Four Channel Compact Disc Digital Audio
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Four Channel Compact Disc Digital Audio is a four-channel audio format specified under the Compact Disc Digital Audio Red Book standard. Most compact discs have a diameter of 120 mm and can store 74 minutes of four channel audio.
Storing four simultaneous channels of audio instead of the usual two requires appropriately set control bits in CD Subcode channel Q. Since CD players read the disc in a standardized range of constant linear velocity, doubling the number of channels neccessitates halving the amount of data per channel. Thus, a four-channel Compact Disc has four channels of 16 bit PCM samples at 22.05 kHz instead of two channels of 16 bit PCM samples at 44.1 kHz.
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Commercial four channel CD releases
Even though the Red Book standard allows for four-channel CDs, there are very few mass-marketed releases in this format.
Hardware & software
All CD recorders can write discs with the necessary subcode channel data for four-channel audio. CD authoring software which can generate four-channel audio data is less common. One such application is cdrdao.
While four-channel audio is part of the Red Book standard, software developers are often discouraged from implementing this feature in CD burning software due to newer and higher fidelity media formats being available, such as Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio.
See also
External link
- Cdrdao (Open Source CD burning software)