What is a CD?

A compact disc is a thin, circular disc of metal and plastic about 12cm (just over 4½ inches) in
diameter. It's actually made of three layers. Most of a CD is made from a tough, brittle plastic
called polycarbonate. Sandwiched in the middle there is a thin layer of aluminum. Finally, on
top of the aluminum, is a protective layer of lacquer. The first thing you notice about a CD is
that it is shiny on one side and dull on the other. The dull side usually has a label on it telling you
what's on the CD; the shiny side is the important part. It's shiny so that a laser beam can bounce
off the disc and read the information stored on it.

How CDs use optical laser technology

Until CDs were invented, music was typically stored on plastic LP (long-playing) records and
cassette tapes. LPs scratched easily, while tapes could stretch and distort and sometimes snapped
or seized up entirely. Both of these ways of storing music were primitive compared to CDs. LPs
were played on turntables with a moving arm that bounced along a groove in the plastic, reading
back the music as it went. Record players (or gramophones, as they were sometimes known)
used mechanical technology for recording and playing back sound: the moving arm turned the
bumps in the plastic into sounds you could hear. Cassette tapes (used in such things as the
original Sony Walkmans) worked a different way. They stored sounds
using magnetic technology. When you put a cassette into your Walkman, a small electric
motor dragged the tape past a little electromagnet. The electromagnet detected the pattern of
magnetism on the tape and an electronic circuit changed this back into the sounds that fizzed and
popped in your headphones.

With the invention of CDs, people finally had a more reliable way of collecting music. CD
players are neither mechanical nor magnetic but optical: they use flashing laser lights to record
and read back information from the shiny metal discs. One of the main problems with LPs and
cassettes was the physical contact between the player and the record or tape being played, which
gradually wore out. In a CD player, the only thing that touches the CD is a beam of light: the
laser beam bounces harmlessly off the surface of the CD, so the disc itself should (in theory)
never wear out. Another advantage is that the CD player can move its laser quickly to any part of
the disc, so you can instantly flip from track to track or from one part of a movie to another.

How CDs are recorded and played back

LP records stored music as bumps on the surface of plastic, while cassettes stored it using
patterns of magnetism. These are called analog technologies, because the sound is stored as a
continuously varying pattern (of bumps in the plastic of a record or fluctuations in the magnetism
on a cassette tape). In a CD, music (or other information) is stored digitally (as a long string of
numbers). After the music has been recorded, it is converted into numbers by a process
called sampling. Almost 50,000 times a second (44,100 to be exact), a piece of electronic
equipment measures the sound, turns the measurement into a number, and stores it in binary
format (as a pattern of zeros and ones). The sampling process turns a CD track lasting several
minutes into a string of millions of zeros and ones. This is the information stored on your CD. In
other words, there is no music on a CD at all—just a huge long list of numbers.

CDs are made from an original "master" disc. The master is "burned" with a laser beam that
etches bumps (called pits) into its surface. A bump represents the number zero, so every time the
laser burns a bump into the disc, a zero is stored there. The lack of a bump (which is a flat,
unburned area on the disc, called a land) represents the number one. Thus, the laser can store all
the information sampled from the original track of music by burning some areas (to represent
zeros) and leaving other areas unburned (to represent ones). Although you can't see it, the disc
holds this information in a tight, continuous spiral of about 3-5 billion pits. If you could unwrap
the spiral and lay it in a straight line, it would stretch for about 6 km (roughly 3.5 miles)! Each
pit occupies an area about two millionths of a millionth of a square meter. That's pretty tiny!

Once the master disc has been made, it is used to stamp out millions of plastic duplicates—the
CDs that you buy and put into your music player or computer. In a CD-making factory, the
master CD is recorded by a laser beam burning information into the surface of a disc. In your
home, you play CDs back in almost exactly the opposite way.

How a CD player works

So what's going on in your CD player when the disc spins around?

 1. Inside your CD player, there is a miniature laser beam (called asemiconductor diode
laser) and a small photoelectric cell (an electronic light detector). When you press play,
an electric motor (not shown in this diagram) makes the disc rotate at high speed (up to
500rpm). The laser beam switches on and scans along a track, with the photocell, from
the center of the CD to the outside (in the opposite way to an LP record). The motor
slows the disc down gradually as the laser/photocell scans from the center to the outside
of the disc (as the track number increases, in other words). Otherwise, as the distance
from the center increased, the actual surface of the disk would be moving faster and faster
past the laser and photocell, so there would be more and more information to be read in
the same amount of time.
2. The laser (red) flashes up onto the shiny (under) side of the CD, bouncing off the pattern
of pits (bumps) and lands (flat areas) on the disc. The lands reflect the laser light straight
back, while the pits scatter the light.
3. Every time the light reflects back, the photocell (blue) detects it, realizes it's seen a land,
and sends a burst of electric current to an electronic circuit (green) that generates the
number one. When the light fails to reflect back, the photocell realizes there is no land
there and doesn't register anything, so the electronic circuit generates the number zero.
Thus the scanning laser and electronic circuit gradually recreates the pattern of zeros and
ones (binary digits) that were originally stored on the disc in the factory. Another
electronic circuit in the CD player (called a digital to analog converter or DAC) decodes
these binary numbers and converts them back into a changing pattern of electric currents.
4. A loudspeaker transforms the electric currents into sounds you can hear (by changing
their electrical energy into sound energy).

Different types of CDs

CDs were originally used just for storing music. Each disc could store 74 minutes of stereo
sound—more than enough for a typical LP record. During the 1990s, CD technology also
became popular for storing computer programs, games, and other information. Kodak's PhotoCD
system (a way of storing up to 100 photos on a compact disc), was also launched in the 1990s.

The original form of computer CD was called CD-ROM (CD-Read Only Memory), because
most computers could only read information from them (and not store any information on them).
In those days, you needed a separate piece of equipment called a "burner" to write your own
CDs, which were often called WORMs (Write Once Read Many). It's now more common for
computers to have CD-R (CD-Recordable) or CD/RW (CD Read/Write) drives for burning their
own CDs, although most new computers now have DVD drives instead.
The difference between CDs and DVDs is the amount of information they can store. A CD can
hold 650 megabytes (million characters) of data, whereas a DVD can cram in at least 4.7
gigabytes (thousand megabytes)—which is roughly seven times more. Because DVDs are the
same size as CDs, and are storing seven times more information, the zeros and ones (or pits and
lands) on a DVD have to be correspondingly smaller than those on a CD. The latest optical discs
use a technology called Blu-ray to store six times more data than DVDs or 40 times more than
CDs

How does Blu-ray™ work?

Blu-ray, which can store six times more data (digital information) than even the best DVDs—
that's a whopping 50 gigabytes worth!

Why Blu-ray can store more information

Blu-ray discs are exactly the same size as DVDs, which are themselves the same size as CDs.
How do Blu-rays store more than DVDs? How do DVDs store more than CDs? The answer is
simple. If you've ever had to squeeze a certain amount of text on a single sheet of paper (maybe
to make a poster) and found it difficult to get everything on, you'll know there's a simple
solution: you just make your words a bit smaller (lower the font size). The same idea works
when you're writing computer data on discs with laser beams. You can store more on a DVD
than a CD by using a laser beam that "writes smaller". And to read or write a Blu-ray disc, you
use a laser to write even smaller still.

A DVD uses a red laser beam that makes light waves with a wavelength of
650 nanometers (0.00000065 meters, or less than one hundredth the width of a human hair).
That's considerably shorter than the wavelength of invisible, infrared light that a CD player uses
(780 nanometers), which is why DVDs can store more than CDs. A Blu-ray player uses an even
more precise laser than a DVD player, with a beam of blue light shooting out of it instead of red
or infared. Blue light has a much shorter wavelength (about 450 nanometers) than red light so a
blue laser can write things that are far smaller. That means Blu-ray discs can store movies in a
much higher quality format known as High Definition (HD), store much longer movies on a
single disc, or just store more altogether. If you can fit four, half-hour episodes ofFriends on a
DVD, you can fit 24 episodes (a whole series) on a Blu-ray disc.