The Digital Domain: A Demonstration

I found this late last year in a used record shop in the electronic music section. It stood out with it's extremely dated artwork, it's target label on the actual CD, a variation on the old Elektra Records logo, it's year of production being 1983 and a familiar named listed as a producer, Elliot Mazer, known for producing many of aural obsessed musician, Neil Young. It didn't hurt that the price was right at $2.50 so the piper was paid and I made my way to the car.

This is definitely not a CD to be listened to for pleasure, it's meant as a tool for setting up home or studio equipment. Of course I tried to give it a listen but it's simply not engaging in that way. Nonetheless, I knew it wasn't something I would get rid of, it might have some potential use in my life. Better yet, it might have use in someone else's life, so I decided to feature it here.

I'm not featuring this as MP3s, only in FLAC as I'd imagine it wouldn't work correctly in a compressed format. I've also scanned the complete packaging and liner notes as they're rather detailed. The full contents are also a representation of their time, with mentions of state-of-the-art 16 bit technology. In fact, you should read this excerpt from the description of the CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), it's quite entertaining:

The facility at CCRMA includes a Foonly F2 computer (emulating a DEC PDP-10) with 1 Mword of 36 bit memory, a 16 channel Grinnell display system, 12 high resolution video terminals, the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer, a special auxiliary processor called the "poly", 16-bit D/A converters, and 16-bit A/D converters. In addition there are the usual complements for a large time-sharing system such as three disc drives (12 Mbytes total), magtape drive, line-printer, a Versatec printer plotter, etc.

12 Mbytes? That's 12 megabytes, right? 16-bit audio is overly standard these days but it was considered a big deal in 1983, but 12 megs of storage space? Over 3 drives? Glad technology has evolved so steadily since 1983!

I hope someone finds this of use or at least as a fascinating relic of the early eighties and digital culture. I ripped this with EAC and compressed it to FLAC though the rip was not perfect, giving me errors on three tracks although they play back fine. I didn't add any metadata to the FLAC files as I didn't feel they were terribly important in this case. Seriously, how many people other than myself would want to listen to a 1khz Square Wave test? For pleasure? Anyway, I hope you find this as interesting as I do.


The Digital Domain: A Demonstration
NOTE: Make certain you download both parts, you will need them to extract all the files. Please leave me a message in the notes if there are any problems extracting any of the files and I will re-up the individual problem files.

Part 1
Part 2