The Sound of 1s and 0s Trivia Quiz

Answer: 74 mins

According to many stories surrounding the origin of the compact disc, 74 minutes was settled on because it would comfortably contain all of Beethoven's 9th symphony on one disc. Although some stories reference a specific Sony higher-up who claimed this as his favorite piece of music, stories differ. All that's known for sure is that Sony insisted on this and won out over Phillips' original 60 minute proposal.

Answer: 44.1 kHz

CDs reproduce 44,100 samples per second, which has a maximum frequency reproduction of 22,050 Hz, or just a hair past the upper limit of human hearing. In this way CDs can theoretically reproduce any frequency in the human hearing range.

Answer: The Nyquist Theorem

The Nyquist theorem explains why CDs are capable of reproducing any sound that the ear can hear. This is debated by many "Vinyl Enthusiasts," but most of the time missing information is a fault of the recording or digital filtering process, not the Medium itself.

Answer: PCM

PCM format is an acronym for Pulse Code Modulation. It is essentially the unaltered stream written to disk as it came through the filtering and digitizing process. Many digital synthesizers like Casio and Yamaha used this same format to store samples.

Answer: Digital Audio Tape

DAT was almost marketed to a consumer audience, but its high price for media, and the inability to provide true random access made CDs the far more viable choice. Unfortunately DAT was not well received by music professionals since the possibility of unrecoverable drop-outs made it an unreliable medium for archiving. Luckily it found a niche in the broadcast and advertising industries where timecode was necessary, but long term data reliability wasn't.

Answer: 48 kHz

DATs have a higher sampling rate which allows a marginal increase in frequency reproduction over CDs. What really makes DAT superior is its 24bit sample word length (most DATs are still 16 bit) which drastically increases its signal to noise ratio compared to CD which always has a 16bit sample word length.

Answer: ATRAC

ATRAC comes in varying varieties, such as ATRAC, ATRAC 3, ATRAC Type R. Sony has developed this comrpession technology and is now trying to introduce it in all sorts of digital devices such as portable music players, computers, and even camcorders.

Answer: Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding

This method has improved steadily in the various versions of ATRAC since it came out. It relies on the perception of audio signals at different volumes by the human ear, which does not match how an objective measuring device would react. Then, the most information is devoted to the frequencies that matter most to our ears.

Answer: SCMS

SCMS is the serial copy management system insisted on by the Music industry and implemented by sony. It prevents digital copying of masters that were originally created digitally. But you can analogue copy all day long. CSS is the digital encryption used to protect DVDs. Macrovision is the analogue copy protection developed for VHS and BetaMax, and is used on DVDs as well. Finally, Saguaro Data Shield is a joke on Cactus Data Shield, the controversial protection scheme for CDs that has been reported to crash computers and DVD players rendering CDs unplayable.

Answer: 16

Each sample is stored in binary (as evidenced by the title of this quiz.) Since a CD uses 16 bit audio, that means each bit has sixteen 1s or 0s in it. The maximum value of a sample is 65,536 - 1, or 65,535. This is because the first possible value is 0, so the 65,536th value is 65,535. Whenever you calculate the maximum value of a sample of n bits, the equation is 2^n-1.