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."

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday Compact Disc! Now wheres my isolinear optical chip I was promised by Star Trek?!?!?!

Re:Happy Birthday!

I'm still waiting for my dilithium crystal powered car.

Re:Happy Birthday!

Almost posted this as an AC, but oh well.

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

Re:Happy Birthday!

Oh, you mean the USB thumb drive/MP3 player that holds 4gb? Why not just check your order status on line. ;)

Sound Quality was improved at both ends

The most surprising thing I discovered during the mid-90s (before recordable CDs were ubiquitous) was how good metal tape with DBX or Dolby C could sound. The biggest revolution brought about by CDs wasn't at the home side, it was at the production side. Pre-CD, bass was arbitrarily rolled off to reduce the cost of making records and increase the capacity of a typical LP (low bass = wide grooves = reduced LP play time, loud bass = deep grooves = thicker records = increased manufacturing cost). It wasn't COMPLETELY universal (as rap/dance 12" singles showed), but for all intents and purposes, it was just the way mainstream records were mastered. As a result, mainstream home audio systems couldn't handle bass, either (remember the sudden appearance of subs and satellite systems almost overnight circa the mid-80s?) Because they couldn't handle bass, and to reduce mastering costs, cassette tapes had the same eq curve applied, and were bass-free as well.

I still remember the favorite album of my childhood -- the Star Wars Christmas Album ("Christmas in the Stars", which, ironically, had Jon Bon Jovi (still a teenager) as its lead singer). At the time, I had no idea why it sounded so incredibly good with headphones on my Dad's stereo, but it did. Unlike the rest of my records, it almost felt like you could reach out and touch the music. It was a feeling I never experienced again until almost a decade later, when CDs were a few years old, and DDD mastering became the high-end norm. For Christmas in 1999, my parents bought me a copy of the newly-(re-)released "Christmas in the Stars" CD (my original record was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew... or more precisely, my parents' disinterest in trying to salvage what to them was just an old record that got wet and moldy along with everything else in the living room). Anyway, it was from reading the cover notes that I finally realized *why* the original album sounded so incredibly great: it was digitally-mastered almost a *decade* before most professionals had even *heard* of "digital mastering".

The First Discs Were Not ABBA

The artist on that first disc: ABBA.

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

And lastly -- hey, hey, hey, wait just another second, those video games aren't going anywhere ... And lastly, I want you to know exactly how close the manufacturing of that very first CD came to killing -- and I mean killing deader than Elvis -- the entire music industry.

Maybe ABBA's "The Visitors" was the first commercially released CD in the United States but even Wikipedia says there were 16 different discs released in Japan [wikipedia.org] first, it wasn't until a year later they came to the United states and all sixteen of them couldn't be ABBA. Furthermore they were popular at the time, how could that kill the music industry? There was only trash on Blu-Ray for a while but that doesn't mean other movies aren't going to come out. Ugh, I hate articles that are written poorly & contain pointless interjections making fun of my age. Of all [google.com] the news [bbc.co.uk] sources you could link to, this one is pure trash.

He also forgot the part where they re-released a few new or live tracks on a disc just to make the die hard fans buy into another medium. That kind of practice really makes me sick. Of course, we're doomed to see it repeated until the end of time in the name of making another buck.

Re:The First Discs Were Not ABBA

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]

Re:The First Discs Were Not ABBA

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

Re:The First Discs Were Not ABBA

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:The First Discs Were Not ABBA

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 First Discs Were Not ABBA

1st cd microwaved: AOL [youtube.com]

The 74-minute story

The story I've heard in reference to the creation of the CD and have always found fascinating is about the 74 minute length. For those who haven't heard it already:

Apparently (so the story goes), the discs were originally designed to hold 60 minutes of music. But the VP of Sony decided this was unacceptable, since it would not be long enough to allow uninterrupted playing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without a disc change -- the piece as usually performed is a little less than 1:15, or about 74 minutes.

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.

Still, I've always gotten a kick out of the idea that the now-standard size of the CD (and DVD, and BluRay/HDDVD) could have been influenced by a piece of music written in 1824.

Re:The First Discs Were Not ABBA

ABBA (whats the Unicode for a backwards 'B'?) were just first in alphabetical order, because popular beat combo Aaron's Aardvarks hadn't formed yet. And still haven't.

the name of the artist on that first disc

Bruce Springsteen, was it?

heheh

I remember when they released. I commented something to the effect of "Bah, perhaps for classical music they'll be great but for stuff like Motorhead or Slayer? Why? So I can say 'this is the cleanest distortion around?'

Boy was I ever wrong. I still miss the large album covers and inserts from the LP days. Other than that vinyl is dead to me.

Re:heheh

Actually the distortion used by Slayer, etc. is incredibly nuanced from an audio point of view. If you start dropping the higher harmonics, the distortion gets progressively more "dull" sounding and eventually just ends up sounding like you're clipping your speakers. Marshall amps have been legendary partly because their brand of distortion is highly distinctive. CDs allow you to retain some of the higher harmonics dropped by an audio cassette, so IMO the difference between Slayer on CD and tape is more immediately obvious than the difference between a classical track on CD and tape.

RIP

Judging by the lack of Philip's logo on most (if not all) music media sold today (due to the inclusion of DRM efforts violating the standards), I'm not altogether sure CD-DA has lived long enough to reach 25.

What a sad begining...

I can't believe the artist that was first recorded on CD. What, were the Bee Gees unavailable? And now I've got one of their damn songs going through my head. Damn you first CD trivia!

how many of them work after that time

i wonder what percentage of cds released 20-25 years ago actually work nowdays :)

Re:how many of them work after that time

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]

Happy B-Day

Happy Birthday CD. Try not to melt yourself on the candles. Does anyone know how old the hard drive is?

Re:Happy B-Day

No one has pointed this out, but early CDs actually sounded like shit. They were WAY under compressed so the noise of the signal path was very significant. Also, they were mostly encoded at the studio in 16 bit, so mulitiplies and stuff going on in the mastering process (most were mastered on analog equipment but there was a required digital transfer to the master). The early CDs I heard in the mid 80s were really trashy. Better than tapes, but not as good as records on a decent hi-fi. This was pretty much common knowledge amongst people who liked music. The real selling point, and what made me get on eventually, was the random track access. That was huge, and I believe that is really what made the CD take off.

Interestingly, there was a kind of golden-era of CD sound in the late 90s when we had high dynamic range mastering equipment, before the loudness war pissed it all away in a hail of clipping.

Re:Happy B-Day

Hmmmm. The real reason early CD's were dissed by audiophiles is because the CD's had the "harsh" sound. Original audio masters were mixed to make up for the extreme deficiencies of vinyl. When CD's came out these masters were transfered directly to the digital domain with no compensation at all. These early CD's sounded awful because all the enhancements for vinyl were not removed (not because of 16 bit transfers). This "harsh" sound of CD's was the largest complaint by audiophiles. No doubt because LP's have a long roll off of high frequencies (compensated for in the master) where this "harsh" sound comes from. LP audiophiles jumped all over this and some of the less intelligent ones today still hold LP's are better because of this early effect that has long ago been fixed.

Once masters were re-mixed for true fideltiy there is no LP in the world that can compete with CD's. Even a 16 bit transfer of a master properly re-eq'd blows away the earlier vinyl based master.

coming through loud and clear

WTF? I thought CDs stimulated the olfactory sense.
Man, it never made any sense that people could get off on shoving CDs up their nose. I've been doing it wrong all these years!

cue the...

The younger set might have trouble appreciating the difference in auditory quality that the compact disc represented over vinyl or cassette tapes

Cue the vinyl fanatics who will whine about how "warm" their vinyls sound

Re:cue the...

Cue the vinyl fanatics who will whine about how "warm" their vinyls sound

Don't worry. I think I've managed to kill tham all.

The CD is as old as I am

I always thought of CDs as new and cool when I was growing up, I didn't realize that they're only slightly younger than I am (I was born in Feb of 82). It's kind of ironic though that in the last 5 years I've bought way more vinyl records than I have CDs.

"...that the compact disc represented over vinyl"

quality that the compact disc represented over vinyl

False for freshly pressed vinyl. True after a few dozen plays.

5..4..3..2..1.. discuss!

Everyone's seen a record

(some have probably never even seen a record)

As cool as you may like to think you are because you were born when records came out. Nobody else cares. Nearly everyone has seen a record.

Stupid CDs

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:Stupid CDs

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:Stupid CDs

Maybe CDs are more scratch resistant than LPs (which isn't saying much), but they're still ridiculously fragile.

Who are you, The Hulk? CDs aren't indestuctible, but I would say they are far from "ridiculously fragile." I often pile nekkid CDs or transport them stacked in spindles and have never had an issue with scratches.

But what I really want to respond to is:

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.

That's just stupid. You can justify breaking DRM to rip and copy CDs because of concerns from handling disks, but piracy? I don't want to be troll-ish, but that is just stupid. Do you justify kidnapping? Would you want to carry in your body for nine months something which will end up being worthless if you don't treat it with extreme care?

Of course, this post misses an actual good point--not that a CD might be worthless in six months because Hulk smash, but that a CD will be worthless years later because they just aren't stable for long term storage. Again, not to justify piracy, but certainly to justify breaking DRM to make back-ups.

It will Never Fly!

I still don't see these newfangled CD Devices going anywhere. As long as I can still get my Fame Soundtrack and Toto songs on cassette, I'll be happy.

I love you CD

Me and CDs have a love hate relationship. When I was a kid, the CD just started coming out and becoming popular. At first I was in awe and treated the CD with respect. Now, I have literally hundreds of CDR/RW that I consider disposable and burn, use, and forget about. I guess this is an apology CD... I hope you can someday forgive me.

What do you know...

I'm 25 today too. And before anyone says it, yes I know this is off topic.

Hazy Memory

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. :-)

War on standards

It was the time of the war between Betamax and VHS. Surprised CD side too was not racked by similar warfare.

Now a days people are so confused by so many warring, deliberately incompatible media. CD-R, CD-RW was one schism, that looks trivially comprehensible compared to the acronym soup of DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-ROM, etc. Then the HD/Bluray war.

People eschewed Betamax, the memory stick, the mini-DVD all Sony offerings. One would think people really understand the need for open standards, supported by multiple vendors, all fighting to get your business and thus delivering all the glorious things free markets and competition are supposed to deliver. But when Microsoft deliberately muddies the waters by confusing the "choice among vendors and products" with "choice in standards" people don't reject it summarily.

May be because hardware is tangible and people get a feel and they have demanded and obtained complete interoperability in brake fluids, car tires, radios and garden hoses, they expect the same in electronics. It would take a while before the consumer understands the similar need for fully open standards for software too. Till then MSFT will continue to rake in , wait a minute. When did I go so off topic?

Re:War on standards

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.

Re:War on standards

> CD-R, CD-RW was one schism, that looks trivially comprehensible compared to
> the acronym soup of DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-ROM, etc. Then the HD/Bluray war.

You said, it brother.

I once witnessed the following discussion between a sales droid and a customer in a major department store:

C: (looking at blank media) What's the difference between the DVD minus R and the DVD plus R?
SD: The DVD plus R, you can read and write to it. The minus R is, well, you can only write to it, you can't read from it

*jesus fucking christ*

sad

The CD is 25 years old, yet my parents still refer to every recording (audio, video, digital or not) as a "tape." They also refer to all acts of recording as "taping."

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

Re:sad

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.

Maybe it's just me

But CDs didn't sound any better than records... at least the first time you played an LP.

I got into CDs because they still sounded as good on subsequent listenings without going through a High Holy Ritual of cleansing and handling whenever you wanted to hear something. Even then, the LPs eventually degraded. You also couldn't play records in the car, though I have a half-memory of some harebrained device that let you do that. Good luck leaving LPs in a hot car, though.

Compact Disc, dead at 25

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - technological and musical innovation Compact Disc was found dead in its Hanover, Germany home this morning. The cause of death is rumored to be Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy digital music, there's no denying its contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

First CD's

I was working at a Lazarus department store that fall in '82, in the stereo/camera department (remember when there was a Camera Department?) when we go our first CD player.

It was included in a new Fisher 100watt component stereo system right across the aisle from me. I remember the only CD's the salesman had to sell, or demo, were classical music.

I also remember watching the salesman carefully take one our of the jewel case, by the edges, show it to all of us carefully - then drop it on the floor and STOMP on it.

My boss nearly Shat himself. It played fine.

OT: That same Fisher 100watt system - we took the audio output line off the back of an Atari 800 (we sold 'em then for $699, I believe) and ran it into the stereo in an AUX input.

Fire up Star Raiders, and crank up the bass. Kids would come running in from the mall *downstairs* to watch and play.

I sold a *lot* of Atari computers that winter...

Cheap "Old Bastard" Engineer

Auditory Quality?

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).

Auditory Quality? Maybe CDs sound better than cassette tapes, and technically, they probably sound better than vinyl, but I still prefer the sound of vinyl records to anything else. I grew up listening to my dad's music who has something like 10,000 45s and LPs. I love the sound of the needle touching down on the record and the opening scratchiness. Maybe it's just me, but I think we're missing something... analog.

Bill Joel appears to have been first

From Sony: "...while Sony was launching the CDP-101, CBS/Sony launched the world's first fifty CD titles, the very first one being 52nd Street by Billy Joel."

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

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.)

That surprises me

I thought they were already here. I remember reading a multiplage newspaper story describing the technology while a grad student. That would place the time period as in the spring of 1980 or before.

In 1982, I had an idea that I described to a few people about using a CD to store aviation charts. The idea was to put a small display in an aircraft cockpit along with a small computer and using Loran radios to provide the current position to the computer so that it could display the location of the aircraft on the display for the pilot. Unfortunately, I didn't have any idea how to get the financial backing to try to produce the device. Now, of course, they have just that, but using GPS instead of Loran, and for far more than just aircraft. It would have never occurred to me to use them for cars.

In 1983, I wanted to store images of title records on CDs and had a customer of mine who was very interested in doing that. The customer was ready to foot the bill to send people to the local county courthouses where he did business to photograph the title records, page by page, for this purpose. But it never came around.

Later, in the early 1990's, my brother's company was publishing data on CDs and it cost quite a bit to write the data out every two weeks. He was going to buy a CD-writer so he could avoid sending them out to be done by an outside company. I think the cost to create the master at the time was $1,000. After that, pressing a few hundred CDs was not too bad. I advised him to wait a little while for the cost of the CD writer to decline in price from about $50,000 each. He bought his first CD writer for about $4,000 a year or so later.

Early on, I figured the audio CD players would never catch on unless they could bring them under $200 each. So I watched the newspapers and when one sold for $199.50 or so, I went to the store and bought one. At the time, everyone was fascinated by the idea that you could scratch them without affecting the sound. So every demo CD in the store had scratches across the bottom as people would test that out for themselves.

At that time, I lived near a large record shop. Their entire selection of CDs were on a table in the store that was about 3 ft by 3 ft and had plenty of empty space on top. Sure enough, they caught on and CDs really began to replace records in the store about a year or two later.

200 Billion?

Anyone care to guess how many of these wre AOL coasters?

No device

bt nerd only requires cd-r.

Funny (if predictable) story

I was working for an outdoor supplies store after my freshman year of college in 2002. I worked in the marine accessories department where we sold boat radios and stereos. One day this guy came in with his kid who was maybe in the 6-8year old range and was checking out the lower end stereos that mostly came with cassette decks. His kid asks "what is that hole for" to which the father responded "that is for cassette tapes". To which the kid responds "what's a tape"? I had never thought about it before, but I guess by 2002 cassettes were pretty dead. Still it seemed weird when I remembered buying and trading tapes with my friends for years on my first jambox. I wonder how long it will be before a kid asks you "what's a CD?"

A quick history

http://www.cdman.com/technical/howdocdswork7.html [cdman.com]

I remember them talking about it on MTV

Mark Goodman I think had one and was talking about how
"these are going to replace albums"

Damn I'm old.

I remember the first day I saw one

It was in a Service Merchandise store. I was 14. It was 1983, I think. The man at the stereo counter was showing me and a friend how they worked.

Him: "Listen to how incredible they sound!"

Us: "Wow!"

Him: "Listen to how clean it is during the silence as I turn it way up!

Us: "Whoa!"

Him: "And look! They're nearly indestructible!"

Us: "Cool!"

Am I the only one....

Who prefers the sound of a vinyl to the sound from a digital medium? Not a scruffy vinyl, but a nice vinyl, with minimal pops et cetera?

The CD was born on my 20th birthday

Great, another reminder of how old I'm getting. My self-esteem just went into a corner and shot itself, leaving me another mess to clean up.

CD vs. vinyl audio quality

the difference in auditory quality that the compact disc represented over vinyl or cassette tapes

There has been much argument about whether CDs or vinyl sound better. Here's some actual facts.

• Vinyl stores more information than CDs do. Quite a bit more.
• CDs are digital. When you convert from digital to analog or vice versa, you lose information. So any recording made on analog equipment (pretty much any recording more than 15 years old) then put on CD is hemorrhaging data when you put it on the disc and again when you listen to it.
• Vinyl is analog. When you make an analog copy of an analog master, you lose information. So any recording made on analog equipment leaks data every time one piece of equipment transfers the recording to another piece of equipment. Instead of the two big wounds of a-d-a, there's a bunch of tiny ones with a-a-a-a-a-a-a.
• When you start out with digital equipment, every time one digital device conveys the recording to another, the copy is literally perfect. Any and all degredation can be caught by checksums--and even if you don't do error-checking, a bit-flip or two will make far less difference in audio than other kinds of digital data. With digital recording equipment, a CD loses information only once--when you listen to it.
• The quality of the equipment you play it on matters. Today's vinyl fanatics talk about how "warm" the sound is, but that's a feature of the player, not the media. There is no market for low-end record players today. Nearly every single record player manufactured and sold today is audiophile-quality. The best hi-fi systems with the best CD players and the best DACs (digital to analog converters) and the best speakers will sound just as much warmer than a $25 boom box from Walmart as an audiophile record player will. One of the biggest wins for any digital format over any analog format is that there's much less room for the player to screw things up. The cheapest CD players are easily ten times as good at conveying the information from the media to the amp as cheap record players were, when there were cheap record players. It's not even mathematically possible to make a digital audio player that sounds as bad as the record players that were mainstream in 1982. In fact, one of the reasons compressed audio has become such a big deal is that even the worst CD players provide better sound quality than low-end amps and speakers can reproduce.
• CDs are not degraded by normal use. Vinyl records are.
• With basic read-ahead for skip protection, CD players are more or less impervious to being shaken or bounced. Bouncing a record player will not only wreak havoc with playback, but probably even damage the media.

Essentially, the vinyl fanatics are correct that a vinyl record will sound better under ideal circumstances than a CD. But making (and keeping) circumstances ideal takes time, effort, and money. In circumstances any more than marginally below ideal, a CD will sound better. Unless you're in the most extreme two or three percent of audiophiles, you're better off with CDs. That's why CDs won, and that's why they deserved to win. I'll keep my record player and my vinyl collection, and I'll tell you how much better vinyl can be than CDs, but CDs are indisputably the right choice for most usage.

I thought Flim and the BB's were first

I thought "Flim and the BB's" were first but they may have been the first to record in a strictly digital format. Their CD's have two D's "DD" on the cover instead of the traditional three "DDD". If I remember correctly 3M asked them to come in and record to test out some of their new shiny digital recording equipment.

http://www.amazon.com/Flim-&-The-BB's/artist/B000A Q1CS8 [amazon.com]

All you players and posers never owned an 8 track!

I'm 40 and I owned a record player, an 8-track, and a tape player. I didn't even buy a CD player until around 1990. SO BFD to all the wannabees out there who think they're cool just because they've seen a record. I've walked through the 8-track jungle, baby.

It wasn't a smooth start.

The CD has been such a huge success story, most people don't realize how hard it was to bring about. It's easy to look back in retrospect and think it was easy, that it was inevitable.

I'm old enough (sad to say) that I remember following the development of the technology in the years before CDs ever hit the market. It seemed to take forever! There was bickering between the different companies over formats and standards, there was delay after delay. I knew what the technology promised, and I wanted it badly. . . but for several years it seemed like the industry was just going to talk, and talk, and argue, and negotiate, and fiddle around, and never actually produce anything. When CDs and players finally hit the market, it seemed to most people like a technological miracle out of the blue. I was glad to finally see it, but also annoyed that it had taken so long for the industry to get their act together. (And I feel the same way now, only much moreso, about Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They still haven't got their act together.)

Although the CD was a great advance, there were problems in those early days. . . The first players were terribly expensive. CDs sold for at least double what we were accustomed to paying for LP records and cassettes. Recording engineers had no experience mastering digital recordings, and a lot of the early CDs came out with weak bass and painfully boosted treble (and some of those are still available today in the back catalog, they've never been remastered). There were also a lot of defective CDs on store shelves for the first few years; mostly they seemed to come from Germany.

sofa king tired of hearing....

how those under a certain age have probably "never seen a record" more bands are releasing vinyl now then probably were at the height of cassette popularity. It is FAR more likley they kids today haven't seen an 8-track or cassette than a vinly album. Dunno why but this cliche drives me up a wall...

I've said it before...

http://www.dailywav.com/0699/noabba2.wav [dailywav.com]

BBC Story

I like the BBC's story here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6950845.stm [bbc.co.uk]

The Phillips engineer they quote keeps saying over and over again how CDs took off because they were designed openly by companies sharing ideas. Goes to show why the FairPlay/PlaysForSure/etc. du jour don't take off (CDs are still more popular than downloads).

The best audio

Still comes from records - 16bit/44.1K isn't as accurate as a record - much like a digital camera isn't as good as a film camera. That said, with 24bit/192K we're certainly getting pretty close. (same with the uber-pixel cameras)

Some positives, some negatives...

I loved the improved sound quality and lack of scratching sound effects, but the one thing I've never liked about CDs is their degree of fragility.

Of course, this is largely a moot point for me anywayz. These days it's all mp3 to me. ;-) I have a drawer full of old CDs from the early 90s, but I virtually never look at them.

Interestingly, a couple of my CDs contain stuff I haven't been able to find online. I've got one old CD of Christian rap, Tha Mad Prophets, by E-Roc, and the album from the group Culturebeat, Serenity. Mr Vain as a single from that album has apparently survived the online transition, but virtually nothing else from the album seems to have. It's a shame, and inexplicable...I was usually only a single track person, but that entire album is fantastic...there's nothing on it that I don't like.

Never did perform as well as the hype...

Anyone remember on Tomorrow's World they showed CDs playing fine after being coated in jam etc.....

Nowadays a single thumb print or spec of dust seems to be enough to cause some CD players (and this seems to be regardless of make, price etc) throw a hissy fit...

Does anybody have

Does anybody have any 25 year old CDs that still play flawlessly? How about a 25 year old player? I have some 45 year old vinyl that still plays like new. Can't say the same for the stylus. I guess diamonds aren't forever.

First CD you bought?

Never mind what was the first released CD, what was the first you actually bought? Mine was the inevitable "Dark Side of the Moon" and also a performance of Holst's "The Planets". This was in 1988. The reason I came so late to the CD party was that the first ones were disappointingly crap.

I'd avidly followed the CD development story from about 1979 in publications such as "Electronics Today International" and was looking forward to a hiss-free format after carefully optimising tape and vinyl playback for years. So in the week when the first CD players went on sale in the UK (1983), a friend and I made the pilgrimage to the next town to get our first CD experience. The demonstrator was very proud to show off the (very expensive) equipment using the four discs that were actually available. I can't remember what all four were but one of them was Roxy Music's "Boys and Girls" album. With great anticipation I looked forward to the utterly hiss free inky black depths of noiseless music - but it wasn't there. The first thing I noticed was the tape hiss from the master and that just ruined the whole thing. Granted, it was quieter hiss than a typical home cassette, but not by that much. The next thing was the harshness of the sound - very brittle and "ringy" which again turned out to be a typical problem of first generation players.

The upshot was that I felt cheated by the CD hype - all that spreading marmalade on the discs they went in for on Tomorrow's World, et. al. The fact was that the sound quality wasn't "perfect" as claimed. Thus I stuck with vinyl for another 5 years until players were much cheaper, much better (they had oversampling playback by then) and there were far more titles available which had DDD production or at least remastered from better source material.

My CD collection went from 2 to about 300 discs in the space of about 3 years, but hasn't grown that much larger since. (Anyone remember the Virgin record store in Oxford street having its own CD pressing plant on show to the public behind glass? Oh it seemed so exotic back then!) I'm only on my second CD player (not counting CD playback on PCs etc) and that's only because the original 1988 one I bought eventually broke down a few years ago through overuse. While I still buy the occasional CD the rise of the format has coincided with both a declining interest in mainstream music and the ageing of my ears. To me the remaining great advantage of the CD is that it's DRM free, which sad to say is probably going to be its downfall.

Happy b-day

I celebrated by taking some of my extra *cou-AOL-gh* CD's and turning them into a lamp! (Now I have 2)

Vinyl wasn't vinyl

Before CDs were around, plastic was replacing vinyl for records. I remember having to return an album FOUR TIMES before I got one that would play without skipping. Plastic records had horrible return rates. Out of frustration I bought fewer records because I got tired of the hassle of returning them.

When CDs came around, they were a much more reliable product. That's when I really started building a collection.

Re:What's a CD? is it like an MP3?

Oh, gotta go... my Pizza that I ordered over the 'net has just arrived at my front door.

Your hydrator's broken?

Re:Rap doesn't sound good no matter what the forma

Nice bias, jack ass.

Good Hip-Hop is a blend of many sounds and nuances.

Re:Too bad modern mastering makes CDs sound worse.

I'm no audiophile, just an ordinary listener who frankly admits he is an ordinary listener. I love to listen to music though...

The punch of the drums and the hit you in the chest thump from the bass adds a tactile sensation to the sound of music, it makes you quite litterally "feel" the music. Phil Spector understood this with his "wall of sound" but today's producers don't get it in the same way. Loudness to them I think covers lots of sins. Today's music (almost an oxymoron I think) is more "studio" than "recording". What I mean by that is when an artist goes into the studio their sound is so massaged by the production process that it ends up being totally different from what went down on tape in the fist place.

When was the last time you heard a female voice in a song that wasn't filled in with multiple layers of the same voice? It seems like they all do it, change the voice, add a little delay and then lay it over the original giving the voice more "presence". The effect is good here and there but when it is all you hear, it sounds so artificial. Ugh.