Introduction to Digital Audio, 2nd Edition

11

Optical disks in digital audio

Optical disks are particularly important to digital audio, not least because of the success of the Compact Disc, followed by the MiniDisc, DVD and magnetooptical production recorders.

11.1 Types of optical disk

There are numerous types of optical disk, which have different characteristics.1 There are, however, three broad groups, shown in Figure 11.1, which can be usefully compared.

1  The Compact Disc and the prerecorded MiniDisc and DVD are read-only laser disks, which are designed for mass duplication by stamping. They cannot be recorded.

2  Some laser disks can be recorded, but once a recording has been made, it cannot be changed or erased. These are usually referred to as write-once-readmany (WORM) disks. ...