate. Four channel, or quadraphonic, supported was originally intended to be included in CD DA. The Red Book specification briefly mentioned a four channel mode in its June 1980, September 1983, and November 1991 editions. On the first page, it lays out the "Main parameters" of the CD system, including: "Number of channels: 2 and/or 4 simultaneously[*] sampled." The footnote says, "In the case of more than two channels the encoder and decoder diagrams have to be adapted." In reality, however, the underspecified "four channel" mode was dropped from the CD standard when it was adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission and became IEC 908:1987, and later IEC 60908:1999. Since the behavior of the "four channel" or "Broadcasting use" bit was never specified by either CD standard, no mass marketed discs have attempted to use the Red Book's four channel mode, and no players have purported to implement it.

Each audio sample is a signed 16 bit two's complement integer, with sample values ranging from −32768 to +32767. The source audio data is divided into frames, containing twelve samples each (six left and six right samples, alternating), for a total of 192 bits (24 bytes) of audio data per frame. This stream of audio frames, as a whole, is then subjected to CIRC encoding, which segments and rearranges the data and expands it with error correction codes in a way that allows occasional read errors to be detected and corrected. CIRC encoding interleaves the audio frames throughout the disc over several consecutive frames so that the information will be more resistant to burst errors. Therefore, a physical frame on the disc will actually contain information from multiple logical audio frames. This process adds 64 bits of error correction data to each frame. After this, 8 bits of subcode or subchannel data are added to each of these encoded frames, which is used for control and addressing when playing the CD. CIRC encoding plus the subcode byte generate 33 bytes long frames, called "channel data" frames. These frames are then modulated through eight to fourteen modulation (EFM), where each 8 bit word is replaced with a corresponding 14 bit word designed to reduce the number of transitions between 0 and 1. This reduces the density of physical pits on the disc and provides an additional degree of error tolerance. Three "merging" bits are added before each 14 bit word for disambiguation and synchronization. In total there are 33 × (14 + 3) = 561 bits. A 27 bit word (a 24 bit pattern plus 3 merging bits) is added to the beginning of each frame to assist with synchronization, so the reading device can locate frames easily. With this, a frame ends up containing 588 bits of "channel data" (which are decoded to only 192 bits of music). The frames of channel data are finally written to disc physically in the form of pits and lands, with each pit or land representing a series of zeroes, and with the transition points—the edge of each pit—representing a 1. A Red Book compatible CD R has pit and land shaped spots on a layer of organic dye instead of actual pits and lands; a laser creates the spots by altering the reflective properties of the dye. Due to the weaker error correction sector structure used on audio CDs and video CDs (Mode 2 Form 2) than on data discs (Mode 1 or Mode 2 Form 1), C2 errors are not correctable and signify data loss. Even with uncorrectable errors, a compact disc player interpolates the data loss with the aim of making the damage unhearable.

The audio data stream in an audio CD is continuous, but has three parts. The main portion, which is further divided into playable audio tracks, is the program area. This section is preceded by a lead in track and followed by a lead out track. The lead in and lead out tracks encode only silent audio, but all three sections contain subcode data streams. The lead in's subcode contains repeated copies of the disc's Table of Contents (TOC), which provides an index of the start positions of the tracks in the program area and lead out. The track positions are referenced by absolute timecode, relative to the start of the program area, in MSF format: minutes, seconds, and fractional seconds called frames. Each timecode frame is one seventy fifth of a second, and corresponds to a block of 98 channel data frames—ultimately, a block of 588 pairs of left and right audio samples. Timecode contained in the subchannel data allows the reading device to locate the region of the disc that corresponds to the timecode in the TOC. The TOC on discs is analogous to the partition table on hard drives. Nonstandard or corrupted TOC records are abused as a form of CD/DVD copy protection, in e. g. the key2Audio scheme.

The largest entity on a CD is called a track. A CD can contain up to 99 tracks (including a data track for mixed mode discs). Each track can in turn have up to 100 indexes, though players which still support this feature have become rarer over time. The vast majority of songs are recorded under index 1, with the pregap being index 0. Sometimes hidden tracks are placed at the end of the last track of the disc, often using index 2 or 3, or using the pregap as index 0 (this latter usage will result in the track playing as the time counter counts down to time 0:00 at the start of the track, index 1.) This is also the case with some discs offering "101 sound effects", with 100 and 101 being indexed as two and three on track 99. The index, if used, is occasionally put on the track listing as a decimal part of the track number, such as 99.2 or 99.3. (Information Society's Hack was one of very few CD releases to do this, following a release with an equally obscure CD+G feature.) The track and index structure of the CD were carried forward to the DVD format as title and chapter, respectively. Tracks, in turn, are divided into timecode frames (or sectors), which are further subdivided into channel data frames.

The audio bit rate for a Red Book audio CD is 1,411,200 bits per second (1,411 kbit/s) or 176,400 bytes per second; 2 channels × 44,100 samples per second per channel × 16 bits per sample. Audio data coming in from a CD is contained in sectors, each sector being 2,352 bytes, and with 75 sectors containing 1 second of audio. For comparison, the bit rate of a "1×" CD ROM is defined as 2,048 bytes per sector × 75 sectors per second = 153,600 bytes per second. The remaining 304 bytes in a sector are used for additional data error correction.

Unlike on a DVD or CD ROM, there are no "files" on a Red Book audio CD; there is only one continuous stream of LPCM audio data, and a parallel, smaller set of 8 subcode data streams. Computer operating systems, however, may provide access to an audio CD as if it contains files. For example, Windows represents the CD's Table of Contents as a set of Compact Disc Audio track (CDA) files, each file containing indexing information, not audio data. By contrast however, Finder on macOS presents the CD's content as an actual set of files, with the AIFF extension, which can be copied directly, randomly and individually by track as if it were actual files. In reality, macOS performs its own as needed rips in the background completely transparent to the user. The copied tracks are fully playable and editable on the user's computer. In a process called ripping, digital audio extraction software can be used to read CD DA audio data and store it in files. Common audio file formats for this purpose include WAV and AIFF, which simply preface the LPCM data with a short header; FLAC, ALAC, and Windows Media Audio Lossless, which compress the LPCM data in ways that conserve space yet allow it to be restored without any changes; and various lossy, perceptual coding formats like MP3, AAC, and Opus, which modify and compress the audio data in ways that irreversibly change the audio, but that exploit features of human hearing to make the changes difficult to discern.

Recording publishers have created CDs that violate the Red Book standard. Some do so for the purpose of copy prevention, using systems like Copy Control. Some do so for extra features such as DualDisc, which includes both a CD layer and a DVD layer whereby the CD layer is much thinner, 0.9 mm, than required by the Red Book, which stipulates a nominal 1.2 mm, but at least 1.1 mm. Philips and many other companies have stated that including the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo on such non conforming discs may constitute trademark infringement. Super Audio CD was a standard published in 1999 that aimed to provide better audio quality than CDs. DVD Audio emerged at around the same time.