Portable CD Player - How IT Works

How It Works

Like a full-size CD player, a portable CD player reads the bumps and grooves using a laser. With its photocell (a device that detects any sort of light reflection given off of certain area), it determines whether there is a reflection of light given off from the CD when the laser hits. Depending on the light reflection, the photocell will return a 1, if there is no reflection, or a 0, if there is any light refection. When its laser hits a groove on a CD, it will not reflect any light, making it a 1. When its laser hits a bump or any other surface on the CD, a light reflection will appear making it a 0. The series of data from 0-1 on the CD is then transformed by a digital to analog converter, to recreate the shape of a sound wave. The headphones then amplify the sounds and then the audio is now able to be heard.

Read more about this topic:  Portable CD Player

Famous quotes containing the word works:

    There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)