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"Hardwired... to Self-Destruct" comes on two CDDAs, but entire length of music on these two could fit on single CDDA (37:10 and 40:18 makes 77:28). I haven't noticed any obvious difference between songs on these two, so I don't see any purpose.
Is this some marketing trick to give impression that these two are conceptually different CDs?
On "Hardwired...To Self-Destruct" being a double disc:
Hetfield: "There's twelve songs, and they're not all three and a half minutes like "Hardwired' was. But there is some long stuff on there and there's some short stuff and some medium stuff. You know, METALLICA gets diverse, and we love that. I think maximum is at 75 or 80 minutes, and then the sound quality starts to suffer, on the vinyl especially. And I think CD-wise, there is a max on that too. And we want it to sound good, I mean, at the end of the day, and we've got a bunch of songs that we love. So that's what has to happen. For the extra dime it costs to make it a double, I think it's very worth it."
While there is a limit to how much can be fit on a CD, Metallica have released longer albums as a single disc. Moreover, while the sound quality does suffer on vinyl, on CD this isn't the case.
I didn't found any official answer to this, so here some thoughts.
In its LP Vinyl version, the album has been released in double disc. You may know that in LP discs you can hardly have good quality above 20 music minutes a side, so in LP, 2 discs for 77 minutes are necessary.
They might want to stick with LPs package.
Also note that even if going above 74 minutes is possible, it requires some technical contraints that they may wanted to avoid with this album. Also, I'm not sure you still follow the CDDA Red Book's rules by going above these 74 minutes.
Source: Wikipedia.
