Happy birthday, Compact Disc
First commercial release 30 years ago today
The Compact Disc is 30 years old - at least if you work back to when the platform first went on sale to punters.
The first commercially release disc and player - respectively, Billy Joel's 52nd Street and Sony's CDP-101 - were introduced in Japan on 1 October 1982. The disc was released by Sony's recorded music subsidiary, CBS.
The debut followed the launch of the digitally encoded music platform - jointly staged by the format's co-developers, Sony and Philips - in August 1982.
Billy Joel's 52nd Street: the first commercially released CD
Source: The First Pressing CD Collection
CD production commenced in Europe that same month, on the 17th, with Abba's The Visitors the first ever disc to roll out of Philips' Hannover, Germany pressing plant - the first of its kind.
US and European music lovers had to wait until 2 March 1983 for the first discs specifically tailored for them.
They embraced the format wholeheartedly. In the UK, Dire Straits' 1985-released Brothers in Arms was immediately snatched up by early adopters keen to put their new CD players through their paces. It was one of the first CDs produced from a digital master made from digital recordings - a so-called 'DDD' album.
Sony's CDP-101: introducing...
But other albums proved even more popular. For many years, it was claimed record label EMI had a CD pressing plant dedicated solely to punching out copies of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, such was the demand for that album.
The development of the CD stretches back to 1979 when Sony and Philips established an engineering team to create a disc capable of storing music in digital form. According to Philips, the original design spec called for a 11.5cm-diameter disc capable of holding an hour's music, but this was later extended to 12cm and 74m minutes - sufficient to accomodate the whole of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Some writers claim this was driven by Sony co-founder Akio Morita, in order to ensure his favourite symphony could be stored on a single disc.
...the world's first CD player
In June 1980, the development specification was frozen and enshrined in what the partners called the Red Book. Later, the arrival of the Yellow Book would see the publication of the CD-Rom specification for computer use.
It might be assumed that the CD's digital encoding is sufficient to ensure perfect fidelity. Not so. Poor laser focusing, discs that wobble as they spin introduce noise into the signal, and the inevitable dust and fingerprints that accumulate on the surface, forcing the format's developers to come up with some clever error-correction technology to compensate. Indeed, listen to a disc without the special encoding, and there's almost as much hiss as music, and arguably worse than the sound produced by cassette tape.
Philips' Joop Sinjou introduces the CD in 1979
To get around the problem, CD uses a technique called eight-fourteen modulation (EFM) developed by Dutch digital recording boffin Kornelis Antonie Schouhamer Immink. The data stream is broken into blocks, each eight bits long - and half of the 16 bits used to encode the sample of the soundwave taken 44,100 times a second. The eight-bit block is matched against a list of possible bit patterns and a 14-bit code read off the table, hence eight-fourteen.
The 14-bit codes are cleverly crafted to ensure any two binary ones in the code is separated by two to ten binary zeros. Three further bits are used to separate the 14-bit codes on the disc. While this approach may be less efficient from a storage space perspective - 17 pits on the disc's data surface are used to encode half that number of bits - it makes it much easier for the optical head to read the data correctly.
Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon: own, dedicated CD plant?
CD encoding also employs Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Coding (CIRC), which adds an extra, parity byte for every three bytes of data. The upshot: the player's electronics can easily and efficiently 'guess' what data masked by errors should have been, eliminating clicks and pops.
More advanced versions of this technique would later be used in DVD and Sony's Super Audio CD (SACD) format.
Neither the SACD nor DVD Audio ever won the broad appeal enjoyed by the CD, which proved a major driver for the music industry as consumers dashed to replace old or scratched vinyl LPs and hissy cassettes with shiny new compact discs.
By the late 1990s, however, in part due to the growing popularity of computer games, and first sell-through videotapes and later DVDs, but also the advent of both the MP3 music format and peer-to-peer file sharing networks, CD sales had begun their inevitable decline.
Worldwide, CD sales slipped by 20 per cent between 2000 and 2008. In 2011, UK CD album sales fell by 13 per cent to 86.2 million discs. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Quality
"debatable I know with Vinyl audiophiles"
If reading the internet has taught me anything, it's that audiophiles generally have no idea what they're talking about. They'll pay the better part of 100 quid for a 'high quality' HDMI cable and honestly can't see the pointlessness of gold plated TOSLINK jacks.
The coming of commercialisation
This is just my personal feeling but vinyl presented me with something that I cherished as much as the record/music itself, the Cover.
Some of the covers were/still are works of art and on rare occassion you also had the double cover, oooohhhhhh Whilst listenging to your favorite LP you could hold/read and admire the cover, it wass a small personal paradise.
Then CDs came out a blew it all away, removing the insert of a CDRom, hopefully not ripping the paper does not present the same tactile experince. It is a delicate task which often ends up in the insert becoming tatty if great care is not taken.
I'm getting old and Cds will always represent, for me, the coming of the "Commercial Pop Culture" and with it a hell of a lot of shit music..
I don't think i'll ever be nostalgique about a CD.
time flies ...
does anyone remember Tomorrows World reporting on CDs ? Was it jam they smeared over it ?
Re: The coming of commercialisation
"Yet the sound wasn't serious worse than dusty LP"
Total bollocks on two counts:
Count one - No-one played dusty LPs because everyone had disc preener gear. Serious audio nutjobs had Zerostat pistols too to neutralise static buildup from the previous LP playing turning the mat into an electrophorus. I had a brush that tracked with the stylus on a separate arm.
Count two - the prerecorded tape industry was cheaper than Jack Benny on a bad day. Brothers in Arms was recorded on Chrome Dioxide tape. You can tell because the tape insert says so in big letters. Of course, Chrome Dioxide wears the tape heads and was superseded in the home recording industry a decade before by various proprietary substrates - my favourite was TDK's Super Avalyn, so the tape manufacturers were, in fact, overstocked with otherwise unsellable Chrome Dioxide tape stocks. It was a source of ironic amusement to everyone back then that the company that bleated longest and loudest about illegal home recording - EMI - was also the world leader in sales of blank tape.
Count three - The cassette versions of recordings not only typically (but not always) shorted people on the artwork but also often were missing tracks. OF course, sometimes you got an extra track, but that usually meant the LP version was over-short. Okay, three counts.
Cassettes do have a couple of virtues - of all the formats they are the only one that you can leave in your car in the heat of summer and the freeze of winter and still expect to work, and no-one is going to smash your window to steal a cassette player in this day and age. For all the talk of tape degradation I own twenty-five year old recordings on TDK AD that are still good.
In any case, this misses the point: that in the Auld Days playing recorded music was a ritual. Anyone can play an MP3 but before you could play an LP you had to have set up your kit and balanced it and adjusted the anti-skate mechanism. Some of the transcription decks were works of art. My Dad had a Goldring Lenco deck that featured chrome-plated weights hung over corckscrew cranes. The cueing device was damped to serene beauty, and was operated by a humungous lever. Today it would be prized by any Steampunk just for it's look. Swivel head tangential tracking styli, parallel servo-driven transcription arms, the deck was often a prominently-displayed piece of techno-sculpture in the home and visits to other's homes in my youth would usually feature music if only to showcase the gear in action.
The cover art was also part - a big part - of the experience, and anyone who says otherwise is a product of the 80s. The fantastic concept of the Roger Dean Yes covers was a good part of the anticipation of each new recording. Proper sleeve notes you didn't need an electron microscope to read (after all, you have a square foot on the dust jacket and possibly two inside the cover to work with) along with clever tricks like the fold-out of the Man album or the Reformation era distorted art and decoder device of the Wakeman album all worked with the recording to provide a multi-media experience you just don't get staring at the visualizer in Windows media player. Every record shop was a people's art gallery in a way the My Amazon page isn't.
Now: get off my lawn!
Reguarding the drop in sales.
I think the music industry likes to blame pirated music for the drop in all media sales, even if they do know the real reasons.
The big one being that by now we all have a decent back catalogue of music covering not just the last 30 years of CD's life but all the music from 70's, 60's and before. Also as CD generally last a lot longer than LP's & cassets they don't need replacing. This meant that people of all ages were buying them. Today they leave just the odd replacement disc and kids buying bad cover versions of classics.
The other big difference is that today kids have far more draws on their pocket money than those of us in the 60's to 80's could have dreamed of. Specifically computer games, mobiles, DVD's plus the vast amount of stuff online, and dozens/hundreds of TV channels and radio stations.
That is very different to the 3 TV channels broadcasting only about 8-10 hours a day each (remember the test cards?) and maybe 6 or 7 radio stations (some on medium wave!).
The simple fact is that buying music has decreased for most of the same reason that fewer book are sold today than in previous decades. There are simply more ways to spend you money and pass your free time.
