Lot's of times in history, a single decision made has had a huge impact on the future. Sometimes this works out for the better, sometimes for the worse. Had the bomb left for Hitler during a coup attemp not been placed at the edge of a heavy table, he'd likely have been killed, ending the war much earlier. Had Lincoln decided not to attend that play in the Ford Theater, how would history have changed? On smaller scales, we see the same thing every day; the decision not to buckle up on an icy morning, the idea of playing your kids' birthdays as powerball numbers, etc.
On a less grandiose scale, I wonder what would have happened if Sony & Phillips would have designed the CD differently? For instance, they decided on a nominal word length of 16 bits because at that time, processing power was expesive, and their research indicated that 16 bits was nominally transparent.
What if they'd have waited a year or two until the power was a little cheaper? Or what if they'd have decided to simply make the disc 1/2"- 1" bigger to accomodate more data? Sure, you could always wait "a little longer" until a product could be made better, but realistically think of the difference it could make.
At 6", the CD would still have been much smaller and more convenient than LP; portability would still be there. And the direct track access, freedom from pops and clicks, the lack of rewinding, all the things that made the format successful would still be there.
But would that have stemmed the early criticisms? From the outset, some said openly that 18 bits was needed to acheive transparency, but again, that was on the edge of practicality. Had they waited or went a tad larger to accommodate 18 bits, would the format have achieved HiEnd cred sooner?
And what of the LP? If we'd have started with a longer word length and higher sampling rate, would vinyl have died quicker? Sure, it didn't take long for the CD to finish what the Cassette started; by the early nineties you couldn't find an LP in any regular run of mill music store. But I mean, would anyone have a TT right now? We'd probably still have worked on improving digital like we ended up doing, with upsampling, outboard DAs, etc. Where would that be the original Red Book standard spec'd a higher quality in the first place.
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Another thought I had: what if the record companies would have seen the writing on the wall when the first CD-Rs came out in computers? What if they'd have moved to regulate them back before anyone had them, or if they'd have come up with an internet business model before Napster got big? Guess that's a topic for another post.
