"The “Redbook” CD specifications state that CDs contain a maximum of 74 or 80 minutes of music. But over the years, record producers have tried to push that limit. There have been some CDs released that approach the 90-minute mark, but I suspect that these are CD-Rs – individual burned CDs – because this is possible using “overburning.”
But I’ve been seeing a lot of CDs recently that are longer than 80 minutes. In the Mozart 225 box set, many of the CDs exceed this duration, and some are even longer than 85 minutes. The longest CD in this set clocks in at 86:30.This isn’t a problem if you’re playing back the CDs on recent devices, or trying to rip them to a computer, but older CD players may not support these discs because the track that spirals around the disc are too close together for older players to read."
I find myself somewhat more impressed with Adam's penultimate ballet than was my colleague Raymond J. Walker, though we are in complete agreement about the very fine performance delivered by Dario Salvi and the Sofia Philharmonic.
I was almost unable to listen to the disc at all, however, for it would not even begin playing on either of my CD players (both purchased within the past two years). Fortunately, it would play on the DVD/Blu-ray player hooked up to my television but, as you can imagine, that's not an optimal solution. All I can imagine is that the completely unprecedented problem may derive from the fact that, as Raymond points out, "enhanced sampling compression" has been applied to get 89 minutes of music onto the single CD. I wonder whether anyone else has experienced the same technical issue with this or any other release coming in at around the 90 minutes mark?
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