Pressed discs (like movies) are physically… pressed. They make a metal mould which is then stamped into melted plastic to make the pits and lands and then coated with a metal film to make the reflected backing, filling in the pits. This makes manufacturing of millions of disks extremely cheap since it takes seconds per disc. Burning commercial disks individually in thousands of burners would be way too slow/expensive.
This is why when when CDs originally came out, the industry kept saying “soon CDs will be super cheap since they’re so much cheaper than manufacturing tapes!” (which really DO need to be dubbed linearly, even though they can be done at like 10x speed in digital high-speed dubbers) before they realized people were still perfectly happy paying $15 for a disc.
This is also why they kept trying to make laserdisc (and RCA’s CED) be a thing, since they were cheaper to mass manufacture by stamping than prerecorded video tape’s slow dubbing process.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 3 days ago
? Did not know that. I assumed they were essentially WORMs but otherwise identical. Do they not use the same laser or something like that?
kalleboo@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Pressed discs (like movies) are physically… pressed. They make a metal mould which is then stamped into melted plastic to make the pits and lands and then coated with a metal film to make the reflected backing, filling in the pits. This makes manufacturing of millions of disks extremely cheap since it takes seconds per disc. Burning commercial disks individually in thousands of burners would be way too slow/expensive.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Wow just like vinyl, sort of huh? That’s fascinating, I never considered it.
kalleboo@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Exactly like vinyl!
This is why when when CDs originally came out, the industry kept saying “soon CDs will be super cheap since they’re so much cheaper than manufacturing tapes!” (which really DO need to be dubbed linearly, even though they can be done at like 10x speed in digital high-speed dubbers) before they realized people were still perfectly happy paying $15 for a disc.
This is also why they kept trying to make laserdisc (and RCA’s CED) be a thing, since they were cheaper to mass manufacture by stamping than prerecorded video tape’s slow dubbing process.