Can we write the data as a single track, that way they could spin very slowly, like a vinly record.
Thanks.
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You could imagine a CD as a vinyl record that’s been hit with a combination of a growth ray and a shrink ray.
The growth ray is because a vinyl track has about 1500 ft of track; that is the distance the needle has to travel to go from the beginning to the end of the vinyl. Meanwhile, a CD is in the realm of 3.7 *miles*, and other discs are only longer. To fully read a CD, the stylus needs to cover so much more distance.
The shrink ray is because a CD is physically smaller. It has a smaller stylus (a beam of light instead of a needle) and it takes up less space (less than 5 inches instead of 10 to 12 inches). The bigger a disc is, the faster one spin moves a part of the disc; for one spin of a vinyl record, the CD needs to spin more than 2 times to cover the same distance. It does this by spinning faster.
The combination of needing to cover more distance and needing to spin faster to make the disc move the same speed is what creates the requirement for such a high spin speed on digital disk readers. It also helps that the light beam is more accurate than the needle, so spinning faster doesn’t mess up the data, and a light beam isn’t mechanically touching the disc so it won’t scratch the disc while reading it faster.
The reason we need so much distance on the CD? This is the digital data definitions I see other answers talking about. Relying on digital data requires more instances of reading than a vinyl that just holds the shape of the speaker’s movement like an original vinyl would, which might sound worse, but the more points of information means the data read will be more consistent or higher quality.
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