# Longest classical CD?



## DuncanW (Aug 19, 2018)

Working through Claudio Abbado & Berliner Philharmoniker complete on DG (which I picked up for a bargain AUD89 from a major aussie retailer) and the 16th disc in the set - Brahms Serenades 1 & 2 - comes in at a whopping 83m16s. I've never seen one that long. Does anyone know of one that beats it?


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

As far as I remember; Riccardo Muti conducting the Verdi Requiem on Label: CSO Resound Length: 89 minutes.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Rogerx said:


> As far as I remember; Riccardo Muti conducting the Verdi Requiem on Label: CSO Resound Length: 89 minutes.


According to Amazon, a double CD.


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

I was just about changing my post, thanks anyway.



Edit, the longest I can fins are Janine Jansen on Decca ; Schoenberg & Schubert 82.00
and Osmo Vänskä on Bis Sibelius: Symphonies Nos 3, 6 & 7 clocking 81.00


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## JAS (Mar 6, 2013)

I find that I often have problems playing any CD that approaches or exceeds the 73 minute running time. A lot of skipping or fragmenting seems to occur as they player gets near the end, which it never quite seems to reach. (I have had this problem in multiple players and wonder if there is a player that does a better job, and is affordable.)


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## Fredx2098 (Jun 24, 2018)

I thought it was impossible to go over the 80-minute limit of CDs? Am I wrong? DVDs can be used for audio and have a much longer playtime. There's a release of Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 on one DVD that goes for about 367 minutes.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

There´s been some cases of expanding the playing time for CDs in recent years, I´ve seen it mentioned in reviews too.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

It doesn't beat it but Zubin Mehta's single-disc Decca recording of Mahler's 2nd exceeds 81 minutes.


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## wkasimer (Jun 5, 2017)

JAS said:


> I find that I often have problems playing any CD that approaches or exceeds the 73 minute running time. A lot of skipping or fragmenting seems to occur as they player gets near the end, which it never quite seems to reach. (I have had this problem in multiple players and wonder if there is a player that does a better job, and is affordable.)


I've never had a problem playing these ultra-long CD's on any of my Marantz CD players. What players are you using?


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## brahms4 (May 8, 2017)

I`ve read that a Super Audio CD can potentially hold several hours of music if it is only released with a single layer that is two channel super audio.No conventional and no multi-channel layers.There is one of these SACD released on BIS of the complete string symphonies of Mendelssohn that is over 4 hours long!


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## JAS (Mar 6, 2013)

wkasimer said:


> I've never had a problem playing these ultra-long CD's on any of my Marantz CD players. What players are you using?


At the moment, I have an Onkyo.

Edit: I should probably add that it is a 6 CD changer, and I bought a new one about a year ago because I needed to support MP3 (for audio books).


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## Ras (Oct 6, 2017)

JAS said:


> At the moment, I have an Onkyo.


JAS

If you have problems playing your cds on your cd-player I think you should try to use your DVD-player or your Blu-ray player - they can usually play everything.

I use a very old Sony DVD player for everything - I don't even have a Blu-ray player myself.

Thread duty: I think my longest disc is a little over 82 minutes - it is one of the cds in the Mozart box by the Hagen Quartet on DGG.


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## Guest (Sep 5, 2018)

The original CD specification limited play time to 72 minutes, if I remember correctly, but it is not like a hard disc format specification, where there is an hard limit because there is a pre-defined sector table which only has a fixed number of entries. Basically it is a matter of how tight you can pack the data before it becomes unreadable. I believe there is a hard limit of 99 tracks, though.

I think 82 minutes is the longest I have seen. I have had no trouble playing or ripping very long CDs. When I have a problem with a CD it is almost always a very old one. If you hold an old CD up to the light you can often see holes forming in the aluminum layer.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

brahms4 said:


> I`ve read that a Super Audio CD can potentially hold several hours of music if it is only released with a single layer that is two channel super audio.No conventional and no multi-channel layers.*There is one of these SACD released on BIS of the complete string symphonies of Mendelssohn that is over 4 hours long!*


BIS also did this with Bach's Organ Music; all of it on 5 discs IIRC.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

Not checked but off the top of my head Gergiev's Nutcracker with the Kirov Orchestra is probably one of my longest. It weighs in at over 81 minutes. Think I have an uber-long Black Sabbath CD, too (one of the live albums).


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

brahms4 said:


> I`ve read that a Super Audio CD can potentially hold several hours of music if it is only released with a single layer that is two channel super audio.No conventional and no multi-channel layers....


I continue to be wow-ed by the two SACD set _The Art Of Mravinsky In Moscow 1965 & 1972_ on 
Scribendum ‎- SC603:















Two SACD discs clocking in at (including gaps between tracks) 240'47"
and 255'17".

Track listings:
*Disc 1 -*
Tchaikovsky: Symphonic Fantasy "Francesca Da Rimini" Op.32, and Symphony No.5
Wagner: Siegfried's Funeral March, The Ride Of The Valkyries (two different recordings), Venusberg Music (Bacchanale) From Tannhäuser, Siegfried's Rhine Journey, Lohengrin, Prelude To Act III
Brahms: Symphony No.3 In F Op.90
Shostakovich: Symphony No.6 In B Minor Op.54
Beethoven: Symphony No.4 In B Flat Op.60, and Symphony No.5 In C Minor Op.67
*Disc 2 -*
Glinka: Ruslan & Ludmila Overture
Mussorgsky: Dawn On The Moskva River (2 different recordings)
Lyadov: Baba Yaga (two different recordings)
Shostakovich: Symphony No.6 In B Minor Op.54 (a different recording from that on Disc 1)
Glazunov: Raymonda, Entr'acte Act 3
Wagner: Lohengrin, Prelude To Act III, and The Ride Of The Valkyries (again, different recordings from those found on Disc 1)
Mozart: Le Nozze Di Figaro Overture, Symphony No.39 In E Flat K543
Sibelius: The Swan Of Tuonela No.3 Op.22, Symphony No.7 In C Op.105
Hindemith: Die Harmonie Der Welt
Stravinsky: Apollon Musagète (Ballet)
Debussy: Prelude A L'après midi d'un faun
Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta
Honegger: Symphony No.3 "Liturgique"

Indeed, a classical music collection in two discs. You do need a single-layer SACD player to access these discs. My SONY XA5400ES more than adequately does the job.

SACD 1 (tracks 1-24: 1972) (tracks 25-26: 1965)
SACD 2 (tracks 1-39: 1965)

I believe this was also released as a 7 CD box set. In any case, if you are a Mravinsky fan, as am I, you won't mind sitting for hours listening to these two discs.


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## David Phillips (Jun 26, 2017)

I have the Bis SACD Mendelssohn String Symphonies and it sounds great. No, I haven't listened to it all in one sitting.


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

DuncanW said:


> Working through Claudio Abbado & Berliner Philharmoniker complete on DG (which I picked up for a bargain AUD89 from a major aussie retailer) and the 16th disc in the set - Brahms Serenades 1 & 2 - comes in at a whopping 83m16s. I've never seen one that long. Does anyone know of one that beats it?


You still winning with that time .


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

So, I'd be interested to know if these 80+ minute disks actually display the official CD logo, because they are definitely not CD-DA Red Book compliant (which permits only 74 or 80 minutes) and use of the official CD logo is supposed to be confined to disks which are.

Being Red Book compliant simply means that it's guaranteed that any CD player also displaying the logo can play it successfully. Stray outside the standard and you lose that guarantee (as some are reporting above). SInce CDs were invented, of course, we've developed DVDs and BluRay and these drives will have more precise optics and motors etc (to deal with the finer track pitches of those media), so someone's recommendation above that if a non-compliant CD won't play in a compliant CD-player, playing it in a DVD or Blu-Ray player should do the trick is also based on sound science and engineering: you'll be using tighter engineering tolerances in the more modern players to deal with the non-compliance in the CD media.

The Red Book standard permits a track width variation of ±10%, which is how they were able to make compliant disks with more than the original 74 minutes of music on them: tighten the spiral pitch of the pits and lands that contain the audio signal and you can squeeze more data on the disk. But 74 minutes plus 10% doesn't make for 83+ minutes of music! So I'm betting that these extra long disks aren't actually compliant.

Anyhow... The Mozart 225 boxed set contains several disks which exceed 80 minutes. Specifically disk 75 contains violin concertos 2, 3, 4 and 5. It clocks in at a whopping-er 86'37":









Not surprisingly, I cannot see an official CD logo anywhere in the associated artwork (and the CD is upstairs in the loft, and I'm not going to bother hunting it down to check!)


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

I saw one reviewed in the recent edition of American Record Guide that was 88 minutes, the longest the critic said he'd ever seen. Seems to me I've seen CDs in the past that had hours of music on them. I recall someone Haydn's edition had several hours of music on a single CD.

The best, lengthiest single CD I know is Ormandy's Verdi Requiem on Sony, a real super audio recording not a hybrid. I don't recall the TT -- something like 84 minutes -- but the sound stage was more well defined than any other SACD I know. The soloists seemed like they were in my living room, the orchestra and chorus in the den.


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## wkasimer (Jun 5, 2017)

DuncanW said:


> Working through Claudio Abbado & Berliner Philharmoniker complete on DG (which I picked up for a bargain AUD89 from a major aussie retailer) and the 16th disc in the set - Brahms Serenades 1 & 2 - comes in at a whopping 83m16s. I've never seen one that long. Does anyone know of one that beats it?


If I recall correctly, Teodor Currentzis' recording of the Mahler 6th comes in at just over 84 minutes. And Vanska has that beat, at near 87 minutes:


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

And this new Prokofieff disk from Bis has 86 minutes.


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## adriesba (Dec 30, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> So, I'd be interested to know if these 80+ minute disks actually display the official CD logo, because they are definitely not CD-DA Red Book compliant (which permits only 74 or 80 minutes) and use of the official CD logo is supposed to be confined to disks which are.
> 
> Being Red Book compliant simply means that it's guaranteed that any CD player also displaying the logo can play it successfully. Stray outside the standard and you lose that guarantee (as some are reporting above). SInce CDs were invented, of course, we've developed DVDs and BluRay and these drives will have more precise optics and motors etc (to deal with the finer track pitches of those media), so someone's recommendation above that if a non-compliant CD won't play in a compliant CD-player, playing it in a DVD or Blu-Ray player should do the trick is also based on sound science and engineering: you'll be using tighter engineering tolerances in the more modern players to deal with the non-compliance in the CD media.
> 
> The Red Book standard permits a track width variation of ±10%, which is how they were able to make compliant disks with more than the original 74 minutes of music on them: tighten the spiral pitch of the pits and lands that contain the audio signal and you can squeeze more data on the disk. But 74 minutes plus 10% doesn't make for 83+ minutes of music! So I'm betting that these extra long disks aren't actually compliant. [...]


Are there any potential problems with a CD not meeting those specifications other than possibly not being playable in certain devices?


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

adriesba said:


> Are there any potential problems with a CD not meeting those specifications other than possibly not being playable in certain devices?


Such as?

If you are not Red Book compliant, it just means you're relying on people having players which themselves go beyond the Red Book standard (such as being a DVD player!)

Not being playable in some devices is the only real consequence of being out of spec, so far as I know.


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

brahms4 said:


> I`ve read that a Super Audio CD can potentially hold several hours of music if it is only released with a single layer that is two channel super audio.No conventional and no multi-channel layers.There is one of these SACD released on BIS of the complete string symphonies of Mendelssohn that is over 4 hours long!


I have the compete lute music of John Dowland, also over 4 hours.

As to regular CDs, 5 of the 6 discs in the Belohlavek Dvorak box are over 80 minutes, the longest being 83:52. They were a pain to rip.


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## adriesba (Dec 30, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Such as?
> 
> If you are not Red Book compliant, it just means you're relying on people having players which themselves go beyond the Red Book standard (such as being a DVD player!)
> 
> Not being playable in some devices is the only real consequence of being out of spec, so far as I know.


I was just curious if there was some compromise of the disc's quality, but then maybe there is no issue outside of compatibility.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

I believe I have the winner:* 2 hours 24 minutes 24 seconds (2:24:24) on a single disc!*










How'd they do it? Two mono tracks, one in each channel. This CD was released in 1987, and there's no redbook logo anywhere on it. To my knowledge this is the only CD ever released this way, although there were several LPs.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

adriesba said:


> I was just curious if there was some compromise of the disc's quality, but then maybe there is no issue outside of compatibility.


Ah, I see. No, digital is a binary affair, so as long as your laser pickup can read the thing, the quality will be every bit as good as a compliant CD would have been.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

NoCoPilot said:


> I believe I have the winner:* 2 hours 24 minutes 24 seconds (2:24:24) on a single disc!*
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Interesting! Yes, the Red Book requires two channels of 16 bit linearly pulse code modulated audio samples at 44,100Hz.

Now, nothing says those two channels have to be left and right of a stereo signal, so it's legitimate Red Book to fill both with exactly the same signal to achieve "centre channel mono" -that is, because left and right speakers are playing the identical sound, it appears to come from somewhere out of the middle of them.

So I'm curious: when you play the CD you've described, does it only come from one speaker and thus appear to be "one channel mono"?

Because if they've got that long playtime by only recording a one channel signal, that's what I'd expect.


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## haziz (Sep 15, 2017)

The original CD specification allowed for about 70 minutes. This was supposedly to accommodate Beethoven's Ninth on one disk, reportedly at the behest of Herbert von Karajan, who was involved with the initial marketing and introduction of the medium, by the two manufacturers involved in it's initial development, namely Philips and Sony.

Over time engineers have "unofficially" managed to expand the capacity to about 80 minutes, so the discs you are seeing are probably at the very limit of what the medium can hold.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

haziz said:


> The original CD specification allowed for about 70 minutes. This was supposedly to accommodate Beethoven's Ninth on one disk, reportedly at the behest of Herbert von Karajan, who was involved with the initial marketing and introduction of the medium, by the two manufacturers involved in it's initial development, namely Philips and Sony.
> 
> Over time engineers have "unofficially" managed to expand the capacity to about 80 minutes, so the discs you are seeing are probably at the very limit of what the medium can hold.


I'm afraid the Beethoven 9th story gets told variously - and variously muddled.

One claim is that the president of Sony (Norio Ohga) was a music fan and insisted on a CD being able to play the complete Beethoven 9th, and the longest recording they could find of that work was a 74 minute mono Furtwängler from about 1951. So 74 minutes became the standard.

Another has it that, yes, as you say, Karajan was going to be of fundamental importance in getting the new format marketed well and broadly adopted, and that _he_ therefore insisted on Beethoven's 9th as the 'gold standard', so again they looked around for the longest-known recording of that work.

The more prosaic truth, however, is that the CD was jointly developed by Sony and Philips. And Philips had a factory capable of mass producing 11.5cm disks. And Sony wasn't willing to give Philips a head-start in the manufacturing stakes, and so insisted on a 12cm disk. And the 74 minutes play-time comes out of the simple physics of a 12cm disk and a pits-and-lands spiral of a given (already agreed) geometry.

Slightly more technically, the Philips chief engineer has explained that in December 1979, he invented an encoding scheme for the new product that would actually improve the amount of music you could get on a 10cm disk by 30% -so that a 10cm disk could have stored the entire Beethoven 9th. For a 12cm disk, that would have permitted over 97 minutes of play-time. But rather than adopt a 10cm disk (which would this time have given _Sony_ the manufacturing advantage over Philips!), they decided to stick to 12cm (which was a manufacturer-neutral size) and reduce the data density by 30%, permitting a 74 minute playback from the 12cm disk.

Amusingly, this decision had the consequence that the Furtwängler Beethoven 9th that allegedly determined things couldn't actually fit on an original CD and didn't do so until finally released in 1988 on a single CD. And that only happened because they increased the data density up again (and improved their digitisation sources)!

Which brings us to the exiension to 80 minutes: it is definitely not 'unofficial'. It's right there in the Red Book standard, which permits a 10% tolerance on the tightness of the lands-and-pits spiral. 10% more than 74 minutes gets you, staying entirely within spec, to 80-and-a-little-bit minutes. That use of the additional permitted tolerance wasn't commonplace, however, until DVD drives (with their much improved optics and mechanics) were on the brink of becoming commonplace.


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## eljr (Aug 8, 2015)

haziz said:


> The original CD specification allowed for about 70 minutes. This was supposedly to accommodate Beethoven's Ninth on one disk, reportedly at the behest of Herbert von Karajan, who was involved with the initial marketing and introduction of the medium, by the two manufacturers involved in it's initial development, namely Philips and Sony.
> 
> Over time engineers have "unofficially" managed to expand the capacity to about 80 minutes, so the discs you are seeing are probably at the very limit of what the medium can hold.


"The original "limit" would have been 74 minutes, 42 seconds. The increase in time was made possible by employing part of the disc originally reserved for error correction"


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## wkasimer (Jun 5, 2017)

NoCoPilot said:


> I believe I have the winner:* 2 hours 24 minutes 24 seconds (2:24:24) on a single disc!*
> 
> 
> 
> ...


That wasn't the only one. I believe that the first CD issue of the 1953 Bayreuth Ring was in this format, accompanied by a device that distributed each track to both channels on your receiver, amp, or preamp. I think that there was a Krauss Parsifal, too.

I'm glad that experiment died. I used to do something similar on a reel-to-reel when recording monaural stuff - it allowed me to use a higher speed and thus get better sound quality if I wanted to put a long opera on a single reel.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

eljr said:


> "The original "limit" would have been 74 minutes, 42 seconds. The increase in time was made possible by employing part of the disc originally reserved for error correction"


That would imply less error correction which isn't true. Source of your quote, please?

As I say, the origin of the original 74-and-bit minutes playtime is explained by the engineering involved; tweaking the pitch tolerance of the play spiral is what gives you the extra 7+ minutes to take it to 80+ minutes, no change in error correction required. Beyond about 82 minutes, you achieve the extra play time by tightening the play spiral more than the Red Book permits (but which modern optics and motors can cope with) -and still no loss of error correction.

I've documented that about 4 times now, so I'm not doing it again!

Incidentally, there isn't an 'area reserved for error correction'. The mathematics is complicated, but the error correction code is right there, where the audio signal is. It's not carved off to its own area or something. For every 24 bytes of data recorded on the disk, a further 8 bytes is added to act as in-place error correction code. So 24/32ths of the CD is audio and 8/32ths (or ¼) is error correction code -and you can't consume that space for anything other than error correction, because the maths goes to pot and your disk becomes unplayable! The error correction mechanism is called Cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon Code and it's a fascinating subject all on its own. Choosing it as the error correcting mechanism was one of the first decisions made by the Sony/Philips ensemble inventing the CD in the first place.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Posted complete bonkers in the wrong thread. My apologies.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

There are also MP3 discs, which can hold up to about 9.2 hours of material.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

NoCoPilot said:


> There are also MP3 discs, which can hold up to about 9.2 hours of material.


I never knew these existed! Thanks.

Do you know if they use CD or DVD style physical disks?
Is it internally a data disc of either of those formats?

Presumably, playable only on a PC I would have thought?


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## haziz (Sep 15, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I never knew these existed! Thanks.
> 
> Do you know if they use CD or DVD style physical disks?
> Is it internally a data disc of either of those formats?
> ...


Actually my previous car's "CD Player" could play MP3s burnt to a CD or CDR, but it was a 2006 car model and therefore post PC and MP3 music revolution.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I never knew these existed! Thanks.
> 
> Do you know if they use CD or DVD style physical disks?
> Is it internally a data disc of either of those formats?
> ...


My main player also plays MP3 discs (many do these days). Yes, they're on a standard CD. And they sound darn decent to these ears.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> So I'm curious: when you play the CD you've described, does it only come from one speaker and thus appear to be "one channel mono"? Because if they've got that long playtime by only recording a one channel signal, that's what I'd expect.


The recording is a 1953 mono recording (of quite dodgy fidelity). The instructions on the CD say to turn your Left-Right balance control all the way over to one side, then hit your "mono" button. My old receiver could actually do that. My present cannot.

One consequence you might not think about of having two separate mono tracks: there are no track divisions. The whole piece has to play through from start to finish, because of course track markers would affect both channels.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

Incidentally, I have recorded several MP3 discs for my own use.

Three hours out a NYC window: 




James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake": https://www.hungama.com/album/james-joyce-s-finnegan-s-wake/39185488/

Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way": https://librivox.org/swanns-way-by-marcel-proust/


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## wkasimer (Jun 5, 2017)

NoCoPilot said:


> My main player also plays MP3 discs (many do these days). Yes, they're on a standard CD. And they sound darn decent to these ears.


I think that most CD players made in the last ten or so years will play CD's with MP3 files. Also, I think that virtually all DVD players will also play them.


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## NoCoPilot (Nov 9, 2020)

And a 320kbps MP3 is virtually indistinguishable from CD audio, to my ears.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> ...
> 
> So I'm curious: when you play the CD you've described, does it only come from one speaker and thus appear to be "one channel mono"?
> 
> Because if they've got that long playtime by only recording a one channel signal, that's what I'd expect.





NoCoPilot said:


> The recording is a 1953 mono recording (of quite dodgy fidelity). The instructions on the CD say to turn your Left-Right balance control all the way over to one side, then hit your "mono" button. My old receiver could actually do that. My present cannot.
> 
> One consequence you might not think about of having two separate mono tracks: there are no track divisions. The whole piece has to play through from start to finish, because of course track markers would affect both channels.


There are copies of this disc available for sale at Discogs. The submission note says this:

Total playing time: 2h 24' 24"
First part plays (in mono) on the Left channel, second part (in mono) on the Right channel.


I suspect this will work with the aforementioned "Mono" switch. But that is not a feature of very many amps/preamps any more. It used to be a common button/switch, and I do miss it on my JoLida tube amp.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

SONNET CLV said:


> There are copies of this disc available for sale at Discogs. The submission note says this:
> 
> Total playing time: 2h 24' 24"
> First part plays (in mono) on the Left channel, second part (in mono) on the Right channel.
> ...


Yeah, I remember the mono switch on my grown-up brother-in-law's component stereo system and wondering 'why on Earth would you ever need this!!'. Only in later life to realise: there are reasons!


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