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March 2002 | When Bob asked me to co-author this article with him, I was both delighted and horrified. On the one hand, I was anxious to dig deep into the mysteries of high-speed CD recording, while at the same time, I was not sure that McDaniel Labs had sufficient scientific apparatus to take on the job. I say that because if you have ever been to Bob's place, you have wondered in amazement at the sheer quantity of all things CD. If those in the main office don't get you, a walk through the CD-R museum across the hall will surely blow your mind. There are marvels in there whose function one can only imagine, CD-R devices that weigh in at 600 pounds, a true CD-ROM XA drive, portables, oddballs, failures, successes—everything CD-R is there. Starrett must own every CD recorder ever made, except, he tells me, a Pioneer DW-S114X and a Plasmon 4102 and a Sony EDW1/CDW1. I think he told me that as a hint to readers that such donations to the museum would be welcome so that his collection would be complete. (Think of it as some Brits imperiously defend the imperially pilfered holdings of London's British Museum: elsewhere, these archeological treasures are doorstops.) Of course, I've had full access to all necessary mechanisms, including the testers that we used for this article, the CD Associates 3002 and the Clover Systems CDX, so my initial fears were unfounded. Sparse as my offices may be at the moment—transitional moment that it is—I've found I have everything I need to explore the depths of 24X CD recording and emerge relatively unscathed, bones intact, for now. I've also received, from reliable insiders at NASA and Fort Bening, the requisite psycho-linguistic and synechdochic training to assess 24X CD recording as a pursuit adequately prepped for public application—to judge drive and media readiness for CD-R's latest speed jump, overeager product differentiation strategies notwithstanding, look-and-leap protocol so rarely followed in these mer- curial times. So, Starrett Applied Sciences, as I have come to call it, and McDaniel Labs—that somewhat smaller and less equipped space where I toil—as you may know, share a long history of successful collaboration. What you may not know is that our collaborative efforts are typically fraught with danger, intrigue, debauchery, despair, and injury of both the psychological and the physical variety. No less so this time. These contusive complications, both of us have come to believe, directly contribute to the success of our joint enterprises. Case in point: during the composition of our co-authored Little Audio CD Book (www.peachpit.com), that most indispensable tome, both of us somehow managed to break bones on the very same day, Bob in the knee region and me at the shoulder. Our intrepid Technical Editor tells us that—contrary to what one might expect—agony, painkillers, and even the loss of the use of limbs so sharpened our collective vision that the final chapters went to press with a grand total of four errors, three of which were controversial uses of grammar. It was argued that Proust would uphold the convoluted subordinate clauses involved, an argument finally shredded and put down by the now-famous axiom, "Proust won't be reading this." Two bent fingers are better than one straight finger: this is the Lesson of the Broken Bones. How do scientists break bones? There are several answers to that question, but this one leaps to mind: scientists break bones by experimenting with the wrong fulcrum, or using a given fulcrum improperly. That, or by vividly demonstrating the Coriolis Effect for the barkeep, in the name of Enlightenment. Newtonian mechanics, torque and mass, are only too happy to work against you, as that, finally, is their destiny—you can't fault them, any more than you might fault a neutrino for whizzing through your head with nary a care for your ganglia. '; An Internist's View
Though the language around CD-R drives elevates them above the old physics—these things talk in terms of nanometers, wavelengths, unreal time, and some kind of diphthong-happy dye with a "phth" in it—they aren't exempt from the ancient laws. Not yet, anyway. That appears to be one of the central difficulties of developing high-speed recording (20X and beyond). The issue isn't that a laser can't keep up, or that a weird deflection field is produced in the drive's guts by the phase plasma apparatus. (That's fiction—there's no "deflection field" or "phase plasma apparatus," but we might imagine there is, given the noise and haste of a 24X drive.) The issue is that a disc spinning fast enough to enable 20X-plus writing becomes physically unstable, just by sheer velocity. It's the '90 Ford Taurus on the freeway, smoking, rumbling, shaking, as its namesake might do confronted with a matador. It's a mechanical problem—an odd fulcrum, but a fulcrum nonetheless.
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