A user might be having problems with his CD player at home because he can’t listen to all of his music. This makes him wonder if maybe it’s a problem with every CD player ever made or just his.
The answer is that his CD player probably isn’t broken, but it’s not universal either. The difference is in the digital encoding of music on CDs. Underneath all the shiny plastic are reflective layers with micro-fine grooves that store data. These microscopic grooves are read by a laser that interprets the varying height and depth of each groove as binary code. The more closely spaced the grooves, the more information can be encoded onto one disk side. That means shorter-spaced tracks use less space for things like gaps between songs so they have room for longer songs. Closer spacing also means lower quality audio because there are fewer bits per second to encode sound waves via lengths of light reflected off tiny bumps in the plastic.
Can you play any song on a karaoke machine?
A person can use a karaoke machine to play normal CDs, but the sound quality produced will not be as good as if you used a more advanced player. If you want to listen to music with better quality, then we recommend using an advanced CD player that isn’t limited only to karaoke disks.
Karaoke machines use CDs with even closer than normal spacing and almost no gaps between songs, so they can cram in just about every song ever written with lyrics.
They produce a lower-quality audio signal than normal CD players because they leave out most of the sound waves that regular CD players would receive from tracks with regular spaced digital information.
So even though the karaoke machine’s player has a fine laser and optics capable of reading data encoded on 8 to 12 times as many bits per second as your home unit, it is still missing plenty of data due to skipped or omitted digital information. What you hear coming out might not be what was recorded in the studio (and definitely isn’t what’s on the label). Some things you can tell right away, like when hip-hop samples are omitted in the sampled ‘vocal’ track. But sometimes it takes really good headphones or speakers to hear music without drum, bass line and guitar in one song, or vocals in another.
On the other hand many karaoke disks will contain extra information that was recorded at a later time after studio retakes or remixing to add harmonies, special sound effects and audio enhancing for voice training/debugging.
How to get the best sound quality ?
To get great quality audio you should use an advanced CD player. The cheaper ones (free with car stereos) or boom boxes may work but skip around more since they do not always “land” on the groove like more expensive players do causing them to pick up extra noise or lag the normal signal.
The best CD players will have a fine laser and optics capable of reading data encoded at 8 to 12 times as many bits per second as your home unit, but it’s still missing plenty of information due to skipped or omitted digital information. What you hear coming out might not be what was recorded in the studio (and definitely isn’t what’s on the label). Some things you can tell right away, like when hip-hop samples are omitted in the sampled ‘vocal’ track, but sometimes it takes really good headphones/speakers to hear music without drum, bass line and guitar in one song , or vocals in another.
So even if a karaoke machine has a fine laser and optics capable of reading data encoded on 8 to 12 times as many bits per second as your home unit, it is still missing plenty of information due to skipped or omitted digital information.
How does encoding affect sound quality?
When you make a CD the sound wave (the music) gets turned into binary code (1’s and 0’s). The more closely spaced these 1’s and 0’s are, the less space they take up on the disk. So using this method lots of songs can be put onto one CD-ROM.
So even if a karaoke machine has very high quality audio equipment like an amp, there will still be gaps between tracks since no more than one song can fit on each disk side This means that sometimes there has to be a gap between tracks for the next song to fit.
In order to make this gap as small as possible, karaoke disks use tracks with very close spaced digital information.
The marks on the disks are tiny bumps in the plastic and reflect light differently than bits of smooth plastic do causing them to read different 1’s and 0’s when passed under a player’s laser. The time it takes for the laser to pass over these bumps is called “the track-to-track seek” or TTTS and can add noise during playback since your CD player has to take more time focusing its optics onto these bumpy tracks than it does when reading smooth data.
