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The Compact Disc is 43 years old [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-08-18
It's been 43 years since the first Comact Discs were pressed in 1982, ushering in an age of vastly superior fidelity ruined by slapdash remastering. The first official pressing on the new optical medium was Abba's The Visitors, one of the biggest vinyl LPs of the year, though an earlier test pressing was made of Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie.
As with most new technologies, one reason for the slow spread of CDs was their steep price tags. The Sony CDP-101 player sold for the equivalent of $730 when it first hit Japanese shelves in 1982. Accounting for inflation, that's about $1,750 today. The audio CDs themselves were $15, which is $35 in 2012 dollars. Because getting a new player and replacing an entire music collection was costly, audio manufacturers were savvy enough to market the first CD players to classical music fans, who were more likely to care about sound quality and have extra disposable income.
Skye Jacobs describes a fast development process, from prototype to store shelves in three years:
The idea of the compact disc had been forming for several years. In the late 1970s, both the Dutch electronics giant Philips and the Japanese company Sony were independently working on digital audio disc technologies. Philips had created a prototype CD player and sought to establish an international standard, while Sony had advanced digital encoding and error correction techniques. In 1979, after Philips demonstrated its prototype in Japan, the two companies agreed to collaborate, forming a joint task force to define the technology and specifications that would become the CD.
There were soon hundreds of titles out. I didn't have a CD player until I was a teenager in the 1990s, and I think it was in a computer. But the first CD I remember noticing in the UK was Dire Straights' Brothers in Arms, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in May. Granted, it sold a lot in every medium; I had it on tape.
At the Wikipedia article, we learn that the old saw about the CD's 74-minute specification being defined by Beethoven's 9th is a myth.
The official Philips history says the capacity was specified by Sony executive Norio Ohga to be able to contain the entirety of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on one disc. According to Philips chief engineer Kees Immink, this is a myth, as the EFM code format had not yet been decided in December 1979, when the 120 mm size was adopted.
Count me among those a little disappointed that optical disks seem to have reached a dead end in the Blu-Ray format, now two decades old. With generally-available disks having a maximum capacity of 128GB, data hoarders have better options…
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