How Does a CD Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews and today I'm going to tell you how a CD works. Now you may have heard the terminology before that you're going to burn a CD. That's basically, what somebody says, when they're done, that they're going to create a CD. Well they're not lying, CDs are actually burn and I'm going to show you here, here's a CD that has been burned and basically what has happened is, this smooth surface on the CD has had a hot powered laser aimed at it and it is actually burn little etches into the surface of the CD. If you look very closely around right here or so, you can see that this area is darker than this area right here and that's where data has been burned onto the surface. Now that laser when it's burning into the CD will basically just spin around the CD and when it gets to a point where it wants to put a single bit of data, it will burst and create a little valley. Or as if you look into a CD, you have two raised areas just like this, just like a valley and then a high point means that there's no data there and a valley means that there is data. And basically that will represent a little 1 and 0 when it's read on the computer. Now if we look at the CD drive itself, we'll pop this out here, you can see on the inside of the CD drive that there's actually another laser inside of your CD drive that's going to bing mat that CD and as your CD spins around thus encasing, when it hits one of those valleys that was burn in there, it's going to register that as data that was burned. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just told you how a CD works."