Welcome to the next installment of "Tech Talk." This monthly feature
will hopefully help you understand about certain sound and musical
gadgets that everyone sees but are just not sure how they operate in
the real world.
This month we will be talking about definitions of terms that everyone
will hopefully find useful. In this day and age of electronics, it
helps to understand some of the terminology, or "lingo" that is used.
DVD (digital versatile disk)
A high-density format for playing full motion video. It provides vast data storage capacity (currently 4.7Gb, more than 7 CDs).
Although popular within the home market, DVDs can also be used to hold computer data.
Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD)
Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the
Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of the world's leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers (including
Apple,
Dell,
Hitachi,
HP,
JVC,
LG,
Mitsubishi,
Panasonic,
Pioneer,
Philips,
Samsung,
Sharp,
Sony,
TDK and
Thomson).
The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of
high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data.
The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of
traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and
50GB on a dual-layer disc. This extra capacity combined with the use of
advanced video and audio codecs will offer consumers an unprecedented
HD experience.
CD-R (Compact Disc-Recordable)
A blank disc that can be loaded with sound recordings by technology available for use on a personal computer.
CD-R burners
Devices that load sound recordings onto blank compact disks.
CD-ROM
Short for "Compact Disc-Read-Only Memory," a type of optical disk
capable of storing large amounts of data. A single CD-ROM has the
storage capacity of 700 floppy disks, enough memory to store about
300,000 text pages.
WAV (or WAVE)
Short for Waveform audio format, is a
Microsoft and
IBM
audio file format standard for storing audio on PCs. It is a variant of
the RIFF bitstream format method for storing data in "chunks", and thus
also close to the IFF and the AIFF format used on
Amiga and
Macintosh computers, respectively. It is the main format used on
Windows systems for raw audio.
