Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: My first encounter with a copy-protected CD?

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 09-15-2003, 08:06 PM:

From Collector's Choice Music, I ordered a CD that had two of Mickey Gilley's early albums on it: Room Full of Roses (from 1974) and Gilley Smokin' (from 1976). It's from Audium Records (AUD-CD-8182 with A 70225 printed under it) and has the Audium Records, Koch Records, and Sony Music Custom Marketing Group logos on it. It has the standard "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on the inside of the plastic case and nowhere is any kind of copy protection mentioned on the case or in the liner notes. There is nothing to indicate that this isn't a standard CD.

When I attempted to play this CD on my system using my Technics SL-PD8 CD player hooked digitally using Toslink cable to my Yamaha DSP-A1 receiver, the audio had a half-second dropout every 3 to 4 seconds. It didn't matter which track I played -- the same symptom resulted in all parts of all tracks.

I then wondered if the CD would be playable on the computer. I put the disc in and extracted all of the tracks to WAV files, which all played fine using WinAmp. I then decided to burn a CD using these WAV files I extracted. I put them on the CD in the exact same order as on the original CD. I put the burned CD in the Technics SL-PD8 and it played perfectly!

I then tried the original CD in several different players and found that it doesn't work on at least 3 of my players.

Technics SL-PD8 CD Player, Digital TosLink to Yamaha DSP-A1 receiver: did not play properly (had the dropouts)

Technics SL-PD9 CD Player, Analog to Pioneer VSX-D901S receiver: played OK

Toshiba DS-3109 DVD Player, Digital TosLink to Yamaha DSP-A1 receiver: played OK

Denon DVD-900 DVD player, Digital TosLink to Yamaha DSP-A1 receiver: played OK

Pioneer DVD-909 LD/DVD combo, Coaxial Digital to Yamaha DSP-A1 receiver: did not play properly (had the dropouts)

Pioneer CLD-D702 LD player, Coaxial Digital to Yamaha DSP-A1 receiver: played fine

Windows Media Player 8.00.00.4487 CD Playback, digital playback: played fine.

WinAmp 2.80 CD Playback: played fine

In summary, this CD is incompatible with 3 of my players, at least when hooked up to the receiver digitally. The method of digital hookup (coaxial or TosLink) doesn't matter.

The whole point of hooking up the players to my receiver digitally is to avoid the extra conversion to analog going out of the player and back to digital when going into the reciever. The digital decoder in the receiver is better than most CD players anyway, so I prefer to just ship the bitstream there for conversion to analog to get the best fidelity.

Isn't it funny that I had absolutely no problem extracting the CD tracks to WAV files? Isn't that what copy protection is supposed to do -- make the disc uncopyable, rather than making the original disc unplayable on certain CD/DVD players? What gives? What are they thinking? The copied CD played perfectly! This is forcing people to copy the CDs!

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 09-15-2003, 08:42 PM:

Personally I don't think copy protection is the issue here. I think it is probably some sort of new (probably cheaper) material they are using to construct the reflective portions of the CD. Apparently, some CD players do not like it.

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 09-15-2003, 08:45 PM:

Since the CD played OK on all but three machines, I don't think it is a copy protecting issue. But I could be wrong.

RIAA has their bass on ackwards anyway. As far as I know, if a copy protected CD is recorded by professional analog or high-end home entertainment analog equipment or into an analog line input of your sound card, all that copy protection crap is gone.

As everyone knows, burner software has provisions for making a "Music CD" with the WAV and MP3 files on the hard drive and the burned CD will play just fine in a CD player.

The broadcasting industry has been using that old technology for years....and that idea will be alive and well for years to come. Most of our local liners and sweepers are normally recorded on to hard drives as WAV files and then converted to files that are compatible to the specialized formats needed for some of the on-air computers. Very few stations use reel-to reel, cassette or carts. They are the thing of the past and most of that equipment has been replaced by a computer.

If Wav and MP3 files (and other files as well) are recorded from a hard drive on to a CD, the chances are you would never know the difference.

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 09-15-2003, 08:52 PM:

Nope. Further testing has shown that in all cases with the players that have the EXACT same symptom, the problem goes away when analog connections are used instead of the digital hookup. I seriously doubt that the disc has any physical defect. It's the way the data is put on there.

I've got well over 2000 discs (probably closer to 2500) and this is the first disc to behave this way. I read on CNN a few days ago that copy protected CDs were going to be released here in the states eiter this month or next month. I'll bet this one is one of them. Time will tell.

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 09-15-2003, 08:56 PM:

Evans, I guess you will have to do as the broadcasting industry does...dump the digital transfer and go back to the way it was done for many years....analog and in "real time." [Smile]

As I stated earlier:

quote:
.....copy protected CD is recorded by professional analog or high-end home entertainment analog equipment or into an analog line input of your sound card, all that copy protection crap is gone.

Problem solved. We depend too much on the digital bullshit anyway. [Wink]

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 09-15-2003, 09:30 PM:

Yeah, going to analog and redigitizing will copy about anything, but since my receiver is one that digitizes analog signals coming into it, I'll lose a little bit of fidelity, which I can hear on my system. The CD player converts the digital to analog, which would then be redigitized by the receiver (or the sound card you're redigitizing with), then converted to analog again on playback. The sound is better just sending the digital bitstream straight from the CD into the receiver so it's converted to analog ONCE.

The thing is -- I don't want some stupid copy protection scheme dictating how I route my audio signals through my system. I want digital from the CD/DVD players into the receiver for best fidelity -- period.

It will be interesting to see if people start reporting problems with new CDs over the next few weeks. I'm keepng my ears open.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 09-15-2003, 10:07 PM:

I think you should return the disk to start with
The use of direct digital interconnects has been promoted within the consumer audio industry to the poin that some one may have financila liabilities when stuff doesn't work
Do the american thing" Sue the bastards"

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 09-15-2003, 10:43 PM:

One of the complaints I've been hearing is that these new CDs won't play on certain drives, especially computer drives and the drives used in car stereos. Most of the complaints have been about inability to play these CDs in the car.

Apparently there are two different copy-protection schemes out there. One adds errors to the digital tracks that computer drives cannot correct, but most audio drives can. This is the one that seems to trip up car players the most.

The other technique is to corrupt the file that tells the drive where the various tracks start. The corruption is applied by recording an extra data file at the end of the digital tracks. The location of this file can be seen visually on the disc as a thin ring located at the end of the recorded area of the disc (at the outer edge of the recorded area). This file is apparently not read by audio drives but is read by computer drives. This corruption scheme is defeatable by optically blocking out that extra file, either by opaque marker or electrician's tape. Block that last file track, and the disc should play.

There's a major lawsuit going on now that seeks to declare these copy-protected CDs as intentionally defective, which would open the record labels to fraud charges and to the possibility of having to provide free, working (i.e. not copy-protected) replacement discs to consumers. Similar suits have already been won in the EU.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 09-16-2003, 01:51 AM:

This is like Macrovision on DVDs and the SCMS system for recordable CDs: you can make it difficult for people whose technical knowledge goes no further than being able to operate basic consumer hardware to copy things, but you can't stop anyone who is determined to. The bottom line is that if it's possible to read the data in order to D/A convert it and then reproduce the resulting audio and/or video, then it's also possible to read the data in order to copy it.

The people who came up with this probably figured that 80% of people who want to copy CDs just don't have the technical skills to use a program such as Nero to extract a CD audio track to a .WAV file, and therefore that stopping 80% is better than stopping no-one.

Besides, there are some circumstances in which copying CDs is just not morally wrong, even if it does contravene the letter of the law. The CD player in my car is an old and knackered one which tends to scratch CDs as you insert or eject them. Not a problem if I can dupe my original onto a 30p blank and use that in the car, but I ain't sticking any originals in there. Given that when I bought the disc in the first place I bought a licence to listen to the music on my own private premises (including in the car), where is the problem in doing that? That's not like I'm making 10 dupes and then giving them out to friends. If the music industry makes a serious attempt to stop me from doing that then they're putting another nail in their own coffin, IMHO. And the classical music industry (from which I buy most of my CDs) is in bad enough shape as it is, so much so that there's increasing speculation about one of the big labels pulling out of that sector. Surely they should be trying to encourage new customers, not alienate existing ones.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 09-16-2003, 04:38 AM:

Since anything that is "copy protected" isn't a "CD" (in the red-book sense), but rather a "round shiny thing that sometimes plays music in some CD players," it should definitely be returned as defective. It might be worth letting Philips (the company which owns the "Compact Disc" trademark) know about this, too. They seem to be doing a pretty good job of going after anyone who uses the trademark on disks which don't conform to the red book specs.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 09-16-2003, 11:22 AM:

Some links regarding the "red book standards" and copy protection:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50101,00.html

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50886,00.html

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci503642,00.html

http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/57

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc

Posted by Matt Hale (Member # 1518) on 09-16-2003, 01:21 PM:

Return the disc. Its clearly defective.

The only way to get the recording companies to drop this horse [bs]

is to refuse to buy said horse [bs]

. And it has to be done now, at the introduction, so that all the bean-counting types clearly see the relationship: Copy protection = lost income.

They tried this awhile back in Europe, which is what first got Phillips going on the use of the CD logo on non-conforming discs. There were calls for a boycott at the time, but I'm not sure what the current status is.

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 09-16-2003, 08:35 PM:

Add DVD-S35 DVD Player to Yamaha DSP-A1 receiver with Optical digital connection as a configuration that had the dropouts every few seconds on all tracks on this CD.