The CD Turns 25 Today

netbuzz writes "Seems like only yesterday to those of us of a certain age, but the CD turns 25 today. Philips, maker of the first CD on Aug. 17, 1982, estimates that more than 200 billion have been sold since. The younger set might have trouble appreciating the difference in auditory quality that the compact disc represented over vinyl or cassette tapes (some have probably never even seen a record). And all but true trivia buffs will have trouble coming up with the name of the artist on that first disc."

Stupid CDs

[eln]

I had to laugh at this part of the press release:

The invention of the CD ushered in a technological revolution in the music industry as CDs -- with their superior sound quality and scratch free durability -- marked the beginning of the shift from analog to digital music technology.

I think that initially CDs were intended to come in plastic cartridges that would protect the actual playing surface from scratches, but those were eliminated very early on. The CD as released is very fragile and prone to scratching. In the old days of cassette tapes, I could throw all my tapes in a big pile and still be fairly confident they would play (unless I left them out in the sun or something). If you try and throw your CDs into a big pile, you're going to get a big pile of scratched up coasters.

Maybe CDs are more scratch resistant than LPs (which isn't saying much), but they're still ridiculously fragile. Maybe music piracy wouldn't be so prevalent if CDs were more durable. I know that I hesitate to buy CDs because I don't want to spend 15-20 bucks on something that could end up being worthless in 6 months if I don't treat it with extreme care.

Re:The First Discs Were Not ABBA

[greg1104]

Maybe ABBA's "The Visitors" was the first commercially released CD in the United States

Nope, that was "52nd Street" by Billy Joel. [sony.net]

Hazy Memory

[Brit_in_the_USA]

I may be a bit wrong on this but I remember UK show tomorrows world covering the CD before it was launched, they showed how you could scratch the surface with metal pads and it still played. IIRC they had a Dire Straits album on display next to it (though not necessarily the first CD). It took me a while to get my first CD player (my parents had had one for a few years), I think it was around 1994 - which happened to be a 2x SCSI CD-ROM drive for some PC work I was doing. The CD needed inserting into a cartridge first before you could put it in the drive. I remember friends with HI-FI CD players were amazed at the track seek time I had (practically instant) - I had to remind them that this was optimized for read access, 4-5 seconds they were experiencing would kill it for PC applications. I also experimented with ripping, but soon stopped as my hard drive space was an order of magnitude smaller than the CD, and compression consisted of re sampling at 12Khz 8bit if I wanted to play about with loops and do silly things off the hard drive, no MP3 (that I knew of or had software to process) for me in those days. It was only a year or two later that as a student I could afford a CD HI-Fi sperate unit (and amp, and speakers) of my own. Within another 2 years I had a 2x CD burner - then the fun really started. :-)

Re:how many of them work after that time

[Greg01851]

I have quite a few CD's purchased in the 80's that work just fine. It's the CD-R versions that degrade over just a few years, the commercially pressed ones last quite awhile. reference: http://computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/st ory/0,10801,107607,00.html [computerworld.com]

Re:The First Discs Were Not ABBA

[taupin]

Billy Joel's 52nd Street was actually the first album released on a CD in Japan.

Re:Stupid CDs

[TeknoHog]

IMHO, the worst problem with scratches is that the data surface is just below the label side, with the bulk of the plastic in CDs being part of the optical path. You can usually polish off scratches on the optical side, but any significant scratches on the label side will destroy the data. DVDs are much better in this sense, as the data layer is exactly in the middle of the disc.

Another stupidity about the audio CD standard is that you've got this nice digital storage space, yet all the metadata is stored on liner notes only. Surely it wouldn't have hurt to add some kind of metadata into the spec, even if most early players hadn't been able to use it.

Re:The First Discs Were Not ABBA

[swillden]

Huh, that's funny because I always thought that the first discs were of the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauß. I read about it yesterday on an actual article that isn't written like a comedian was drunk.

According to Philips [philips.com] the first discs from the assembly line in Langenhangen were ABBA's "The Visitor".

Re:War on standards

[644bd346996]

CD-R, CD-RW was one schism ...

No, it wasn't. CD-R is a write-once medium. CD-RW is a re-writable medium that is significantly more expensive and less compatible. The two have never been in direct competition, because they are not in the same market niche.

DVD-R[W] vs. DVD+R[W] vs. DVD-RAM was a true format war, but it has been completely resolved. (ie. -RAM is completely dead and almost all burners on the market support +/-R.) The only active format war right now is HD vs. Blu-ray, and while it far from over, there are drives that support both.

OK, not the first artist to record on CD, but...

[Thomasje]

I think Klaus Schulze's "Dig It" deserves an honorable mention as the first *truly* digital CD: performed on digital synthesizers, recorded and mastered on digital tape. Nothing analogue until you popped in your player! Nifty. (Cool CD, too.)

Re:sad

[Vellmont]

Technology progresses quickly, but humans aren't quite as fast, it seems :-(

No, people just don't really care about the original meaning of words, nor should they. Do you get bent out of shape every time someone talking about "dialing" a telephone, even though 99% of telephones no longer have a dial? There's hundreds of examples like this where the original etymology of the word was forgotten and the words takes on a modified meaning of the original. That's just how language works.

Re:The First Discs Were Not ABBA

[asynchronous13]

lots of subtle distinction in claiming 'first'

1st cd pressed ever: Herbert von Karajan conducting the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauß (one-off type production)
1st cd manufactured: ABBA - The Visitor
1st cd released in the USA: Billy Joel - 52nd Street
1st cd manufactured in the USA: Bruce Springsteen - Born in the USA
1st cd single: Dire Straits

Re:The 74-minute story

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a myth. [snopes.com]

Re:The 74-minute story

[Bigjeff5]

According to Wikipedia, there was probably more than just a love for classical music in here; the demand for 74 minutes as opposed to 60 (which necessitated 120mm discs instead of 115) was strategic. Polygram (one of Sony's major competitors) already had an experimental facility set up to make 115mm discs, Sony didn't, and therefore it was advantageous to force 120mm in order to start the playing field off level

I don't believe the fact that Polygram had a 115mm factory was a major factor in going to 120mm, at best it was one of those "hey that's even better!" situations for Sony.

Why do I say this? Because Sony and Phillips produced the Compact Disk as a JOINT venture. Polygram was owned by Phillips. Had they produced the CD in 115mm format instead of 120mm, it would have been rather simple to facilitate a production deal that would put Sony at no disadvantage. And trust me, there's no way Sony would have gone in on the venture if they didn't have wording in the contract requiring something to that effect.

Besides, I'm no engineer, but I don't think a retool from 115mm to 120mm for a brand new technology that had never been produced before was really that big of a deal for Polygram.

Re:Happy Birthday!

[Binestar]

Almost posted this as an AC, but oh well.

The power comes from an Matter/Antimatter annihilation. The crystals just regulate the reaction.

Re:The 74-minute story

[hellopolly]

This is what Dr. Kees A. Schouhamer Immink (one of the actual engineers that invented the CD) says about it:

"The disk diameter is a very basic parameter, because it relates to playing time. All parameters then have to be traded off to optimise playing time and reliability. The decision was made by the op brass of Philips. 'Compact Cassette was a great success', they said, 'we don't think CD should be much larger'. As it was, we made CD 0.5 cm larger yielding 12 cm. (There were all sorts of stories about it having something to do with the length of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and so on, but you should not believe them.)"

See http://www.exp-math.uni-essen.de/~immink/pdf/cdsto ry.pdf [uni-essen.de] for the whole story.

Re:how many of them work after that time

[chiph]

I bought a Sony CDP-101 (first commercial CD player) in 1983 for $650 (a lot of money back then.) Still have it in a closet somewhere (sounds horrible compared to modern gear, but it's built like a rock!)

All the discs I bought back then still play -- Eurythmics, Deutsche Grammophon von Karajan, The Kinks, Star Wars soundtrack.

The ones that have problems are the mass-market CDs of recent vintage -- the pressing company seems to have let their quality standards slip in favor of shipping more product. What looks to have happened is the lacquer protectant had pinholes & gaps that allow the aluminum to oxidize.

Chip H.

Re:The 74-minute story

[rsidd]

For instance, Glenn Gould has two recordings of the Goldberg Variations. The 1955 version lasts 38.5 minutes, the 1981 version; 51.25 minutes.

That's because (a) Gould was weird in the way he took tempos, and more importantly, (b) he omitted all repeats in the 1955 recording but played them in the 1981 recording. There are no omittable repeats in the Beethoven.

Most performances of Beethoven's 9th would range from perhaps 70 to 75 minutes. Longer is certainly possible, but 60 minute recordings would sound dreadful; if they exist, they were probably made to fit the whole thing into a single LP (just as, a few decades earlier, many recordings were made at absurdly high tempos to fit them on to 78s).

Re:The 74-minute story

[Oktober Sunset]

Sadly for you your reasoning is completely flawed, because railways were not initially designed to carry people, they were made to carry coal, the fact is that standard gauge was set by George Stephenson, who set it so his rolling stock would be same size as rolling stock from horse drawn wagonways, which were the same size as normal wagons, which were set according to the size or a horse, and how much it can pull.

In fact, if you design a railway specifically for people, you will find wider gauges to be better. The Great Western Railway was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel specifically for the comfort of his passengers, and used a massive 7 foot gauge, in order to make the ride smoother and faster. Russia and the British Raj both selected broad gauge railways because they has improved stability and were more practical design than standard gauge.

Standard gauge is anachronistic, it only won out because of the prevalence of Stephenson's designs, if the worlds railways were built from scratch today, a much wider gauge would be probably be used. As a geek you ought to know that a lot of standards are set not by common sense, but because the big fish said so, Stephenson was the big fish, and he set railway gauges to the same size as road carts because it was cheaper to use wagonway rolling stock. So, the Shuttles SRB's are the size they aree because Stephenson was a cheapskate. Also, because he was successful, and because the north won the US civil war.

You know what else they should teach in schools? Not trying to be clever when you know fuck all about something.